Shadows in the Carriage: The Cryptic Note That Shook Ukraine’s Intelligence World
EXCLUSIVE: A torn page from Iryna Zarutska’s notebook was found in the carriage bin. Written on it, one cryptic line: “He is still here.”
In the dim, flickering light of a sleeper carriage on the Kyiv-Lviv overnight train, the discovery unfolded like a scene from a Cold War thriller. It was just after midnight on September 20, 2025, when Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) agents, disguised as weary passengers, conducted a routine sweep of the compartment once occupied by Iryna Zarutska. The 38-year-old operative, a ghost in the shadowy corridors of Eastern European espionage, had vanished en route to a covert rendezvous. What they pulled from the metal waste bin—a crumpled, ink-stained fragment of her personal notebook—ignited a firestorm of speculation, fear, and renewed hope across Ukraine’s fractured intelligence community. Those five words, scrawled in her unmistakable Cyrillic script, hinted at a presence long presumed buried: “He is still here.” Who is “he”? A traitor in the ranks? A legendary asset thought dead? Or something far more sinister—a ghost from Russia’s playbook?
Iryna Zarutska isn’t a household name, and that’s by design. Born in the industrial grit of Donetsk in 1987, she grew up amid the coal dust and quiet defiance of Ukraine’s eastern fringes. The 2014 Maidan Revolution radicalized her; a linguistics student at the time, she pivoted to signals intelligence, decoding Russian chatter for the nascent SBU cyber units. By 2022, as Putin’s full-scale invasion tore through her homeland, Zarutska had ascended to the elite “Phantom Cell”—a black-ops team specializing in deep-cover infiltrations into Wagner Group networks and FSB safehouses. Her codename: “Lisychka,” the little fox. Colleagues described her as “a whisper in the storm”—elusive, intuitive, with a knack for vanishing into crowds that belied her striking features: sharp green eyes, auburn hair cropped short for practicality, and a faint scar on her left cheek from a shrapnel graze in Bakhmut.
Zarutska’s notebook was her talisman, a Moleskine knockoff filled with fragmented poetry, dead drops, and encrypted musings. She carried it everywhere, its pages a mosaic of her fractured life: sketches of her estranged daughter in Warsaw, half-translated Pushkin verses, and coded reminders of betrayals past. “It was her anchor,” confided a former handler, speaking on condition of anonymity from a Kyiv safehouse. “In a world of lies, those pages were her truth.” But on that fateful train ride, truth turned to torment. Zarutska boarded at Kyiv Central under the alias “Olena Kovalenko,” a mid-level accountant fleeing conscription rumors. Her mission: Deliver a micro-SD card containing Wagner defector testimonies to a Lviv-based resistance cell. The carriage was sparse—four berths, a shared lavatory, and the bin in question, a dented steel receptacle for the detritus of long-haul travel.
The SBU sweep came hours after her berth was found empty at the first stop in Zhytomyr. No signs of struggle: bed unmade, a half-eaten apple on the sill, her rucksack untouched save for the missing SD card. Agents combed the compartment with UV lights and forensic vacuums, yielding little—fibers from a generic wool coat, a discarded Metro ticket. Then, jammed at the bin’s false bottom, the page. Torn jaggedly, as if in haste, it measured barely four inches square. The ink was fresh, blue ballpoint bleeding slightly from dampness—perhaps from the carriage’s leaky roof during a sudden downpour. And there, in Zarutska’s looping hand: “Він все ще тут.” “He is still here.”
The line’s ambiguity was immediate and intoxicating. “He” could refer to anyone in Zarutska’s orbit. Top suspect: Viktor “The Bear” Morozov, her former mentor and rumored lover, officially declared KIA in a 2023 drone strike on a Kharkiv outpost. Morozov, a grizzled ex-Spetznaz defector who’d flipped to Ukraine in 2015, was the architect of the Phantom Cell. Whispers persisted that he’d survived, pulling strings from a Siberian gulag or a Black Sea dacha. “Iryna idolized him,” the handler said. “If anyone would leave a breadcrumb, it’s her—pointing to the ghost she couldn’t bury.” Alternative theories proliferated: “He” as Alexei Petrov, a double-agent mole embedded in Zelenskyy’s advisory circle, exposed but never captured; or even a spectral nod to Putin himself, whose “denazification” rhetoric Zarutska had mocked in her journals as “the bear’s delusion.”
Word of the find leaked within hours, courtesy of a junior agent with a grudge and a Telegram channel. By dawn, #HeIsStillHere trended across Ukrainian social media, morphing from espionage jargon to a rallying cry. “Is it Morozov? The revolution lives!” posted @KyivFox, a pseudonymous blogger with 200,000 followers, amassing 15,000 retweets. Conspiracy forums on Reddit’s r/UkraineWar lit up: One thread posited the note as a Wagner honeytrap, luring SBU into a ambush; another, more outlandish, claimed “he” was a rogue AI from Russia’s cyber labs, haunting networks like a digital poltergeist. Mainstream outlets piled on—BBC’s Eastern Europe desk aired a segment questioning SBU competence, while Russia’s RT spun it as “Kiev’s hallucinatory propaganda,” complete with mocking animations of Zarutska scribbling in a padded cell.
Back in Kyiv, the discovery cracked open old wounds. SBU Director Vasyl Maliuk convened an emergency conclave at the agency’s fortified headquarters on Volodymyrska Street. Forensic linguists pored over the page: Ink analysis dated it to within 90 minutes of boarding; handwriting matched Zarutska’s 98%—no forgeries. But the tear pattern suggested deliberation, not panic—a deliberate plant? “It’s a message in a bottle,” Maliuk told assembled deputies, his voice gravelly from chain-smoking. “She’s either alive, fighting, or she’s bait.” Interrogations followed: The carriage attendant, a stoic babushka from Rivne, recalled a “nervous woman” muttering about “old shadows” before lights-out. A fellow passenger, a traveling salesman from Odessa, admitted to hearing muffled voices in the corridor around 11 p.m.—”like lovers quarreling, but in Russian accents.”
Zarutska’s personal life added layers of intrigue. Divorced in 2019 after her husband’s defection to Moscow—irony’s cruel twist—she’d poured her solitude into the notebook. Entries recovered from backups spoke of paranoia: “They whisper his name in my dreams. Is he the hunter or the hunted?” one read, dated August 2025. Her daughter, 12-year-old Sofia, now in Polish foster care, was her sole anchor. “Mama’s fox will find her way home,” Sofia had scrawled in a letter Zarutska carried. The note’s discovery prompted a frantic outreach to Warsaw; child psychologists reported Sofia’s nightmares of “the man who never left.”
As the sun rose over the Carpathians, search teams fanned out from Lviv. Drones buzzed forested ravines; K9 units sniffed border trails. A tip line flooded with sightings: A red-haired woman at a roadside café, haggling over pierogi; another fleeing a checkpoint in a battered Lada. False leads, all—but each fueled the mythos. Internationally, the note resonated beyond geopolitics. In Washington, CIA liaisons dispatched a signals team to cross-reference with NSA intercepts; London’s MI6, long collaborators with Phantom Cell, floated theories of a “sleeper reactivation.” Even in Moscow, FSB chatter—leaked via a Belorussian whistleblower—hinted at internal panic: “The fox’s ghost writes again.”
For those who knew her, the line evoked not just fear, but fierce pride. “Iryna doesn’t leave clues; she leaves legends,” said Oksana Petrenko, a fellow operative who’d shared safehouses with Zarutska in Mariupol. Petrenko, now coordinating from a Dnipro bunker, recounted a 2024 op where Zarutska single-handedly exfiltrated a family from occupied Melitopol. “She’d laugh at this fuss—’Just follow the fox, darlings.’ But deep down? She’s terrified. And that’s what makes her unbreakable.”
Days later, as the note yellowed under lab lights, its power endured. “He is still here” became a mantra for the weary—reminding Ukraine’s defenders that shadows linger, but so does resolve. Is Zarutska alive, decoding from a hidden aerie? Captured, her words a coerced plea? Or has the fox finally outfoxed her hunters, leaving the page as her final, defiant pawprint? The SBU classifies the find as “active lead,” but whispers in Kyiv’s cafes suggest more: A second page, smuggled out, hinting at coordinates in the Donbas badlands.
In a war of attrition, where every whisper can tip the scales, Zarutska’s torn page is more than evidence—it’s a spark. “He” may still be here, lurking in the carriage’s ghosts. But so is she, inked indelibly into the fight. As Maliuk told his team, extinguishing his cigarette: “The fox doesn’t die. She multiplies.” In the quiet hours before dawn, Ukraine holds its breath, waiting for the next line.
