Valeriy Kondratiuk, the former head of the Counterintelligence Department of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), has disclosed the details of the situation that unfolded in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea. According to him, Ukraine theoretically had the possibility to defend the peninsula, but it would have required ignoring the recommendations of the G7 countries, which promised diplomatic support in regaining control over Crimea.

General Lieutenant, former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, and former head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Kondratiuk, revealed in an interview with Natalia Mosyichuk : "It is necessary to realise that the previous two defence ministers held Russian passports. What could we rely on in the Armed Forces at that time, which units, which commanders, when everything was being purged? Essentially, we didn't have enough time to deal with this. And again, these constant warnings from the West, I think they played their role."

Kondratiuk, who was dismissed from the Ukrainian Intelligence Service in 2010 and returned to the position of the head of the Counterintelligence Department in 2014, recalled that during the time of Oleksandr Yakimenko (the head of the SBU until February 2014), the SBU's counterintelligence base had been cleared. At the same time, unidentified individuals seized the Crimean parliament in Simferopol and presented themselves as the "self-defence of Crimea."

Kondratiuk explained that counterintelligence managed to infiltrate the internal surveillance system in the parliament, discovering that up to 100 people were armed with machine guns, indicating their military affiliation. An analysis of the phone traffic of the "self-defence forces" revealed that they had all been in Sevastopol at the Russian Marine Corps base a week before this event. Kondratiuk emphasised: "Even though they were in civilian clothing, we informed the state leadership that these were Russian infiltrators, not a military unit and not 'self-defence.'"

To recap, at the end of February 2014, after the escape of Yanukovych , Russian military personnel without insignia entered the territory of Crimea. An armed formation was created from Russian "Cossacks," known as the "self-defense of Crimea."