The British Times: Putin carries out a Stalinist purge of the Russian security services due to the failure of his war in Ukraine

The Times reported that the Russian authorities were conducting a "Stalinist" mass purge of the Russian secret service after more than 100 agents were fired and the head of the department responsible for Ukraine was imprisoned.

The British newspaper said in

that about 150 officers of the Russian Federal Security Service "FSB" (FSB) have been dismissed, in reference to President Vladimir Putin's anger over the failures of the "invasion".

She explained that all of those ousted were employees of the Fifth Service, a division established in 1998, when Putin was director of the Federal Security Service, carrying out operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union with the aim of keeping them in Russia's orbit.

Among them is a senior officer

Among those officers is the former head of the service, Sergei Beseda, 68, who was sent to the Lefortovo prison in Moscow after he was placed under house arrest last month, and is still under investigation for embezzlement.

It is noteworthy that this prison was used by Russian intelligence for interrogation and torture during the "Great Purge" of former Soviet President Joseph Stalin in the thirties, and it is a prison run by the Federal Security Service, and it has an underground shooting range, and it has bullet holes left by those "purges" operations when It was used for mass executions.

The newspaper attributed the current "purge" to Christo Grosev, executive director of the Bellingcat Investigative Organization, which previously revealed the poisoning of two Russian prisoners in Salisbury, England, in 2018, without revealing the source of his information.

The headquarters of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in Moscow (European)

false information

Grosev said the officers were fired for "spreading false information to the Kremlin about the real situation in Ukraine before the invasion."

"I can say that even though a large number of them have not been arrested, they will no longer work for the FSB," he told a YouTube channel called "Popular Politics" dealing with current Russian affairs.

Last month, FSB agents also conducted searches at more than 20 addresses around Moscow for colleagues suspected of contacting journalists.

A powerful message from Putin

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia's security services, told The Times that by sending Beseda to Lefortovo, Putin sent a "very strong message" to other elites in Russia. "I was surprised by this, Putin could easily have fired him or sent him to a regional job in Siberia. Lefortovo is not a nice place," he said. Sending him there indicates how seriously Putin takes these things."

In the years before the invasion, the Fifth Service was active in trying to destabilize Ukraine by directing pro-Russian political figures, and trying to foment unrest among far-right groups in western Ukraine.

Grosev said he believed the Russian security services had wasted "billions of dollars" in unsuccessful attempts to secure support from Ukraine's "suspicious political class" in the run-up to the war, adding that a lot of money was spent to lure Ukrainian recruits through expensive trips to Thailand, Cyprus and the Maldives.

"It was money that was wasted," he said.