by Fabrizio Dragosei
Three independent sources report the news of the torpedoing of the deputy commander of Rosgwardia and former security officials of Russian heads of state
First, it fell to the intelligence services not to have given the right news about what was in store for the Russian army in Ukraine. Then to the Rosgvardia National Guard, which allegedly suffered excessive casualties and failed in their surveillance duties in the occupied locations during the so-called “Military Special Operation” in Russia. Of course, only denials came from above. But in such a way that the news being circulated by foreign-based opposition sites seems entirely plausible.
News of the torpedoing of Roman Gavrilov, deputy commander of Rosgwardia and former security officer to Russian heads of state, arrived on Thursday, after more than two FSB agents, the main successor to the KGB. The head of the Duma Communications Commission, Alexander Chinshtein, who is also deputy secretary of Putin’s United Russia party, immediately intervened. “Absolute fake,” he thundered. He then specifies that Gavrilov, with whom he spoke, resigned because he had reached the minimum 20-year service period after which he could retire.
The latest news about the war in Ukraine
That explanation seems more like an endorsement of torpedoing: let alone when, in the midst of a war, indeed a “special operation” with thousands of his men deployed across the border, a general contemplates leaving. The news was broken by Christo Grozev of international investigative site Bellingcat, who confirmed three independent sources: “He was stopped by the FSB either for leaking military information or for stealing fuel.” Already on March 11, the ax fell on the heads of two super-spies who are apparently under house arrest, as quoted by an expert on Russian military affairs, Andrei soldatov, from the information site meduza.io.
Vladimir Putin would have been furious that a wrong picture of Ukrainian reality was the cause of the invading army’s deadlock. According to various sources, the expectations at the beginning of the “Special Military Operation” were very different. In a few hours the invaded country should have collapsed and the Ukrainian military hardly had to react to the “friendly” mission of their Russian colleagues. Sergei Beseda is the head of the fifth branch of the FSB, the most important successor to the KGB. Anatoly Boljukh is or was his deputy. It would be the Department of Operational Information (Doi) created by Putin himself when he was head of the FSB in the 1990s.
Foreign espionage was already the prerogative of the SVR (former first directorate of the KGB) and the GRU, the military intelligence service. But Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted to keep his “eyes” on secret service operations in the former Soviet republics, which became independent by the end of 1991. After the so-called color revolutions earlier this century (that of the roses in Georgia, then orange in Ukraine, and tulips in Kyrgyzstan), Putin would have started to trust only the men of the FSB.
March 19, 2022 (Change March 19, 2022 | 09:57)
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