What's going on in Moscow
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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
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@Mik said in What's going on in Moscow:
They're not talking. This is not good.
I posted on the rather strange absence of the two men at the top of Russia’s military hierarchy. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov dropped out of sight on March 11. Considering Russia is at war, this seemed most odd...
I speculated earlier today that one of the reasons Shoigu and Gerasimov were refusing to talk to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley might be because they were no longer the incumbents.
Sergei Surfaces: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/russian-defence-minister-resurfaces-on-tv-but-for-just-a-few-seconds
For just a few seconds on Thursday, Sergei Shoigu was back on Russians’ television screens, sitting in the corner box of a teleconference with Vladimir Putin.
The Russian defence minister, arguably the man most responsible for the floundering war effort in Ukraine, had not been seen in public for 12 days. Nor had the chief of the general staff of Russia’s armed forces, Valery Gerasimov.
By Thursday, the matter was being brought up at a daily press call held by the Kremlin.
“The defence minister has a lot to deal with right now, as you can understand,” Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said during a briefing, denying Shoigu was ill. “A special military operation is ongoing. Certainly, now isn’t exactly the right time for media activities. This is quite understandable.”
Sensing a problem, the Kremlin promptly returned Shoigu to television. The clip released on Thursday was unusual: a security council teleconference with Vladimir Putin, where Shoigu was said to have reported “progress in the special military operation and efforts being made by the military to provide humanitarian aid, ensure security, and restore vital infrastructure on the liberated territories”.
But you wouldn’t know that because the sound was turned off. And Shoigu appeared for just seconds, as his camera was briefly unblocked to reveal him sitting in front of several Russian flags at an undisclosed location. His arm moved, proving it wasn’t just a picture of the defence minister returned to television to dispel rumours about his demise.
And then, just as quickly, he was gone again.
And some others point out that this appearance by Shoigu looks identical to his last known appearance on television.
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Putin's 'purge': Russia's top commander Valery Gerasimov 'is suspended'
Russia's top commander General Valery Gerasimov has been suspended, a top adviser to the Ukrainian president has claimed, while a clutch of other officers have been sacked or arrested amid a rumoured purge of top brass.
Oleksiy Arestovych, a veteran of military intelligence and one of President Zelensky's inner circle, claimed late Wednesday that Gerasimov - the chief of staff of the Russian army - has been suspended as Putin looks for senior commanders to blame over his blundering invasion of Ukraine.
Arestovych, speaking to dissident Russian lawyer and politician Mark Feygin on YouTube last night, said: 'According to preliminary information, Gerasimov has been de-facto suspended. They are deciding whether to give him time to fix things, or not.'
He added: 'The commander of the first tank army of the western military district Lieutenant General Sergei Kisel has also been arrested and fired after the first tank army was defeated near Kharkiv.'
Two further army commanders have been fired due to heavy battlefield losses, according to information released on a Telegram channel run by the Ukrainian interior ministry, which also claimed the commander of the Black Sea fleet has been sacked and arrested and his vice admiral has been placed under investigation.
Arestovych stressed that his information is 'preliminary', but it comes after Gerasimov failed to appear during Russia's Victory Day parade in Moscow on Monday which he was widely expected to attend. It also comes after he was reportedly wounded by shrapnel in Ukraine when Putin sent him there in order to turn the war around.
Putin's army - once championed as the world's second-best - has been handed a series of humiliating battlefield defeats in just two months of fighting in Ukraine that has seen more than 10,000 troops killed, hundreds of tanks destroyed, its Black Sea flagship sunk and Russia's international standing trashed.
Just yesterday, it was revealed that Russian troops were massacred while trying to cross a river in the Donbas after Ukraine discovered their sneak-attack and unleashed an artillery barrage that destroyed at least 58 vehicles.
Yeah, something to warm your cockles...
