Thread by @samagreene

Ok. Deep breath. Time for a grain or two of salt.

TL;DR: This can be real and mod quite what it seems at the same time. gov.uk/government/new…

First, I’m always skeptical of anything that comes from intelligence services, not because I think intelligence services are evil or prone to lie, but because such stories are inherently unverifiable. I don’t like data I can’t verify.

However, skepticism ≠ rejection, and unverifiable ≠ unreliable. It just means we need to ask questions.

One of the questions we need to ask is how we — and how the UK gov’t in this case — understand “Russia”, “Russian intelligence svcs” and “the Russian government”.

While most analysts I know here in London are well aware of the complexities of all of the above, Liz Truss’s statement simplifies things to a monolithic entity. That’s potentially problematic.

We know that there are competing interests within the Russian system. We also know that there are competing networks vying to wag the dog, and that has particularly been the case in Russia’s intervention in Ukraine since 2014.

Developments in Donbas since 2014 are rife with Russian intel actors and their local “friends” devising plans and trying to sell them to the Kremlin. Sometimes the Kremlin buys, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s a big part of how the system works.

That system, though, generates an awful lot of chatter — most of which is genuine, but much of which never grows legs.

In this case, it’s entirely plausible that Russian intel actors did indeed decide the plan that Truss has revealed. And yes, it would be bad if Russia tried to put that plan into action. And it’s bad that the Russian gov’t is paying people who come up with plans like this.

But we don’t know — and we can’t independently verify — whether there was ever any top-level buy-in for this plan. Without that, it may not mean very much.

If the FCDO has evidence that the communications they presumably intercepted were robust and included clear instructions from Moscow to the field, that would be meaningful in the extreme. If that’s the case, they ought to say so.

Absent that, though, I’m just not sure the evidence we have justifies the headlines we’re seeing. “Russian agents plan Kyiv coup” ≠ “Kremlin plots Ukraine putsch”.

Before I go, a disclaimer: I’m not here to say we should be ignoring what the Kremlin is doing. Even without a coup plot, Putin’s stance is threatening in the extreme and demands a response.

But just because Putin threatens a war doesn’t mean we need to deliver the fog.

*not

G’night

*devise