What Happened to Andriy Kovalenko?

By Matthew Parish

Tuesday 29 September 2026

The departure of the head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation looks mysterious at first sight. Look a little more closely, however, and it may tell us something rather more interesting about the changing architecture of Ukraine’s war against Russia.

On 28 September 2026, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed one of the shortest presidential decrees imaginable. Decree No. 971/2026 consists, in substance, of a single instruction: Andriy Valeriyovych Kovalenko is dismissed from his position as head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation. There is no explanation, no tribute, no announcement of a successor and no indication in the decree of what Kovalenko will do next.

In a country at war, the departure of the head of an organisation responsible for combating enemy disinformation inevitably attracts attention. The Centre sits under Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council and its business is not peripheral public relations. It identifies hostile information operations, analyses Russian propaganda and attempts to coordinate responses to efforts to manipulate Ukrainian and international public opinion. In a war in which Telegram channels, fabricated videos, rumours about mobilisation, invented battlefield breakthroughs and carefully constructed stories about Western abandonment accompany missiles and drones, this is an important part of the Ukrainian state.

Hence the terse announcement naturally invites a question: what happened? The absence of an explanation is particularly noticeable because Kovalenko had become one of the more recognisable figures in Ukraine’s wartime information apparatus, frequently commenting upon Russian military claims, propaganda operations and attempts to manipulate Ukrainian public opinion.

The first thing to say is that the social-media formulation that Kovalenko was simply “dismissed” is technically correct but potentially misleading. There is presently no persuasive public evidence that President Zelensky suddenly decided to remove him because of misconduct, political disagreement or dissatisfaction with his performance. Kovalenko says that he himself submitted the request to leave the position and thanked Zelensky for accepting it. He described his three years at the Centre as a substantial journey and said that it was time for him to move on.

More importantly, the story did not begin on 28 September. Eleven days earlier, on 17 September, the Ukrainian publication ZN.UA reported, citing its sources, that Kovalenko had asked the leadership to transfer him to another position. According to that report, he would remain inside the security sector and would be responsible for the cognitive and analytical dimension of information confrontation in another security institution. The precise institution was not identified.

That report substantially changes the complexion of the affair. What appeared in isolation to be a dismissal begins to look much more like an institutional transfer whose destination has not yet been publicly disclosed. Kovalenko’s own words upon leaving point in precisely the same direction: he said that he would remain involved in national-security processes and in what he called the “cognitive confrontation” with Russia. He also said that his personal media channels would continue operating and indeed would become more active.

That expression — cognitive confrontation — deserves more attention than it has received. It may provide the most useful clue to understanding not only what Kovalenko intends to do next but also how the Ukrainian state increasingly conceives of information warfare.

A war over what people believe

Russia’s war against Ukraine has always taken place simultaneously in two worlds. There is the physical war: soldiers, artillery, drones, missiles, trenches, logistics and territory. Then there is a parallel struggle over people’s understanding of that physical war, and the relationship between these two forms of conflict has become progressively more intimate as the full-scale invasion has continued.

Moscow has devoted enormous resources to the second battlefield. Russian information operations do not necessarily depend upon persuading their audiences that Russia is right. Frequently the more realistic objective is to make people uncertain whether anybody is right, whether anything they read can be trusted and whether resistance is ultimately worthwhile. Confusion, cynicism and exhaustion may be more useful strategic products than actual belief in the Kremlin’s version of events.

That distinction matters because propaganda in the twenty-first century does not always resemble a Soviet poster announcing the virtues of the Communist Party. It may instead consist of twenty mutually inconsistent explanations for the same event, repeated through thousands of accounts until the audience concludes that the truth is unknowable. The purpose can be less to establish one story than to destroy confidence in the possibility of establishing the truth.

Ukraine consequently needs institutions capable of fighting on this terrain. Yet this creates a difficult question for every democratic state: what exactly does “countering disinformation” mean? The answer becomes particularly complicated when the government doing the countering is itself engaged in an existential war and therefore has legitimate military secrets, strategic communications requirements and an obvious interest in sustaining public morale.

At its narrowest, countering disinformation means identifying demonstrably false claims generated or amplified by a hostile state and providing accurate information in response. At its broadest, however, information warfare becomes something considerably more ambitious: understanding how populations perceive events, anticipating narratives before they develop, influencing international debate and maintaining social resilience under the extraordinary psychological pressures of war. The difference between these two conceptions is substantial.

The latter activities are increasingly described by military and security specialists using terms such as cognitive warfare, cognitive security or cognitive operations. They involve not merely identifying individual lies but understanding the information environment in which those lies become persuasive, the emotions they exploit and the social groups through which they spread.

Kovalenko’s choice of language therefore appears significant. He did not announce that he was retiring from public life or abandoning the struggle against Russian propaganda. He specifically said that he was remaining within national security and cognitive confrontation. That is consistent with the earlier report that his next role would concern the cognitive and analytical dimension of information warfare, although consistency is not the same thing as confirmation.

We should therefore distinguish inference from fact. As of 29 September, the Ukrainian authorities have not publicly identified the new institution or position. It would be premature to announce that Kovalenko has been appointed to some secret new psychological-warfare organisation, still less to invent a bureaucratic reshuffle for which there is no documentary evidence. There is nevertheless enough information to suggest that something less dramatic and potentially more interesting than a sacking is occurring.

The strange institution Kovalenko built

The Centre for Countering Disinformation is itself an unusual creature. Governments have always communicated during wars, but the information environment of the Russo-Ukrainian war has blurred the traditional distinctions between intelligence analysis, strategic communications, journalism, diplomacy, psychological operations and ordinary government press work. The smartphone has brought all these disciplines onto the same screen.

Kovalenko became head of the Centre in January 2024, having previously served as its deputy. During his tenure he became unusually visible for somebody occupying what might otherwise have been an obscure bureaucratic position. His Telegram presence turned him into a recognisable interpreter of Russian military and information activity, and his statements were routinely quoted by Ukrainian and foreign media.

This model has advantages. Russian information operations move extraordinarily quickly, whereas a conventional government department requiring several layers of authorisation before answering every false claim may discover that by the time its response appears the lie has travelled around the world. A recognisable individual who can communicate rapidly and in comprehensible language offers an obvious alternative.

There is also a structural problem. A state institution ought ideally to be larger than the personality who leads it, and when an official becomes simultaneously an analyst, government communicator and substantial social-media personality, the boundary between institutional authority and personal authority becomes difficult to discern. Kovalenko’s departure may therefore prove an interesting test of whether the Centre has matured into an institution capable of surviving the departure of the man most publicly associated with it.

He himself evidently believes that it has. In his farewell remarks he said that his team had built a strong institution, expanded its media products, helped form a Ukrainian information agenda and strengthened cooperation with international partners. That is naturally his assessment of his own tenure rather than an independent evaluation, but the language is revealing: he presents his departure as the completion of one stage rather than the collapse of a project.

Four secretaries and one war

There is another curious feature of Kovalenko’s tenure. During the period in which he headed the Centre, the political and bureaucratic environment surrounding the National Security and Defence Council changed repeatedly. ZN.UA notes that he worked under four NSDC secretaries: Oleksiy Danilov, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, Rustem Umerov and Ihor Klymenko.

That degree of movement at the top of the Ukrainian security establishment makes institutional adaptation unsurprising. Ukraine’s wartime government has repeatedly reorganised ministries, military commands and national-security structures as the character of the war has changed. The information war has changed particularly quickly, and in some respects the technologies through which it is fought have evolved faster than the institutions responsible for confronting them.

Artificial intelligence now makes the inexpensive manufacture of convincing false photographs, voices and video increasingly routine. Telegram permits rumours to spread across Ukraine within minutes. Russian narratives aimed at Ukrainians coexist with different narratives directed towards Americans, Germans, Poles and other European audiences, while Russian intelligence and propaganda operations increasingly intersect with genuine political arguments taking place inside democratic societies.

The old model of “debunking disinformation” therefore risks becoming inadequate. By the time a government department has disproved yesterday’s viral fabrication, tomorrow’s has already appeared. A more sophisticated model would concentrate upon networks, audiences, patterns of amplification and the psychological vulnerabilities that hostile information operations attempt to exploit. That is considerably closer to what the expression “cognitive confrontation” implies.

If Kovalenko is indeed moving from the public-facing Centre into a more specialised security structure concentrating upon those questions, then his change of job may represent the bureaucratic expression of this broader evolution. For the moment, however, that remains an interpretation rather than an established fact, and the distinction is important in a story about disinformation.

The Telegram problem

There is an additional complication that illustrates the peculiar world in which Kovalenko has been operating. Ukrainian political Telegram is full of anonymous and semi-anonymous channels, supposed insiders, unattributed briefings and allegations about who controls which information outlet. Some of these channels undoubtedly possess genuine sources; others recycle rumours, advance private interests or mix accurate information with speculation in proportions that are extremely difficult for the ordinary reader to disentangle.

Immediately after Kovalenko’s departure, one such channel alleged a connection between him and another Telegram channel from which Kovalenko has publicly distanced himself. The allegation is intriguing precisely because information professionals themselves inevitably become subjects of information operations, gossip and counter-gossip. Yet the available material does not establish the alleged relationship, and Kovalenko has reportedly denied it strongly enough to describe suggestions of such a connection as a matter for the Security Service and Cyber Police.

This is precisely where caution becomes important. It would be ironic for an article about the former head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation to convert anonymous Telegram insinuations into established facts. At present they are not established facts, nor is there public evidence that these allegations explain his departure.

Indeed the chronology points in another direction. Reports that Kovalenko intended to move to another security-sector position appeared on 17 September, well before the presidential decree of 28 September. Unless reliable evidence emerges connecting the Telegram controversy with the earlier decision, the two should not simply be joined together because they make a more dramatic story.

So what is behind it all?

The least exciting explanation may therefore be the one most consistent with the evidence presently available. Kovalenko wanted to leave the Centre and requested another role; the Ukrainian leadership agreed, and the bureaucratic process subsequently produced the presidential decree required to remove him formally from his existing position. Kovalenko, meanwhile, prepared to continue working elsewhere in the Ukrainian security system.

That explanation does not answer every question. Quite the contrary, it leaves one particularly interesting question unanswered: where is he going? ZN.UA’s description of a role involving the “cognitive and analytical direction of information counteraction” is unusually specific, suggesting that somebody had already discussed the nature of the proposed position by the time the story emerged. There may consequently be another announcement to come.

Until then, three possible interpretations ought to be kept analytically separate. One is the dramatic interpretation: Kovalenko has fallen out with somebody powerful and has been pushed aside. There is presently no solid public evidence demonstrating this. Another is the mundane interpretation: after nearly three years at the Centre he simply wanted another job within government, and his own account broadly supports that explanation.

The third possibility sits somewhere between the two and is perhaps the most interesting. Ukraine may be reorganising the way it conducts information warfare, moving some activities beyond reactive disinformation monitoring towards the broader business of cognitive security, intelligence analysis and strategic communications. The evidence presently available is consistent with that interpretation but does not yet prove it, and future appointments may reveal whether this is indeed what has happened.

There is a broader lesson in the uncertainty. One of the habits that Russia’s information war encourages is the urge to fill every gap in knowledge immediately. A resignation without an explanation must conceal a scandal; a transfer without a destination must represent a conspiracy; an anonymous Telegram allegation must reveal a secret struggle within Bankova. Sometimes these things are true, but frequently they are not.

The more useful discipline is to construct a chronology, separate what is known from what is merely claimed and then wait for the missing evidence. What we know is comparatively straightforward: on 17 September, Ukrainian media reported that Kovalenko had requested a move to another security-sector position concerned with cognitive and analytical information warfare. On 28 September, Zelensky formally dismissed him as head of the Centre. Kovalenko thanked the President for accepting his request and explicitly said that he was remaining in national security and cognitive confrontation with Russia.

Everything beyond that remains investigation rather than fact. There is nevertheless an irony worthy of the age: the man who spent years asking Ukrainians not to leap from fragments of information to unsupported conclusions has departed his job in circumstances that invite precisely that temptation. For the time being, resisting that temptation while watching carefully to see where Kovalenko appears next may be the most appropriate way of understanding what is really going on.