The counterintelligence of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has exposed the fact of recruitment by the special services of the Russian Federation of an employee of the department for the Management of Affairs of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, said spokesperson of the SBU Artem Dekhtiarenko.

"The official was persuaded to cooperate by a staff member of the FSB during a trip to the temporarily occupied Crimea before the start of a full-scale invasion. According to the instructions of his Russian curator, the agent must collect intelligence about the visits of foreign delegations to the Ukrainian parliament, including their personal composition, the content of official and informal conversations," the spokesperson of the SBU said in a video message posted on the Telegram channel of SBU on Friday.

According to Dekhtiarenko, the agent was given the task to study the possibility of installing special technical means of secretly collecting information in the halls and on the sidelines.

"To do this, the official had to use his official powers, which provided for admission and access to different rooms of the administrative building. But at the time of the beginning of the full-scale aggression of the Russian Federation, he resigned from the state institution and did not fulfill any tasks of the occupiers," the SBU spokesperson said.

Dekhtiarenko added that later the agent tried to get a job at a strategic enterprise in Zhytomyr region, during the passage of a special check, the SBU specialists revealed that he had been recruited by enemy special services.

Currently, within the framework of criminal proceedings under Article 111 (high treason) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, urgent investigative and operational actions are continuing to establish all the circumstances of the criminal offense.