Ukraine’s state is under growing strain

Officers of Ukraine’s two main intelligence agencies exchanged fire in a Kyiv residential street on the morning of 2 September. Three officers of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) were wounded on Yuriya Shumskoho Street, in the Bereznyaky area, according to the lawyer Taras Borovskyi and to sources cited by Ukrainska Pravda. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) says its investigators were attacked during a search; Borovskyi and a HUR unit commander say SBU officers opened fire on HUR personnel. President Volodymyr Zelensky called it “absolutely shameful” and ordered the prosecutor general and the State Bureau of Investigation to establish what happened.

Two armed state agencies shooting at each other in the capital, during a war, invites an obvious question about how stable the Ukrainian state now is.

The strain is documented

Most of Ukraine’s security leadership has changed in nine months. Andrii Yermak left the President’s Office on 28 November 2025 after the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) searched his home. Kyrylo Budanov replaced him on 2 January, handing HUR to Oleh Ivashchenko. Three days later Vasyl Maliuk was replaced at the SBU by Yevhenii Khmara in an acting capacity, a decision the Washington Post reported had angered military commanders. In July, Khmara became acting defence minister and Oleksandr Poklad took the SBU, also in an acting capacity. The service has had no confirmed permanent head since January.

The prosecution that started this is substantial. NABU said in November 2025 that Operation Midas, a 15-month investigation involving more than 70 searches, had established that contractors to the state nuclear operator Energoatom were forced to pay kickbacks of 10 to 15 per cent of contract value, with roughly $100m laundered through one Kyiv office. Five people were detained and seven notified of suspicion. The businessman NABU places at the centre, Tymur Mindich, left the country before the searches and denies wrongdoing.

The political effects reach beyond the security services. The Carnegie Endowment assessed in April that the presidential administration no longer exercises the centralised control over parliament it held under Yermak, and noted that the governing majority had failed earlier in 2026 to pass legislation required to secure external financing.

Public opinion has moved on corruption specifically. Carnegie cites an April 2026 poll in which 54 per cent of Ukrainians called corruption a greater threat than Russian military aggression, against 39 per cent who said the opposite.

The army is where it costs most

The clearest measure of strain is not political but manpower. The Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw reported that, as of November 2025, the Prosecutor General’s Office had registered 255,000 proceedings for unauthorised absence from a unit and 56,200 for desertion since February 2022, and that more than 80 per cent of desertions occur during initial training. Those figures cannot now be updated: the Prosecutor General’s Office classified the statistics in November 2025, and estimates published since vary widely enough that none should be treated as authoritative.

Mykhailo Fedorov announced a mobilisation overhaul in March, which the Centre for Eastern Studies described at the time as an attempt to fix long-standing problems. He was dismissed as defence minister four months later.

What has not happened

Set against that is a list of things a collapsing state does not do.

NABU charged people inside the president’s circle and was not stopped from doing so. The head of the President’s Office resigned and was replaced through a published decree. When Zelensky dismissed Fedorov on 15 July, thousands protested outside the President’s Office and in Lviv, Dnipro, Mykolaiv, Ivano-Frankivsk and elsewhere, peacefully, for weeks. Forbes reported demonstrators still gathering on 15 August, the 31st consecutive day. One governing-party MP said he would resign in protest.

The protests worked, partially. Zelensky dismissed commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi on 21 July, one of the demonstrators’ two demands. He did not reinstate Fedorov. Asked about the crowds on 16 July, he said he heard what society was saying and that people had wanted to take to the streets, “and rightfully so.”

Support has softened rather than broken. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found trust in Zelensky at 55 per cent in fieldwork from 20 July to 3 August, against 58 per cent in April, with 40 per cent expressing distrust. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index assessment published this year found that democratic institutions in Ukraine remain functional and that institutional stability had persisted despite roughly a fifth of the country being occupied.

Where the risk actually sits

The uncomfortable item on the list is the shootout itself. Both services acquired combat formations, weapons and wide operational latitude after February 2022. Prosecutions and protests are institutions absorbing conflict. Two armed agencies settling a dispute with gunfire in a residential district, while a joint statement about a Russian plot was still published, is conflict escaping them.

Chatham House, which described the Fedorov dismissal as a political crisis for Zelensky, has also flagged what a ceasefire might release. In a survey of Ukrainian civil society representatives conducted online in March, 46 per cent said they expected a ceasefire to increase internal instability, pointing to divisions between those who fought and those who avoided the draft, and between those who stayed and those who left. That is a specialist sample rather than a population poll, and should not be read as a national figure.

Budanov said on 27 August that talks with Russia could resume this month. Carnegie’s warning is that a long war produces a state aligned with the West but institutionally weak and politically fragile. Wednesday supplied a data point for that argument. It did not settle it.