From master spy to lead negotiator

What does Zelensky’s new chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, bring to the peace talks?

Kyrylo Budanov’s predecessor as President Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, was known as the second-most powerful person in Ukraine. However, he was far less successful in the diplomatic arena. U.S. officials on both sides of the aisle had grown sick of dealing with Yermak long before his ouster in December 2025. And direct negotiation between Ukraine and Russia sputtered out last summer. Now, Budanov is stepping in to lead Kyiv’s negotiating team in the middle of the Trump administration’s latest push to end the war. Having risen to the very top of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR), Budanov brings with him a stellar reputation as a master spy, public popularity, and established contacts in both the U.S. and Russia. Meduza looks back on Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov’s military career and experience negotiating with Moscow.

The man without a smile

Kyrylo Budanov is a military man by training. A graduate of the Odesa Military Academy, he began his career in the special forces of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, and went on to become a member of Unit 2245 — an elite commando force trained by the CIA. After Russia annexed Crimea and started a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Budanov took part in raids on the peninsula and fought in Donbas. After he was injured in combat, the CIA sent Budanov for treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland.

In 2020, President Volodymyr Zelensky appointed Budanov to lead Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as the Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR). Within three years, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant general. Then, on January 2, 2026, Budanov accepted a new position as Zelensky’s chief of staff — just two days before his 40th birthday.

Known for leading daring operations against Russia during the full-scale invasion, Budanov is one of the most popular figures in Ukraine. According to polling by the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center, the Main Intelligence Directorate enjoyed a 71 percent trust rating under his leadership as of December 2025. Other polls have found that more than 10 percent of respondents would vote for Budanov in a presidential election — making him the third most popular candidate after President Zelensky and former army commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

Media reports note that Budanov is “famous for his cold stare,” referring to him as “enigmatic,” “poker-faced,” and “the man without a smile.” Both at home and abroad, his name calls to mind some of Ukraine’s most famous sabotage operations, including assassinations of high-level Russian military officials and propagandists, attacks on the Kerch Bridge, and Operation Spiderweb (although the latter was led by Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU). Budanov himself has admitted that his unusually public profile is a deliberate move in the “information war” against Russia.

Negotiating behind the scenes

Budanov’s role in negotiations with Russia is less well known, but no less significant.

In March 2022, shortly after Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, HUR established the first channel of regular communication with the Russian side. Initially, this secret channel between Budanov’s deputy, Dmytro Usov, and Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) General Alexander Zorin was only used to coordinate exchanges of prisoners and war dead. But it ultimately proved to be the most stable and effective line of communication between the warring parties. (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE have also acted as intermediaries in prisoner swaps.)

In May 2022, the channel between Usov and Zorin was used to negotiate the surrender of Ukrainian soldiers at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol and their release from Russian captivity. And this prisoner exchange mechanism has continued to operate almost uninterrupted throughout the war. In December 2025, HUR was also involved in the release of more than 100 political prisoners from Belarus, most of whom were brought to Ukraine. The Belarusian authorities said they were exchanged “for wounded and captured Russian and Belarusian citizens.” Among those released were Ukrainian citizens convicted of espionage in Belarus.

After Washington put forward a controversial 28-point peace plan in November 2025, Zelensky included Budanov in Ukraine’s delegation for negotiations with the Trump administration. After presenting the proposal to Zelensky in Kyiv, U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll flew to Abu Dhabi for talks with Russian officials; Budanov was already there, reportedly for a secret meeting with his GRU counterpart. (A source told Axios about the meeting, which was presumably one of many. Budanov declined to comment on it, telling RBC Ukraine that negotiations must remain “behind the scenes.”)

President Trump’s foreign policy team is well acquainted with Budanov. A former Trump administration official who worked on Russia and Ukraine told the Washington Post that Budanov was a good choice for Zelensky’s new chief of staff because political appointees and career officials across the U.S. government respect him. This source also recalled that Budanov played an important role in peace talks in early 2025. “When you actually engage with him on how the war’s going to end, he’s probably one of the more realistic and sober guys,” the former official said.

By contrast, this person found Zelensky’s former chief of staff and lead peace negotiator, Andriy Yermak, antagonistic and self-absorbed. Considered the second-most powerful figure in Ukraine during his tenure, Yermak developed a reputation for rubbing American officials the wrong way and failing to grasp the realities of U.S. politics. A Politico source once described him as a “bipartisan irritator.”

‘Ukraine’s national interests will be protected’

With established contacts in both the U.S. and Russia, Budanov is in a unique position as a negotiator. Moreover, his interlocutors on the Russian side — GRU Chief Igor Kostyukov and General Alexander Zorin — were part of the Kremlin’s delegation for peace talks with Ukraine in Istanbul last May.

The negotiations marked the first direct talks between Russia and Ukraine since 2022. Months earlier, in January 2025, Budanov had warned lawmakers in a closed-door meeting that Ukraine’s very existence could be under threat unless talks to end the war began by summer.

Since then, Budanov has said that the prospect of freezing the front line in place as part of a ceasefire agreement presents a dilemma for Ukraine. “For me, losing one square millimeter of our land is a bad result,” he told the Italian newspaper Il Foglio in October. “But if you adopt other points of view, then certainly sparing ourselves thousands and thousands of deaths is a good thing,” he added.

As Politico’s Jamie Dettmer notes, Budanov has the advantage of public popularity. But if Zelensky is forced to accept an unfavorable peace deal, he will have to help the president “sell it” to Ukrainians.

On January 6, four days into his tenure as chief of staff, Budanov travelled with Zelensky to Paris for talks with “Coalition of the Willing” countries. Rather than donning a military-style suit, as Ukrainian officials have typically done in wartime, Budanov wore a uniform jacket with a HUR patch. The summit resulted in Kyiv’s allies signing a declaration on post-war security guarantees for Ukraine. The U.K. and France also committed to deploying forces to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal.

Talks continued on January 7, as Ukrainian negotiators met with U.S. officials to discuss the most difficult issue in the peace process: territory. As usual, Budanov was tight-lipped about the meeting. “Not all information can be made public, but there are already concrete results. Our work continues,” he wrote on Telegram. “Ukraine’s national interests will be protected.”

Meduza