President Putin and his security institutions are no longer a united front.
Russia’s army is deeply unhappy at the new and curtailed strategy Putin has ordered them to adopt in Ukraine, abandoning the big goal of capturing Kyiv for a much more modest objective of invading Donbas in the country’s east.
And they are pointing the finger at other agencies, the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch primarily, for misinforming the president about the true conditions inside Ukraine that have led to failure. Other FSB departments appear to share the military’s analysis.
“As journalists, we expected to lose many of our contacts in the Russian military and secret services after the invasion began”
The war in Ukraine sharply divided Russian society. As journalists, we expected to lose many of our contacts in the Russian military and secret services after the invasion began on Feb. 24. After all, it’s one thing to complain to a journalist about corruption in one’s agency, and it’s quite another to speak about the war with those who have taken a public antiwar stand. And indeed, in the first month of the war, some sources refused to answer our calls and messages.
But the situation has now changed dramatically. Last week we began to receive more and more calls and messages from our contacts in the military and in the FSB commenting on our reporting about Sergei Beseda, one of the heads of the Fifth Service of the FSB, who gathers political intelligence on Ukraine and cultivates the pro-Kremlin opposition in Kyiv. The general was sent to the infamous Lefortovo prison in Moscow, which has had a horrible reputation since the Stalin purges — innumerable victims have been murdered in the building’s basement.
The Kremlin has made frantic efforts to hide the details of Beseda’s arrest, going as far as to change the general’s name in prison records. (The Investigative Committee, Russia’s main investigative authority, went so far as to deny the fact of Beseda’s criminal prosecution.)
