A month ago, as it was evident that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukrainian adventure started to unravel, a funny thing happened even though his fanbois were still predicting imminent victory. Sergey Beseda, head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, was rumored to have been arrested (Trouble in Paradise: Putin Arrests Senior FSB Officers Over Ukraine Fiasco). The FSB is the domestic component of the old KGB; most foreign intelligence is the province of the SVR or GRU, the sandbox of the foreign intelligence branch is the independent states that were part of the USSR.

The rumor at the time was that Putin was exercised because his invading army was not met with crowds of adoring Ukrainians who couldn’t wait for the chance to be ruled by their racially superior Slavic brethren; a shower of anti-tank missiles met it. And instead of Kiev falling in 72-hours and showing the world the invincible might of the Russian Army, the war, at the time of his arrest, had gone on for three weeks with no visible progress towards achieving any of Putin’s stated victory conditions.

As it turns out, Beseda was not the only head that rolled. The Times (London, not New York) has a major story on what happens to an intelligence agency in a totalitarian government when it f***s up: Putin ‘purges’ 150 FSB agents in response to Russia’s botched war with Ukraine.

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.

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.

…

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.

If we did this every time the CIA screws the pooch, we might have a more intelligent foreign policy, but that’s a different story.

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, the KGB’s predecessor, for interrogation and torture during Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s.

…

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.

In an article for The Moscow Times, Soldatov suggested that it was possible Beseda was suspected of having passed information to the CIA.

There is another interesting angle in the story.

Last month FSB officers also carried out searches at more than 20 addresses around Moscow of colleagues suspected of being in contact with journalists.

If you recall, in early March, there were stories about attempts made on the life of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. For instance, there is this post by my colleague Jeff Charles, Here’s How Volodymyr Zelensky Survived Three Assassination Attempts.

The report indicated that mercenaries working with the Russian-backed Wagner group and Chechen special forces were unsuccessful in their attempts to eliminate the Ukrainian president because they were thwarted by anti-war elements within the Kremlin’s Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB. “They would be going in there with a very high-profile mission, something that the Russians would want to be deniable — a decapitation of a head of state is a huge mission,” an unnamed official told The Times.

Related to the FSB purge story, there are numerous reports that long-time Putin catchfart and domestic policy guru, Vladislav Surkov, has also been arrested, apparently as a co-defendant of Beseda.

Vladislav Surkov is reportedly arrested. For years he ran Russian domestic politics and later Kremlin's policy in Ukraine. On Feb 15 he published an article calling for the war to reannex Ukraine, Belarus and Baltics. Today I'll discuss his role in Putin's rise to Presidency🧵 pic.twitter.com/PcYtE2I9Nk

— Kamil Galeev (@kamilkazani) April 12, 2022

This has all the appearances of Putin throwing into the woodchipper anyone involved with providing information that supported the decision to invade Ukraine. Is this just him releasing his inner Stalin? Or is he setting the stage for claiming that he was lied to and duped into invading Ukraine by a bunch of crooks and cut his losses (Putin Clueless and Misinformed About Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, Says US Intelligence)?