{"id":63,"date":"2022-04-25T18:50:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-25T15:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/?p=63"},"modified":"2022-06-21T23:39:24","modified_gmt":"2022-06-21T20:39:24","slug":"vicious-blame-game-erupts-among-putins-security-forces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/new-nobility\/vicious-blame-game-erupts-among-putins-security-forces\/","title":{"rendered":"Vicious Blame Game Erupts Among Putin\u2019s Security Forces"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russia\u2019s army is deeply unhappy at the new and curtailed strategy Putin has ordered them to adopt in Ukraine, abandoning the big goal of capturing Kyiv for a much more modest objective of invading Donbas, in the country\u2019s east.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And they are pointing the finger at other agencies, the FSB\u2019s foreign intelligence branch primarily, for misinforming the president about the true conditions inside Ukraine that have led to failure. Other FSB departments appear to share the military\u2019s analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war in Ukraine sharply divided Russian society. As journalists, we expected to lose many of our contacts in the Russian military and secret services after the invasion began on February 24. After all, it\u2019s one thing to complain to a journalist about corruption in one\u2019s agency, and it\u2019s quite another to speak about the war with those who have taken a public antiwar stand. And indeed, in the first month of the war, some sources refused to answer our calls and messages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the situation has now changed dramatically. Last week we began to receive more and more calls and messages from our contacts in the military and in the FSB commenting on our reporting<\/a> about Sergei Beseda, one of the heads of the Fifth Service of the FSB, who gathers political intelligence on Ukraine and cultivates the pro-Kremlin opposition in Kyiv. The general was sent to the infamous Lefortovo prison in Moscow, which has had a horrible reputation since the Stalin purges \u2014 innumerable victims have been murdered in the building\u2019s basement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Kremlin has made frantic efforts to hide the details of Beseda\u2019s arrest, going as far as to change the general\u2019s name in prison records. (The Investigative Committee, Russia\u2019s main investigative authority, went so far as to deny the fact of Beseda\u2019s criminal prosecution.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell done!\u201d was a message from our old contacts in Russian Spetsnaz<\/em> (special forces in the Russian military intelligence.) \u201cAll true!\u201d we were told by our contact in the Service of Economic Security of the FSB. Videos about Beseda\u2019s plight have recorded millions of views on Russian YouTube, and were widely debated on pro-Kremlin telegram channels. The rumor mill went wild suggesting that compromising material on Beseda was provided by its rival agency, the foreign intelligence service, the SVR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does this mean that the military or the FSB has concluded that the war, with its enormous casualties and incompetent direction, was a mistake? The short answer is no, quite the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russia\u2019s military believes that limiting the war\u2019s initial goals is a serious error. They now argue that Russia is not fighting Ukraine, but NATO. Senior officers have therefore concluded that the Western alliance is fighting all out (through the supply of increasingly sophisticated weaponry) while its own forces operate under peacetime constraints like a bar on airstrikes against some key areas of Ukraine\u2019s infrastructure. In short, the military now demands all-out war, including mobilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The frustration is becoming so intense that it has spilled over into the public space.\u202fAlexander Arutyunov (aka, the blogger\u202fRAZVEDOS), a well-known veteran\u202fof Spetsnaz<\/em> of the National Guard,\u202fmade a video plea to Putin: “Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, please decide, are we fighting a war or are we masturbating?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He demanded a massive escalation, with a choice of airstrikes on\u202f Ukrainian\u202finfrastructure or an end to the war.\u202fThe video went viral, especially with pro-military groups on VK and those Telegram channels affiliated with the Russian army.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The telegram channel \u201cFighterBomber\u201d associated with the Russian air force, posted on April 12 a comment about NATO\u2019s weapon supplies to Ukraine: \u201cNaturally, we\u2019ll further increase air defense units on the border with Ukraine in order to cover our territory from ballistic missile strikes, but it is also clear that NATO countries have far more weapons than Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author expressed optimism that the Russian air force will be able to staunch the flow of Western supplies, but warned that further Ukrainian victories \u201cwill almost certainly prompt the use of nuclear weapons\u201d against targets in Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then on April 22, Russian army General Rustam Minnekaev announced a second phase of the \u201cspecial operation\u201d which would aim to \u201cestablish full control over the Donbas and Southern Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis will provide a land corridor to the Crimea, as well as influence the vital objects of the Ukrainian economy,\u201d Minnekaev said, according to Russian wire agencies. \u201cControl over the south of Ukraine is another way out to Transnistria [the Russian-garrisoned breakaway region of Moldova], where there are also facts of oppression of the Russian-speaking population.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was odd. Minnekaev is Deputy Commander of the Central Military District, and he made his remarks at the annual meeting of the Union of Defense Industries, of all places. The most plausible explanation was that having recently attended General Staff meetings, he became over-excited at what he had heard, and then revealed the news at the first public meeting thereafter. Regardless, it is a sign that the Russian army wants more war rather than less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is absent in all these discussions within the military, public or private, is any criticism towards Sergei Shoigu, the Minister of Defense, and the public face of the war. Somehow Shoigu has succeeded in keeping the respect of the military, and redirecting all the anger away from the military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Privately, the army, and even the secret services, have been heard to blame not only the Fifth Service of the FSB for misinforming the president, but also the president himself for making a bad call on changing the military strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2014, when the Russian army swiftly occupied Crimea, the military and the security services were on the same page with Putin \u2013 they fully supported his decision to annex Crimea and were enthusiastic about the way it was done. It is very significantly different in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does it matter? It matters a lot. This is the very first time the siloviki<\/em> are putting distance between themselves and the president. Which opens up all sorts of possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n

Agentura.ru 2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The security institutions, the \u2018siloviki’, that are key to propping up the regime are exchanging recriminations for a growing list of failures in the war on Ukraine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":64,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-nobility"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/90"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}