Freedom House Security P olicing and security agencies are the first line of defense for individuals facing threats of violence. When the aggression has extraterritorial roots and political motivations, guarding against it entails specific challenges. A narrowly defined understanding of national security and established security practices that prioritize bilateral cooperation are unlikely to yield substantive protections for individuals targeted with transnational repression, and instead tend to provide opportunities for authoritarian regimes seeking to silence dissent abroad. Limitations of a traditional approach to national security Ukraine’s national security priorities include traditional considerations such as the protection of state and military information and infrastructure. It is neither surprising nor inappropriate—given Moscow’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, eight years of war in the Donbas, and the full-scale Russian invasion of the country in 2022—that the chief concern of Ukraine’s contemporary national security strategy has been Russian aggression.5 The SBU maintains a hotline for reporting national security threats and specifically warns citizens about the dangers of recruitment by Russian operatives, informing them that they may avoid criminal liability if they voluntarily report any connection to a foreign intelligence service.6 most notorious perpetrators. For example, it is in a “strategic partnership” with the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan, and it has had a bilateral extradition agreement with China since 2000.8 Individuals in Ukraine who are targeted by these other states are left largely without recourse. In 2021, two Chinese nationals who were seeking protection in Ukraine, including an ethnic Kazakh from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, left or attempted to leave the country after receiving threats.9 The lack of safeguards against authoritarian states other than Russia is compounded by practices that securitize migration, tasking law enforcement and security officers with surveilling and controlling foreigners. The SBU has a significant role in policing migration, including the power to ban or expel foreigners from Ukraine. This arrangement creates an unfavorable environment for interactions between the SBU and foreign dissidents. For example, in early January 2022, SBU officers were involved in a violent altercation with Kazakh activists in Kyiv who were expressing support for antigovernment protests in Kazakhstan.10 The activists claimed that SBU officers threatened to deport them unless they stopped their political activities. Formal and informal security service cooperation In addition to vigilance against Russian aggression, Ukrainian authorities have taken measures to punish and prevent certain acts of transnational repression perpetrated by Moscow. For example, in April 2020, authorities arrested Major General Valeriy Shaytanov of the SBU on suspicion of working for Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) to, among other things, attempt to assassinate Adam Osmayev, a leader of proUkrainian Chechen volunteer fighters in the Donbas. In 2018, the SBU warned an exiled Russian journalist, Arkady Babchenko, of a plot to kill him and staged an elaborate counterintelligence operation to fake his death and arrest an alleged hitman.7 The many socioeconomic and political reforms aimed at increasing democratic accountability in Ukraine have unfortunately not included a review of security practices that can expose individuals to transnational repression. Specifically, the Ukrainian government continues to participate in legal cooperation agreements that facilitate simplified extradition procedures and has allowed the SBU to maintain many of its Soviet-era information-sharing practices. Both of these avenues of cooperation with other states increase the risk of extraterritorial violence against foreign nationals within Ukraine’s borders. Despite these notable successes, however, Ukraine’s approach to domestic security has shortcomings that weaken its overall ability to protect different groups of vulnerable individuals against foreign threats. While the focus on Moscow as a source of extraterritorial violence is justified, Russia is only one of at least 36 states known to engage in transnational repression. Kyiv has good working relations with some of the While Ukraine suspended its membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States in 2014, it continues to participate in the Minsk Convention on Legal Assistance and Legal Relations in Civil, Family, and Criminal Matters alongside known perpetrators of transnational repression: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Lawyers working in Ukraine note that the Minsk freedomhouse.org 3