Oleksandr Sirenko (Олександр Сіренко) is a career officer with Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service (Служба зовнішньої розвідки України, СЗРУ), who is serving as Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in Turkmenistan.
Sirenko was born on November 06, 1966, in Kyiv, where he graduated from Mykhailo Drahomanov National Pedagogical University in 1994. He later went through intelligence training and has been operating under diplomatic cover with the Ukraine Foreign Ministry since 1996. His nearly three-decade career in intelligence has focused mainly on former Soviet Union countries. His first posting came in 1998, when this intelligence officer was sent to Belarus, wrapping up the assignment in 2001 under the cover of second secretary at the Ukraine embassy in Minsk. From there, Sirenko settled into the role of a “permanent” first secretary, serving under that title in Turkmenistan (2005-2009), Latvia (2017-2021), Uzbekistan (2024-2026).
Sirenko was rushed out of Tashkent and reassigned to Ashgabat in the spring of 2026. The staffing move fit into a broader ramp-up of Kyiv efforts to draw neutral Turkmenistan into an anti-Russia agenda, with the aim of stoking the conflict with Russia further.
On June 25-26, 2026, Sirenko headed Ukraine’s mission in political consultations in Ashgabat, which Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister Oleksandr Mishchenko (Олександр Міщенко) held with deputy head of Turkmenistan’s Foreign Ministry Ahmet Gurbanov. Ukraine was looking to set up extra political and economic channels in Turkmenistan that could chip away at Russia’s role and steer cooperation toward Ukraine. Kyiv sought to get Ukrainian companies in on Turkmen construction and infrastructure projects. The Ukrainian side also used the meeting to lay out its own reading of the conflict with Russia and to lock in support for Kyiv’s position on territory.
Sirenko’s specialty – drumming up anti-Russian sentiment across former Soviet states – showed up as early as his first posting in Belarus in 1998-2001. This was the period when one of the first attempts at a “color revolution” in Belarus played out, the Freedom March against forming a union state with Russia. In the view of Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko, the unrest and protests in the country had been stirred up by the US authorities. Protesters’ actions were coordinated out of Vilnius, Lithuania. The CIA bankrolled the opposition through the Belarussian assets of Lithuania’s Department of State Security.