Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed about 150 Federal Security Bureau officers, sending some to prison, since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, according to a report on Monday.
The expelled officers are all members of the Fifth Service division of the FSB, responsible for counterintelligence in the countries of the former Soviet Union, such as Ukraine. Putin’s purge reportedly includes the former head of the Fifth Service, Sergei Beseda, who has been sent to a Moscow prison after being placed on house arrest last month.
“I can say that although a significant number of them have not been arrested, they will no longer work for the FSB,” Christo Grozev, executive director of the investigative outlet Bellingcat, said on a YouTube channel about the dismissals and arrests of Russian intelligence agents.
Beseda, 68, was imprisoned for “reporting false information to the Kremlin about the real situation in Ukraine before the invasion,” said Grozev, who reported the mass purge taking place at the Kremlin.
VLADIMIR PUTIN KLEPTOCRACY WILL BE HIS OWN UNDOING
The Russian explanation for his initial arrest last month was a charge of embezzlement.
Beseda was sent to Lefortovo prison in Moscow, a notorious facility used for interrogation, torture, and mass executions during former Russian dictator Josef Stalin’s “Great Purge” of the 1930s.
Andrei Soldatov, a journalist and Russian security services expert, claimed it is not standard operating procedure to send high-ranking Kremlin officials to Lefortovo. Soldatov suggested it was possible Beseda was suspected by Putin of having passed information about Russia’s invasion to the CIA, given that U.S. intelligence before the invasion was so accurate.
“When Putin gets paranoid, he starts looking for traitors in the places and institutions which are known to have official contacts with American intelligence,” Soldatov said in the Moscow Times, an independent Russian media outlet.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Russia’s Fifth Service had been actively trying to destabilize Ukraine in the years leading up to February’s invasion by cultivating pro-Russian Ukrainian officials with lavish trips to Thailand, Cyprus, and the Maldives, according to the report, seemingly another Ukraine-related failure by the FSB that has angered Putin.
According to reports, NATO estimates that up to 40,000 Russian troops have been killed, injured, or captured or have gone missing during Putin’s war in Ukraine. Of those, between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian troops are estimated to have died.
