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The Times

Apr 11 • 10 tweets • 3 min read

🔺 NEW: A “Stalinist” mass purge of Russian secret intelligence is under way after more than 100 agents were removed from their jobs and the head of the department responsible for Ukraine was sent to prison thetimes.co.uk/article/putin-…

In a sign of President Putin’s fury over the failures of the invasion, about 150 Federal Security Bureau (FSB) officers have been dismissed, including some who have been arrested

All of those ousted were employees of the Fifth Service, a division set up in 1998, when Putin was director of the FSB, to carry out operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union with the aim of keeping them within Russia’s orbit

The service’s former chief, Sergei Beseda, 68, has been sent to Lefortovo prison in Moscow after he was placed under house arrest last month.

The prison was used by the NKVD for interrogation and torture during Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s thetimes.co.uk/article/kremli…

The FSB purge was reported by Christo Grozev, executive director of Bellingcat, the investigative organisation that unmasked the two Salisbury poisoners in 2018. He did not reveal the source of his information thetimes.co.uk/article/bellin…

Beseda, who remains under investigation, is being held on the official charge of embezzlement.

In reality, however, the basis for his arrest is the botched invasion, which has been blamed on poor intelligence concerning the political situation in Ukraine

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services, said that in sending Beseda to Lefortovo, Putin had sent a “very strong message” to other elites in Russia

“I was surprised by this,” he 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”

Lefortovo, which is an FSB-run prison, has an underground shooting range with bullet holes left over from Stalin’s purges, when the room was used for mass executions

Read the full story here: thetimes.co.uk/article/putin-…

@rogerboyes

The FSB purge is exactly what, diplomatic editor, @rogerboyes told us would happen in this #storiesofourtimes podcast

pod.fo/e/1196b3

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