4.11.22
Colonel General Sergei Beseda, head of the Fifth Service of the FSB, is being held in Lefortovo prison. Beseda was placed under under house arrest in March. Rumor had it that Beseda fell out with Putin – it was his Fifth Service of the FSB which was largely in charge of providing intelligence about the political situation in Ukraine and, more importantly, for cultivating political support for the Kremlin in Ukraine. The FSB tried to downplay Beseda’s arrest, presenting it as a mere questioning of the powerful general. But now I’ve learned from my sources that this “mere questioning” didn’t save Beseda from a cell in Lefortovo Prison. This is a good indicator of how the relationship between Putin and his beloved secret services had changed by the second month of the war. The Fifth Service is the only department in Lubyanka that was created by Putin when he was director of the FSB. In 1998 Putin established a tiny directorate to supervise regional sections in charge of recruiting foreign nationals and gave the directorate a large mandate to spy in the former Soviet Union. In twenty years, it became the powerful Fifth Service, Putin’s chosen weapon to keep former Soviet countries in the Russian orbit. And it was run by one of Putin’s most trusted generals at Lubyanka, Sergei Beseda.
The work of the department, later made into the Fifth Service of the FSB, was actually nothing but a series of diplomatic disasters. Beseda’s officers were caught red-handed everywhere, from Abkhazia to Moldova to Ukraine, where Beseda himself was present during the Maidan revolution. But Putin kept Beseda around — until this war. There are several explanations for why Putin decided to throw Beseda under the bus now. Some say it’s due to the bad intelligence before the war. But inside the FSB most sources seem to think it was his failure to create and fund a pro-Kremlin opposition to Kyiv’s regime. In any case, that is being used in the official line of investigation, according to sources. Many people in Moscow and the Kremlin have been asking themselves why U.S. intelligence before the war was so accurate. This might have added more to the already existing climate of paranoia. In 2022, Putin is once again in a paranoid and angry mood, and Sergei Beseda is already in Lefortovo.
