Kyrylo Budanov Has Ties to Far-Right Pro-Banderite Groups
From the Phoenix Program to Operation Condor and the Contra War to Operation Timber Sycamore and the Global War on Terror, the CIA has a long history of training fascist death-squad operatives, torturers and assassins.
The historical pattern has extended to Ukraine, where the CIA has set up a website that celebrates the killing of Russians and Russian sympathizers.
In early January, it was announced that a CIA-trained spymaster, Kyrylo Budanov, was appointed as the new presidential chief of staff.[1]
General Budanov previously served as head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency (HUR) and was a member of the elite Unit 2245 of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate trained by the CIA that has been implicated in war crimes.[2]
According to an article by Jason Melanovski in the World Socialist Web Site, Budanov was known to maintain direct ties with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the descendant of Ukrainian fascist Stepan Bandera’s World War II-era organization that was responsible for the murders of thousands of Jews and Poles.
Melanovski wrote that Budanov—who has allegedly survived ten assassination attempts and metaphorically likes to “be in darkness”—“personally overs[aw] countless numbers of adventurist sabotage operations, drone strikes and political assassinations of both Russian military and civilian figures on Russian soil.”[3]
One of the victims of the death squads that Budanov oversaw was the former head of the Socialist Party in Ukraine’s parliament from 2017 to 2019, Illia Kyva, whom Ukrainian military intelligence took credit for murdering in a Moscow park in December, 2023.
Commanders with the Donetsk People’s Army, civilian officials in towns in eastern Ukraine that voted to rejoin Russia, and journalists who were critical of the Ukrainian government were also targeted in car bombings and other terrorist attacks directed by Ukrainian military intelligence units that fell under Budanov’s command.
The New York Times reported that Budanov had a reputation for “audacious covert operations that occasionally pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable to Ukraine’s leadership and its Western allies.”
In 2016, Budanov led a team of commandos into the Crimean Peninsula, where they planted explosives at an airfield and killed Russians who tried to stop them.[4]
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) determined that Budanov was responsible for an explosion on the Crimean bridge in October 2022 that caused the deaths of at least five innocent people and the collapse of part of the bridge into the water below.
After he was injured fighting in eastern Ukraine following the February 2014 Maidan coup, Budanov received treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, a “rare accommodation for a Ukrainian soldier,” according to The New York Times.[5]
This “rare accommodation” indicates that Budanov has been groomed by the CIA and/or other U.S agencies for a high position in the Ukrainian government.
A key purpose of CIA training programs is to identify leadership candidates who can be prepared for high office with the aim of penetrating foreign governments like Ukraine, which is being used as a pawn in a larger geopolitical conflict with Russia.
In addition to his intelligence ties to the CIA, Budanov is reportedly close with several figures from the Trump administration, including U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia (and retired Lieutenant General) Keith Kellogg and Vice President J. D. Vance.
“One of the CIA’s Top Guys”—Who Is Implicated in Serious War Crimes
Andrii Telizhenko is a former Ukrainian diplomat and parliamentary aide now living in Switzerland, who told CovertAction Magazine in an interview on January 8 that Budanov was “recruited directly by the CIA” when he received medical treatment in the U.S. and is “one of the CIA’s top guys in military intelligence.”
Motivated largely by the opportunity to make money and gain power, Budanov “basically told the CIA he would do anything they told him to do,” according to Telizhenko, “because he knew that people allied with the CIA are the ones who advance in the military’s ranks. Others were asked to do the same thing but said no because they knew it could lead to a world war and destroy Ukraine, but not him.”
While not openly neo-Nazi, Budanov, Telizhenko suggests, has a similar ideology in considering anyone opposed to war with Russia or who has a different political ideology to be a “traitor” who should be killed.
After the 2014 Maidan coup, Budanov led units that went into wealthy people’s homes in the Donbas and killed the people living there and then stole their jewelry and paintings and any weapons they found and sold them on the black market in Kyiv, Telizhenko said. The people killed included women and children.
According to Telizhenko, Budanov was a key figure behind a 91-drone attack on the residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin in late December. The reason the CIA issued a denial, he said, was to protect one of its chief Ukrainian “assets.”
Telizhenko believes that the purpose behind Budanov’s appointment as presidential chief of staff is to protect President Volodymyr Zelensky, against whom the British MI6 have been planning a coup, using military officers stationed in the Baltics and General Serhiy Kryvonos.[6] The aim of the coup is to replace Zelensky with General Valerii Zaluzhny.
Telizhenko said that Zelensky had been brought into the orbit of MI6 by oligarch Victor Pinchuk and former Zelensky chief of staff Andriy Yermak, but is now considered to be a political liability and, hence, expendable.[7]
Budanov himself is considered one of Zelensky’s potential political rivals should presidential elections ever take place again in Ukraine.
According to Telizhenko, Budanov would himself launch a coup against Zelensky if he is given orders to do so, as he is “not loyal to Ukraine” but “owned by the CIA,” which has “given him the possibility for power.”
Officially acknowledged to have 12 bases in Ukraine, the CIA, according to Telizhenko, may actually have up to 20 bases in Ukraine.
Ukraine is an optimal place to run covert operations into Russia, he said, because Ukrainians speak a dialect similar to Russians in the Rostov region and can go there undetected.
According to Telizhenko, the CIA “controls almost everything in Ukraine. They have agents working under cover as journalists and political advisers, and control a lot of politicians and other prominent people [through financial payoffs]. Further, the CIA directly advises President Zelensky. The Americans who are brought to advise him are CIA.”
Telizhenko added that “there are also other U.S. agencies who are influential in Ukraine, like the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA). Ukraine has lost its sovereignty and that is why I left.”
Budanov replaced Andriy Yermak as the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff. Yermak resigned over a corruption scandal. ↑
The New York Times reported that one of the missions of Unit 2245 was to capture Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. The unit was also skilled in psychological warfare, a skill that includes staging atrocities to be blamed on the enemy and manipulating the media. The Times specified that Budanov had “deep ties to the CIA” and was trained as part of a “CIA program.” ↑
CovertAction Magazine has done numerous articles on the CIA-linked assassination program in Ukraine and how it follows the precedent of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. See here, here, and here, for example. ↑
Disguised as Russians, Budanov and his team, according to Times reporting, landed in Crimea via inflatable speedboats. After they were ambushed by Russian troops, Budanov and his team had to swim back into Ukraine, which took them hours. In a public address, President Putin accused the Ukrainians of plotting a terrorist attack and promised to avenge the deaths of the Russian fighters Budanov and his team killed. ↑
Budanov was shot in the arm. The fighting in eastern Ukraine broke out when the people there voted for their autonomy after refusing to accept the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government that had been imposed in a CIA-backed coup d’états and killed dissidents, as in the Odessa trade union massacre in May 2014. ↑
Telizhenko said that Ukraine is being used as a base by the CIA. ↑
Telizhenko said he agrees with much of the substance of Scott Ritter’s documentary Agent Zelensky, which argues that Zelensky is or was a British MI6 asset—evident in the fact that, when Zelensky traveled to London in 2020, he eschewed normal diplomatic protocol by meeting directly with the head of British MI6, Sir Richard Moore. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
