Russia vs Ukraine

This war will be a total failure, FSB whistleblower says

Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described

Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a “total failure” that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany.

A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, said that the Russian dead could already number 10,000. The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged the deaths of only 498 of its soldiers in Ukraine.
The report said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions.

The whistleblower added that no one in the government knew the true figure of the dead because “we have lost contact with major divisions”.

FSB officers had been ordered to assess the effects of western sanctions, they said, but were told that it was a hypothetical box-ticking exercise. “You have to write the analysis in a way that makes Russia the victor . . . otherwise you get questioned for not doing good work,” they wrote. “Suddenly it happens and everything comes down to your completely groundless analysis.

“[We are] acting intuitively, on emotion . . . our stakes will have to be raised ever higher with the hope that suddenly something might come through for us.
“By and large, though, Russia has no way out. There are no options for a possible victory, only defeat.”

The letter said that Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and an ally of Putin, was on the verge of outright conflict with the Russians after his “hit squad”, sent to kill President Zelensky, was destroyed by Ukrainian forces.

Even if Zelensky were killed, the report said, Russia would have no hope of occupying Ukraine. “Even with minimum resistance from the Ukrainians we’d need over 500,000 people, not including supply and logistics workers.”

The analyst said that the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was trying to “dig up dirt” to claim that Ukraine had built nuclear weapons, a pretext for a pre-emptive strike.

The 2,000-word document was published by Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist who runs the anti-corruption website Gulagu.net.

Christo Grozev, an expert on the Russian security services, said he had shown the letter to two FSB officers, both of whom had had “no doubt it was written by a colleague”.

Grozev, who reported the identities of the Salisbury poisoners with the investigative website Bellingcat in 2018, said: “Ukraine had previously leaked fake FSB letters as psy-ops.

“This letter appeared different, though. It came via a reputable source [Osechkin] and it was way longer than a forger would choose to make it.”

The FSB is led by Alexander Bortnikov, a confidant of Putin. They have known each other since the 1970s, when they both served as KGB officers in Leningrad. Bortnikov’s son, Denis, is chairman of VTB bank and is among those sanctioned by the UK.

The war, the writer said, had been given a “provisional deadline” of June because by then the Russian economy will have collapsed. “I have hardly slept at all recently, working all hours, in a brain-fog,” they wrote. “Maybe it’s from overwork, but I feel like I am in a surreal world. Pandora’s Box has been opened.”

The author said they could not rule out international conflict and that they were expecting “some f***ing adviser to convince the leadership” to send an ultimatum to the West threatening war if sanctions were not lifted.

“What if the West refuses?” they wrote. “In that instance I won’t exclude that we will be pulled into a real international conflict, just like Hitler in 1939.” Elsewhere in the letter they said: “Our position is like Germany in 1943-44 — but that’s our starting position.”
Disquiet is growing in Russia, articulated by a senator whose late husband was once a mentor to Putin.

Lyudmila Narusova, 70, was the wife of Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg, who died in mysterious circumstances in 2000 as Putin ascended to the presidency. She acknowledged the huge number of Russian casualties, saying that out of one company of 100 conscripts only four had survived.
She also confirmed that conscripts had been forced to sign contracts committing them to fight in Ukraine.

Twelve months of military service is mandatory between the ages of 18 and 27 for Russian men. The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia said last week that many soldiers had been tricked into enlisting. They had been told they were heading to the border for drills, the group said, but their contracts were changed to include conflict. Narusova said: “Yesterday conscripts were withdrawn from the warzone in Ukraine who had been forced to sign a contract. . . from a company of a hundred men only four were left alive.”

Last week she told Dozhd, an independent television channel, that dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine lay “unburied, wild, stray dogs gnawing on bodies that in some cases cannot be identified because they are burnt”. “I do not identify myself with those representatives of the state that speak out in favour of the war,” she said. “They are following orders without thinking.”