With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine turning into a fiasco, President Vladimir Putin turned the blame on his former colleagues at the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) – the main successor agency of the KGB – purging around 150 agents.
Putin also ordered the head of the FSB department responsible for Ukraine to be put in prison, Fox News reported.
According to the Times, the fired agents were from the Fifth Service, a division that Putin created in 1998 when he was director of the FSB. The division is responsible for operations in former Soviet Union nations, including Ukraine, with the goal of keeping the countries in Russia’s sphere of influence.
In March it was reported that Sergei Beseda, the ex-head of the Fifth Service, was under house arrest. He was later transferred to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, which is run by the FSB.
The arrest of Beseda sent a "very strong message" to other higher ups in Russia, according to Andrei Soldatov of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
"I was surprised by this," Soldatov told the Times. "Putin could have very easily just fired him or sent him off to some regional job in Siberia. Lefortovo is not a nice place and sending him there is a signal as to how seriously Putin takes this stuff."
He added that Beseda might have been suspected of being a CIA informant.
Beseda’s house arrest was reported by Fox News at the time as being payback for errors committed by the FSB during the early days of Russia’s Ukraine invasion.