President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine has asked the SBU's chief Vasyl Hrytsak to order the SBU's Counterintelligence Department to check state servants in Ukraine for having relatives with Russian citizenship and in case such cases are revealed to bring those servants to responsibility, including their dismissal if need be.

"We have a great number of state servants, among them those working in law-enforcement agencies, who have relatives in Crimea. I have asked the SBU's chief Vasyl Hrytsak to order the Ukrainian counterintelligence agency to do checks of the information about all the state servants, paying special priority to those employed by law-enforcement and investigation agencies," Poroshenko told a press conference in Kyiv on December 16 in response to a request to comment on the fact that the SBU had established that Serhiy Semochko, first deputy head of the External Intelligence Service, has got Russian citizenship.

The president said that once the checks are over and there are grounds to bring any state servants to responsibility, including their dismissal if need be, he will take all the necessary steps.