Russia’s President Vladimir Putin relied upon the information provided by incompetent FSB officers when he planned his invasion into Ukraine, according to an investigation by IStories.
Putin receives most of his knowledge about what is going on in his country and abroad from the so-called “fifth department” at the FSB, the country’s Security Service and the KGB’s successor. The fifth department is led by Sergey Beseda and is responsible for collecting information in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union.
The employees of the department, however, are known for “selling air” instead of providing reliable data and are generally incompetent.
“They would over- or misinterpret information, sometimes they would make up things completely. The senior executives used to believe all of this nonsense. For instance, they would report that the regions of Ukraine do not have any real connection with the Kyiv government and are keen on joining Russia should they have a chance to do so,” says one of the former FSB officers.
Another FSB officer who also spoke to IStories has agreed that the professional standards within the fifth department are far from perfect: “It was full of people who had no clue how the job is done. Many people refused to join the department, it is something of a morass really,” he said.
The department has failed to collect enough reliable information about what was going on in Ukraine even though they had eight years to complete the task. Their key informers were runaway Ukrainian officials who left their country for Russia between 2014 and 2022. Many of them actually took advantage of the FSB for their own ends.
“They would feed Beseda with their made-up fantasies to seem worthwhile and receive financial aid. Also, they were dreaming about returning to Ukraine, they would even plan out what positions they would take in the future. This way they adapted their stories to create a favourable picture,” another ex-FSB officer says.
Both former FSB officers and numerous western politicians point out that Putin has been living in his own world of informational isolation. He does not want to listen to any alternative opinions, while the intelligence and the security agencies are afraid of providing him with a truthful overview. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation even worse as Putin now barely meets people in person.
Vladimir Putin declared the invasion into Ukraine on 24 February. The Russian army was tasked to capture Mariupol in three days and Kyiv in five days, according to IStories. Today, on the 82nd day of the Ukraine War, the Russian army was almost pushed off to the state border in the Kharkiv region, while Kyiv, Chernihiv and other major cities are still under Ukrainian control. The Russian army suffered their heaviest losses in this war while trying to breach the river Donets in the Luhansk region recently, according to The New York Times.
