Putin has ordered a hunt for 'Western spies' in the FSB, with intelligence failings blamed for the stalled invasion of Ukraine, expert says
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- Putin seems to have turned against his security services amid the stalled invasion of Ukraine.
- He has placed two FSB officials under house arrest and launched a search for spies, an expert told Insider.
- Analysts say intelligence failings have impacted Russia's invasion.
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine stalls, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be directing his anger against his security services.
Putin had likely been led to expect a swift victory over Ukraine by his intelligence and military chiefs, minimal resistance from Ukraine's civilians, and a network of loyalists willing to back a Kremlin-installed puppet government, experts and analysts have said.
But Russia has instead faced fierce resistance from all levels of Ukrainian society resulting in a mounting Russian death toll and a stalled invasion.
And it's the FSB, the domestic security agency that Putin once headed, that may be facing the brunt of the blame.
In the past week, Putin has placed two commanders from the Fifth Service of the FSB, Sergei Beseda and his deputy, under house arrest, Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and expert on Russian security services, told Insider.
And the Russian military's counterintelligence division has launched an investigation to identify possible informants and foreign agents in the FSB, according to Soldatov's sources.
"What we see in Moscow is a sense of desperation in terms of the lack of political support in Ukraine for the invasion," said Soldatov.
He said that the officials detained were responsible for areas like political subversion and building local networks to back the invasion of Ukraine.
Soldatov said that Western intelligence reports contained granular details on Russia's military buildup, plans, and stalled campaign. This, he said, led to fears in the Kremlin that the FSB may have been infiltrated by foreign intelligence, allowing its plans to reach the West.
ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
Soldatov said that in Russia "we have the military counterintelligence looking into the activities of the fifth department of the FSB, which basically means that they started looking for moles because military counterintelligence is basically identifying Western spies."
"And that makes some sense because, of course, lots of people in Moscow are asking themselves the question why the US intelligence was so good."
Soldatov said that among the responsibilities of the fifth department was liaising with the CIA, so it would be "the first place to look for Western spies."
The Kremlin in public has insisted that the military operation is going according to plan. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in a CNN interview Tuesday said that claims Russia had expected a swift victory were false. He said Russia had never planned on occupying Ukraine but neutralizing its military.
However, for Ruth Deyermond, an expert in post-Soviet security at Kings College London, the detention of the FSB officers tells a different story.
"Whatever the Kremlin says in public, we know that in reality, Putin can see at least some of the war's failures. It also suggests that he's unwilling to take the blame for them himself," she told Insider.
"If the war continues as badly as it's begun, it suggests that many more intelligence and probably military officers will be blamed and punished. What that will do to long-term support for him among these parts of the state isn't clear."
The roots of Russia's failings lie not in flawed intelligence but a pervasive underestimation of Ukraine in the FSB and a reluctance to challenge Putin, Soldatov siad.
"The problem is that they never believed that Ukraine built a real or functional state," said Soldatov. "It's mostly about very cynical assessment of Ukraine. They believe that it was absolutely dysfunctional."
It's a view that Putin's expressed in a speech on the eve of the invasion when he insulted Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a drug addict and said Ukrainian national identity was a fiction.
"It fits with Putin's assumptions because everybody knows Putin despised Ukraine from the beginning, he made absolutely clear to everybody inside the secret services, said Soldatov. "So I think it was really difficult or maybe even impossible to challenge his views on Ukraine."
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