(PresidentialWire.com)- Russian President Vladimir Putin is apparently not happy with how his country’s invasion of Ukraine is going so far, and he’s blaming others for the current state of affairs.
A Yahoo News report says that Putin is blaming many of his colleagues over at the Federal Security Bureau, which is also known as the FSB. It’s the intelligence agency that replaced the former KGB.
The report said that Russia’s president has removed more than 100 FSB agents thus far. In addition to that purge of rank-and-file officials, Putin also reportedly put the person who was in charge of the department’s efforts in Ukraine to jail.
On Monday, The Times of London reported that 150 officers with the FSB have been dismissed from duty by Putin. All of the agents belonged to the agency’s Fifth Service. That’s a division that was set up in 1998 by Putin himself, when he was serving as director of the FSB.
The Fifth Service’s focus is to carry out various operations in the countries that made up the former Soviet Union. The goal of the unit was to keep all of those countries within Russia’s orbit, even though they were no longer officially a part of the country.
The head of the Fifth Service, Sergei Beseda, was also placed under house arrest in March, before being moved to the Lefortovo prison, which is located in Moscow and run by the FSB. That prison was used during the reign of Stalin. During the Great Purge in the 1930s, Stalin used the prison to torture and interrogate people.
Andrei Soldatov, who serves with the Center for European Policy Analysis, told The Times that these moves by Putin sent a “very strong message” to some of the other members of the elite class in Russia. As he explained:
“I was surprised by this. Putin could have very easily just fired him or sent him off to some regional job in Siberia. Lefortovo is not a nice place, and sending him there is a signal as to how seriously Putin takes this stuff.”
Soldatov even said that it was possible that authorities within Russia could suspect that Beseda possibly passed information over to the U.S. through the CIA.
Many analysts said in recent weeks that when Beseda was placed on house arrest, it was possible that it was done in retaliation for failures in intelligence during the war in Ukraine.
According to Soldatov, the Fifth Service represents “the most sensitive department of the FSB department, which is in charge of espionage in Ukraine. And now it looks like Vladimir Putin finally understood that the intelligence he was given before the invasion was not extremely accurate. And he has started looking around trying to find someone to blame.”
Russia has failed in many respects since it invaded Ukraine at the end of February. While they have certainly caused a lot of destruction — and horror around the world — their efforts obviously haven’t been up to the expectations that Putin set for his country.
The scary part is that now he’s starting to blame some of his closest allies, and taking extreme actions instead of backing down.
