CIA Trained Spymaster Implicated in War Crimes Appointed Presidential Chief of Staff in Ukraine

rom 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.