In a country in its third year of defending against an invasion, something happened that no military report anticipates: two Ukrainian services opened fire on each other. Not Russian saboteurs, not infiltrators - the Security Service of Ukraine and the military intelligence directorate, on a street in Kyiv, with three people wounded.

The incident took place on Yuriy Shumsky Street in the Dniprovskyi district. According to Ukrainian media, three members of the military intelligence directorate were wounded in the confrontation. The trigger was Stepan Kaplunov, deputy commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps - a formation made up of Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side - whose disappearance set the whole thing in motion.

The two services tell the story differently, and that is where it gets interesting. The Security Service said its people were carrying out urgent investigative actions connected to an alleged Russian FSB terrorist plot targeting a Russian opposition figure staying in Ukraine. "In order to halt the armed attack and protect the participants in the operation, special units used weapons. There are wounded among those who put up resistance. The attackers have been detained," the service said.

Kaplunov's legal team turns the picture upside down: it claims members of both services came to his residence, and that this is precisely what provoked an armed response from the people around him. In other words - one side says it was repelling an attack, the other says it was the one attacked.

Nobody explains how

Investigators from the State Bureau of Investigation and the Alfa special unit also arrived at the scene. After negotiations, the two services agreed to unload their weapons so the investigators could work. That is a detail worth reading twice: in the capital of a country at war, a ceasefire was negotiated between two of its own services.

The Ukrainian authorities have so far not explained publicly how a joint operation ended in gunfire between structures that formally work for the same state. The silence is understandable from a military point of view. Understandable does not mean harmless - every event like this is a gift to Russian propaganda, which is already selling it as "the start of a civil war", which it plainly is not.

Rivalry between services that formally work for the same state is not a Ukrainian speciality - it is an old story anywhere the security apparatus is split across several houses with overlapping powers. The difference is where the line gets drawn. In Kyiv, that day, the line was drawn with weapons - and that is what war changes in every institution it touches.