Zelenskyy says he fired 2 top Ukrainian security officials for being 'traitors'

• Ukraine's president said two SBU officials had been removed from their roles and stripped of their titles.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy described them as "traitors" and "antiheroes."

• It marked a rare moment of internal conflict in Ukraine's military command since the Russian invasion.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had fired two top Ukrainian security officials whom he accused of being "traitors."

In a late-night address on Thursday night, Zelenskyy said that the chief of Main Department of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Andriy Olehovych Naumov , and the head of the SBU in Kherson, Serhiy Oleksandrovych Kryvoruchko, had been removed from their positions and stripped of their titles.

He described the officials as "antiheroes" and said: "Now I do not have time to deal with all the traitors. But gradually they will all be punished."

"Those servicemen among senior officers who have not decided where their homeland is, who violate the military oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people as regards the protection of our state, its freedom and independence, will inevitably be deprived of senior military ranks," he said ."Random generals don't belong here!"

Zelenskyy did not describe the specific alleged offenses that led him to to fire the officials.

The SBU is Ukraine's main domestic security agency, with counterintelligence among its chief responsibilities.

It marks a rare moment of disunity within Ukraine's security forces, whose cohesion and effectiveness has so far been in contrast to the low morale, faulty intelligence, and faltering progress of the Russian military.

Since the Ukraine invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin has placed two of his intelligence chiefs under house arrest and launched a search for Western moles in his domestic intelligence agency, the FSB.

According to a statement on the SBU website last January, Naumov was the target of an assassination plot by former officers in the agency who saw him as an obstacle to their reinstatement.

Read the original article on Business Insider