Head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense Kyrylo Budanov considers his short-term goal to intensify intelligence service in Donbas, and the longer-term goal – to increase the level of intelligence readiness, including " extracting and reading" information.

"The short-term goals are obvious. First of all, this is a sharp intensification of our intelligence along the line of separation of forces in Donbas. We must carefully verify and disassemble any manifestations of the activity of that side in order to exclude or suppress provocations," Budanov told Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday, August 11.

He also said that "the presidential peace plan is the keystone at present."

Budanov was appointed as Head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense by the presidential decree on August 5, 2020.

Among other tasks, Budanov called "increasing the level of technical, technologic and managerial readiness of the Main Intelligence Directorate, including the introduction of specific new technological solutions in our intelligence functions and, above all, solutions for extracting or reading information." He also noted the need to "restructure analytical work in such a way as to obtain more coherent predictive conclusions in a shorter time." "Another direction is the development, in fact, in the online mode, of detailed scenarios of our responses to certain external and internal irritations," the Main Intelligence Directorate's head said.

In terms of threats to the security of Ukraine, Budanov said that "wars of a new type, which involve not only military groups, but also civilian units, and which are ideally masked by various powerful propaganda programs." "We need to learn to isolate the military component in these potential conflicts, to indicate in advance its presence and prevent the possibility of starting military conflicts," he said.

The Main Intelligence Directorate's head said that now any country faces the following risks: "global peace, open borders, quick extraction of any information, multiple focal points of unfriendly intentions, sharp increase in technical capabilities to initiate certain clashes. All of this is money and modernization."

"I would especially like to emphasize that some countries have a strong tendency to intensify various kinds of hybrid influences on our country in order to push us towards one or another vector of development, namely, beneficial for these countries, but not for us. Thus, our task is to assess all the military capabilities of any potential adversary in advance and in fully," he said.

According to Budanov, he is a native-born of Kyiv and he studied at Odesa Institute of the Ground Forces. "After graduation, almost all of my service was held in the special forces of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense. From 2018 to 2020, I was in special work, and from the middle of 2020 I went to work as deputy director of a department in the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine," he said.

When asked to comment on the publication of a number of media outlets about the operation that was carried out in Crimea in August 2016, and with which the attempt on him in 2019 is associated, Budanov said: "No comment."

In April 2020, journalist Yuriy Butusov wrote that in April 2019, a Russian saboteur tried to blow up Budanov's car. According to him, this attempt was a revenge for the raid of a group of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense on the territory of the occupied Crimea, during which a lieutenant colonel of the Russian Vympel unit was killed.