This piece from the BBC that suggests Putin is looking for people to blame for the failure in Ukraine.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-60685883?ns_mchannel=social&ns_source=twitter&ns_campaign=bbc_live&ns_linkname=622b9f46980bea49f4b7c173&Fallout for Russia's spies?&2022-03-11T20:18:44.120Z&ns_fee=0&pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:b67cbcdd-a5ea-4293-bd0a-70f1076702ba&pinned_post_asset_id=622b9f46980bea49f4b7c173&pinned_post_type=share
Text:
SHAREDFallout for Russia's spies?
Gordon Corera
Security correspondent
The fallout from the failure of Russia’s plans may be hitting its spy agencies.
Reports – still unconfirmed – say two senior officials from the FSB – Russia’s Security Service – have been placed under house arrest.
One of them, it is said, is Sergey Beseda – the head of the 5th Service of the FSB. This department is responsible for intelligence gathering and operations in Ukraine. His team is thought to have been behind plans to install a pro-Moscow government in some kind of coup and may be blamed for the failure to understand the level of opposition in the country.
"It seems that after two weeks of war, Putin finally realised that he was simply misled: the 5th Service, afraid of infuriating the leader, simply supplied him with what he himself wanted to hear," said Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two leading experts on Russia’s spy agencies, who first reported that the arrests may have taken place.
The department was also thought to have been building networks of undercover agents ready to be activated when the invasion started. But either they did not exist as promised or failed to have the desired impact.
If the reports of arrest are confirmed, they could be because someone needs to take the fall for the failures or because of some other manoeuvrings.
“If claims of their arrest are correct, this would indicate that Putin is seriously concerned about the FSB’s role in the military campaign and there could be significant changes at senior levels in the FSB,” one Western official said.
A number of supposed letters from anonymous insiders at the FSB have also been circulating on social media painting a bleak picture inside Russian intelligence – these have also not been confirmed but experts think they sound plausible.
And the extent to which the West has been able to gather its own intelligence on Moscow’s plans will also have set alarm bells ringing – leading to fears in Moscow that they might have Western moles inside their ranks or that their communications are being intercepted.
Add to that the fact that Putin very publicly humiliated the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, on the eve of the invasion and you get a sense that beneath the surface of the normally hidden world of Russia’s spies, these are deeply unsettling times.
