Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not appear to be going according to plan, and President Vladimir Putin appears intent on blaming his old colleagues in the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), the KGB’s successor, for the quagmire.
Putin reportedly purged more than 100 FSB agents, and his government sent the head of the department in charge of Ukraine to prison.
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About 150 FSB officers have been fired, The Times of London reported on Monday. The ousted agents belonged to the Fifth Service, a unit that Putin, then director of the FSB, set up in 1998 to conduct operations in the former Soviet Union to keep them in Russia’s orbit.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with female flight attendants in comments broadcast on state television on Saturday, March 5, 2022. Reuters video
Authorities placed Sergei Beseda, a former head of the Fifth Service, under house arrest last month. He has since been transferred to the FSB-run Lefortovo prison in Moscow, according to The Times. The NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, used the prison for interrogation and torture during Stalin’s Great Purge in the 1930s.
The move sent a “very strong message” to other elites in Russia, Andrei Soldatov, an expert with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), told The Times.
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“I was surprised by that,” Soldatov said. “Putin could very easily have just fired him or sent him to some regional job in Siberia. Lefortovo is not a pleasant place, and sending him there is a signal of how seriously Putin takes these things.”
Soldatov suggested that Russian authorities might suspect Beseda of leaking information to the CIA.
Earlier, analysts told Fox News that Beseda’s house arrest sentence appears to be a form of retaliation for intelligence mistakes in Ukraine.
Soldatov said the Fifth Service was “the most sensitive unit of the FSB department responsible for espionage in Ukraine. And now it seems that Vladimir Putin has finally realized that the intelligence he was given before the invasion was not exceptional. And he began to look around, trying to find the culprit. “
The story continues
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As Russian troops fight to seize positions in Ukraine, Moscow is also waging an intelligence war. The US FBI announced last week that it had violated a Russian military hacking scheme to create a “botnet” on victims’ devices in the United States and elsewhere. At the end of last month, Ukrainian intelligence released an estimated list of more than 600 Russian spies.
Representative Richie Torres, DN.Y., called The FBI is investigating a Russian diplomatic complex in New York, which experts told Fox News Digital earlier, to house diplomats in the United States to spy on America.
“We were horrified and alarmed by Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked aggression war against Ukraine. We were horrified by his war crimes against the Ukrainian people, and in this context I have officially asked the FBI to launch an investigation into reports of espionage in the Russian diplomatic room, “Torres told reporters on Tuesday about the White Tower located at 355 West 255th Streetin the Bronx.
The Bronx Democrat called it “both metaphorically and literally an observation structure.”
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