Kremlin arrests FSB chiefs in fallout from Ukraine chaos
A Russian spy chief is said to have been placed under house arrest in a sign that President Putin is seeking to blame the security services for the stalled invasion of Ukraine.
Sergey Beseda, head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, was arrested with Anatoly Bolyukh, his deputy, according to a leading expert on the Russian security services.
Andrei Soldatov, who is co-founder and editor of Agentura, an investigative website that monitors the FSB and other agencies, said that sources from within FSB had confirmed the detention of both men.
Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian human rights activist, also confirmed the arrests. He added that FSB officers had carried out searches at more than 20 addresses around Moscow of colleagues suspected of being in contact with journalists.
“The formal basis for conducting these searches is the accusation of the embezzlement of funds earmarked for subversive activities in Ukraine,” Osechkin said. “The real reason is unreliable, incomplete and partially false information about the political situation in Ukraine.”
The spy chief’s defenestration attests to Putin’s growing fury towards the intelligence services, which he believes provided false information over the situation in Ukraine, Soldatov said. “Putin has finally understood that he was misled,” Soldatov told The Times.
Beseda, 68, heads the FSB’s Fifth Service, which is responsible for intelligence-gathering in Ukraine.
Although the FSB is officially a domestic security service, akin to MI5, the Fifth Service was set up at the end of the 1990s when Putin was director on orders to carry out operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Bolyukh, 66, is head of the Department of Operative Information, which is a part of the Fifth Service.
A western official was aware of the reported arrests but could not confirm them. The official said: “Both men have played a major role in intelligence operations against Ukraine for several years, and highly likely played a major role in the planning for the invasion of Ukraine. If claims of arrest are correct, this would indicate that Putin is seriously concerned about the FSB’s role in the military campaign and there could be significant changes at senior levels in the FSB.”
Several military leaders are also reported to have been dismissed. On Thursday Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s security council, said that “around eight” Russian commanders had been sacked since the start of the invasion on February 24.
Beseda was known to have been in Kyiv in February 2014, when almost 100 Ukrainians were shot dead by police. They were protesting against the pro-Kremlin presidency of Victor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia shortly afterwards. Beseda was sanctioned by the European Union in July 2014.
This week Soldatov said the final reports produced by the FSB on Ukraine in the run-up to the invasion were “simply not right, which is part of the reason as to why things have gone so badly for Russia”.
Their assessments of popular support among Ukrainians for a Russian invasion and the extent to which the country would resist were “terribly miscalculated”, he said.
However, he added: “The problem is that it is too risky for superiors to tell Putin what he doesn’t want to hear, so they tailor their information. The tailoring probably takes place somewhere between the rank of colonel and general in the FSB. We can’t rule out the fact that the intelligence they gathered on the ground was in fact very good.”
Last weekend an alleged report written by an FSB officer emerged. The author complained about being overworked and made a scapegoat for the failings of the Russian advance. They added: “I can’t tell you what led those in charge to decide to proceed with the operation but now they are methodically throwing us to the lions. We are being scolded for our analysis.”