What's going on in Moscow
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@George-K said in What's going on in Moscow:
I have no idea who Igor Sushko is.
Apparently, he's a racing driver.
Weird times.
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Igor Sushko
Mar 20, 2022
Gavrilov has been accused of leaking information of Russian troop movement in Ukraine which resulted in the death of more than 100 Rosgvardiya soldiers, as well for sabotaging a number of operations to seize territory and strategic facilities in Ukraine.He’s going to get a bad performance review.
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Recriminations and finger-pointing have begun within Russia’s spy and defense agencies, as the campaign that Moscow expected to culminate in a lightning seizure of Ukraine’s capital has instead turned into a costly and embarrassing morass, U.S. officials said.
The blame game, which includes the detention of at least one senior Russian intelligence official, doesn’t appear to pose any immediate threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s iron grip on power, but the U.S. officials are watching the machinations closely.
A U.S. official described as credible reports that the commander of the FSB intelligence agency’s unit responsible for Ukraine had been placed under house arrest.
The official, in an interview, also said bickering had broken out between the FSB and the Russian Ministry of Defense, two of the principal government units responsible for the preparation of the Feb. 24 invasion.
Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns told Congress earlier this month that Mr. Putin had planned to seize Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv within two days, suggesting the Russian leader expected minimal resistance.
The FSB officer said to be under investigation and house arrest is Col.-Gen. Sergei Beseda, head of the intelligence agency’s Fifth Service, also known as the Service for Operational Information and International Communications.
Another former U.S. intelligence official who has studied Russia for decades said Mr. Putin, a former FSB chief, helped create the Fifth Service, which operates as the de facto foreign-intelligence arm of the overall agency, which is primarily focused on internal security. It would have shared responsibility for preparing the way for the invasion of Ukraine, the former official said. That, he said, likely included a plot made public by the U.S. and U.K., but denied by Russia, to eliminate Ukraine’s leadership and install pro-Moscow successors.
Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, who co-wrote the first report on Mr. Beseda’s house arrest, said Mr. Putin may be blaming the FSB for failing to bring about the rapid collapse of the Ukrainian government that he had expected.
“Putin himself has been absolutely sure that he understands Ukraine really well,” said Mr. Soldatov, who is a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “He expected his agencies, and first of all the FSB, to do some groundwork like cultivating political groups that could provide support for the Russian invasion. And now obviously that’s not what is happening.”
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Not only Gorbachev but Khrushchev as well. In the latter’s case he went on vacation and was asked to come back to Moscow to chair a special meeting on agriculture. When he arrived at the Moscow airport he was told he was ousted as GenSec and driven to his dacha outside Moscow. No fuss, no muss and it was over. In his memoirs he told his son afterward that the fact he and his family were all still alive proved that his post Stalin reforms had actually accomplished some positive results in the system.
But to answer George’s question, there is no mechanism other than conspiracy.
‘a-blowe yow and be-kele yow wel, and comyth up all with your ease’ ~ attributed to Henry V
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@Renauda said in What's going on in Moscow:
But to answer George’s question, there is no mechanism other than conspiracy.
That was my impression as well. Thanks.
Do you think such conspiracy exists?
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@LuFins-Dad said in What's going on in Moscow:
If he is removed, who/what comes next?
Someone who appreciates our government's flexibility?
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@George-K said in What's going on in Moscow:
@Renauda said in What's going on in Moscow:
But to answer George’s question, there is no mechanism other than conspiracy.
That was my impression as well. Thanks.
Do you think such conspiracy exists?
No idea but there are rumours and the usual chatter. One has Oleg Bortnikov taking over- I doubt it. I think one Beria is enough for Russia, no need for another.
‘a-blowe yow and be-kele yow wel, and comyth up all with your ease’ ~ attributed to Henry V
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Lavrenty Beria. He was head of Stalin’s KGB from 1938 until 1949. He made a bid to succeed Stalin in 1953 but met with sudden terminal lead poisoning courtesy of his Politburo colleagues and Soviet General Staff. Colourfully loathsome character - sleaze, murderer and child molester. Stalin ordered his bodyguards never to leave his daughter, Svetlana alone with Beria. Look him up.
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I spent 34 years in the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service, and watching Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine from the sidelines fills me with both sadness and a sense of opportunity. Espionage is a predatory business, and there’s blood in the water. Mr. Putin’s self-inflicted damage has done more to turn his own people against him than anything the West could have done.
Mr. Putin’s disastrous choices are causing military strategists to reconsider which tactics could be used against Russia’s overrated and underperforming armed forces. Political experts and economists are rethinking tools for punishing malign behavior. Other potential aggressors—namely China—must take notice. If your job is cultivating spies, I suspect that recruiting must be good.
Russian mystique is gone. Mr. Putin has proved his country is the declining power that the best-informed Russia watchers claimed it was. Fewer pundits will wax poetic over Mr. Putin’s cunning and strategic brilliance. He might have been a capable operations officer during his KGB career, but he clearly missed the classes on self-awareness and counterintelligence. The more he tightens the security screws and covers Russia’s window to the world, the more likely those he depends on will turn against him.
Resurrecting the Soviet empire, as Mr. Putin wants to do, brings with it the same forces that prompted most of the Warsaw Pact’s best CIA agents to turn against the Kremlin. Agents across the Soviet bloc often shared the same desire: to inflict whatever harm they could. They took up the fight not for money, but to undermine a toxic system that enriched a corrupt elite, wrought suffering and economic stagnation, and occasionally brought the world to the brink.
Some of the CIA’s Russian agents were so dedicated that despite years of service and risk, they refused to give up the fight and leave their homeland even when they were in grave danger. One of the most famous was Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev. Known as “The Billion Dollar Spy,” Tolkachev was a Soviet electronics engineer. Angered by how dissident family members had suffered under Stalin and by the Kremlin’s corruption, Tolkachev provided the CIA documents on Soviet missile systems, avionics and radar that undermined Soviet air capabilities—information that continues to provide value today.
Another was Maj. Gen. Dmitri Fyodorovich Polyakov of the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate. He believed corruption had denied his son vital medical care, leading to the boy’s death. Polyakov helped the U.S. keep the Cold War from ever turning hot by providing key intelligence on the split between Moscow and Beijing that helped persuade President Richard Nixon to undertake the opening with China.
In December 1980, the U.S. used intelligence from Col. Ryszard Kuklinski, a senior officer on the Polish general staff and a CIA agent, to expose Soviet plans to invade Poland. Kuklinski’s decision to turn against his government’s Kremlin masters came after Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring of 1968.
If truth was able to penetrate the Iron Curtain and reach the likes of Tolkachev, who never left the country and had no access to the outside world apart from shortwave radio, Mr. Putin won’t be able to extinguish truth in the digital age. Russians have been watching the puppet show and can see the strings.
Mr. Putin has delivered a rival intelligence officer a great gift: a precipitating crisis. The desire to take control over their own destiny amid crisis drives people to spy. Intelligence officers take advantage of that desire to secure an agent’s cooperation through inspiration, trust and means to make a difference. Mr. Putin’s bumbling has provided the crisis, Ukrainian courage the inspiration, and the response of the U.S. and its allies the trust and tools for Russians to strike back.
Some of the CIA’s best agents have been volunteers who finally are pushed over the edge by a life-altering event and offer their services to an intelligence service. Tolkachev, Polyakov and Kuklinski were volunteers. Thanks to Mr. Putin’s deplorable behavior, I expect an increase in Russian volunteers who have toyed with the idea of doing something to better Russia’s future and might now be receptive to an encouraging nudge.
Only weeks ago, Russians were vacationing in far-off destinations and buying imported cars and other luxury items. Today Russians are lucky if they can get to their own money (what’s left of it after the ruble’s collapse) and keep a job. Soon they may struggle to put food on the table. Weeks ago, the world trembled at Russian power. Mr. Putin is no longer the master chess player; he’s the great and powerful Wizard of Oz hiding behind a curtain.
He still could bring the world to an apocalyptic end. But his Cold War predecessors also had that power. It didn’t make Russia great in the eyes of its own people then, nor does it today.
The Soviet state indiscriminately destroyed instead of built, while the Russian elites immersed themselves in luxury as working people toiled and suffered. That drove some of Russia’s greatest patriots to step forward in the past. Mr. Putin may resurrect the Soviet empire, but he will have to contend with a new generation of patriots who will fight for Russia’s freedom and bring about his doom.
Sounds overly optimistic to me, but interesting read nonetheless.
Kim Philby, Aldrich Ames and others might also not agree.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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They're not talking. This is not good.
“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
