Putin began repressions against the 5th service of the FSB. It was she who, on the eve of the war, provided the President of Russia with data on the political situation in Ukraine.
18:06, March 11, 2022
Source: Meduza
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After two weeks of war, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a crackdown on his beloved agency, the FSB. According to journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, the so-called 5th service of the FSB came under attack. Its leadership, according to the sources of Soldatov and Borogan, was placed under house arrest. There is no official confirmation of this information. Meduza asked Soldatov and Borogan to explain what was going on.
Andrey Soldatov and Irina Borogan are journalists and writers, authors of several books about the Russian authorities and special services. They have been studying the FSB for many years and have an extensive network of sources.
The 5th service (officially called the Service of Operational Information and International Relations) oversees the FSB's relations with foreign partners, including with US agencies. Inside the service, there is the infamous Department of Operational Information (DPI), which performs the functions of the FSB's foreign intelligence.
The FSB acquired the right to conduct operations abroad in the late 1990s, when Vladimir Putin was the director of this special service. At the same time, a new department was formed within the FSB, which was instructed to conduct intelligence operations on the territory of the former USSR. (We have been following the activities of this FSB unit for a long time and write about it.)
When the “color revolutions” led to the fact that many pro-Kremlin leaders in the post-Soviet space lost power, the administration was given the task of doing everything to keep these countries in Russia’s sphere of influence.
In 2004, the department was upgraded in status, having been transformed into a full-fledged department - the Department of Operational Information. Soon he had a new leader - Sergei Beseda, who had previously served in the FSB department that oversaw the presidential administration of Russia, where he had excellent connections. Soon, DPI officers began to be noticed in Belarus, Moldova and Abkhazia. It turned out that their main task there was not classic espionage, but support for pro-Kremlin candidates in local elections. However, it was Ukraine in the entire post-Soviet space that occupied a special place in the priorities of the DPI.
In June 2010, we received information that a website with the telling name lubyanskayapravda.com (Lubyanskaya Pravda) appeared, where secret FSB documents were posted. Among the various intelligence reports there were published DPI reports addressed directly to Putin. One of them talked about a document that was falsified to undermine relations between Ukraine and Turkmenistan. It was about a fake report of the Ukrainian special services on the financing of the Turkmen opposition. It was a classic FSB action: the DPI leaked a fake report to the Ukrainian media, and then something unexpected happened: Russian intelligence (SVR) accepted this report as genuine and reported it to the Kremlin.
Besed was clearly proud of himself when he described what had happened in his report addressed to the first person.
Are there still professionals in the FSB? What will happen to the employees who probably poisoned Navalny? Does Putin run the FSB, or does the FSB run Putin? Andrey Soldatov answers embarrassing questions about Russia's main intelligence agency
a year ago
In April 2014, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry sent a request to the Russian colleagues for interrogation of Beseda. In Kyiv, they claimed that he was in Ukraine on February 20-21, during the revolution on the Maidan. The Ukrainian authorities considered this important in the framework of the investigation of crimes committed during mass actions in Kiev on February 18-22
, 2014 .
The FSB was forced to confirm that Sergei Beseda was indeed in Kyiv on February 20-21. But they claimed that he came only to check the level of protection of the Russian embassy - this is a version that no one believed. Since 2014, Beseda has been on the US and EU sanctions lists.
However, this story did not affect the positions of the 5th service in any way: DPI operatives continued to collect intelligence information in Ukraine, recruited sources and carried out subversive activities.
It was the 5th service that was responsible for providing Vladimir Putin with information about political events in Ukraine on the eve of the invasion. And it seems that after two weeks of the war, Putin finally realized that he was simply misled: the 5th service, afraid to anger the leader, simply supplied him with what he himself wanted to hear.
Now our sources report that General Beseda and his deputy have been placed under house arrest. Among the reasons are the misuse of funds allocated for operations, as well as poor intelligence information. And indeed: the intelligence of Putin's career intelligence officer, as it turned out, was put out of hand very badly.
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