the times | Wednesday April 13 2022 11
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said were being held by “scoundrels”.
Mikhail Mishustin, the Russian
prime minister, said last week that his
country’s economy was facing its big-
gest challenge since the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991. Annual inflation
is expected to reach almost 24 per cent
and GDP is set to shrink by 15 per cent.
Russia has overtaken Iran as the most
sanctioned country.
However, Putin cited the success of
the Soviet space programme as an
example of Russia managing to make
huge breakthroughs under tough
conditions. “Sanctions were total, the
isolation was complete but the Soviet
Union was still first in space,” he said.
Putin said Russia would renew its
lunar programme by landing an un-
manned spacecraft on the moon by the
end of the year. The Luna 25 mission
was initially scheduled for 2016 but has
been plagued by delays. “We need to
successfully stand up to the challenges
of space exploration,” he said.
The Soviet Union sent the first satel-
lite, Sputnik, into orbit in 1957. The Sovi-
et cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the
first human to travel into space in 1961.
Putin’s visit to the Vostochny Cosmo-
drome took place on the 61st anniver-
sary of Gagarin’s flight, which is cele-
brated in Russia as Cosmonaut’s Day.
on the moon by the end of this year
“Z” symbol freshly daubed on its doors
and bonnet. An Audi with Russian flags
also featured in both events.
The news website RussianIre-
land.com reported in May last year that
the expatriates were members of the
Kosa Active Family Leisure Club and
bikers from the Kosa club, who came
together for a series of VE Day rallies.
More than a hundred cars participatedRussian expatriates in Dublin and the
country’s embassy in Ireland have
denied planning the convoy of a
hundred cars that drove through the
city in support of the invasion of
Ukraine. However, analysis of number
plates and car models has revealed that
the drivers were members of a Russian
community in the Irish capital.
The group is thought to comprise
parents, car mechanics and bikers who
take part in pro-Russian demonstrations
in Ireland every year.
Last weekend the vehicles provoked
outrage when they were seen on
Ireland’s busiest motorway, draped
in Russian flags and bearing the
“Z” symbol.
The same vehicles took part in a
“Victory Rally” through Dublin on
May 9 last year as part of a locally orga-
nised convoy to celebrate Victory Day,
which commemorates Russia’s defeat
of Nazi Germany.
Two Wanderer trucks are thought to
have been involved in both events, one
of which was seen last weekend with theCyberattack
on grid foiled
Russian hackers attempted to
carry out a cyberattack on
Ukraine’s electricity grid last week,
officials said yesterday. The
Sandworm group, which
previously had been tied to
cyberattacks attributed to Russia,
deployed data-wiping malware on
computers controlling substations,
the Computer Emergency
Response Team of Ukraine
(CERT-UA) said on its website.
“The victim organisation suffered
two waves of attacks,” it added.
Officials foiled the attack. The
statement did not say which
energy provider was targeted.
Russia has consistently denied that
it has made cyberattacks on
Ukraine. ESET, an IT security
company in Slovakia that said it
worked with CERT-UA to foil the
attack, described the malware as
an upgraded version of a malicious
program that caused power
blackouts in Kyiv in 2016. It was
designed to take over networks
and cut power supplies.Russian spy caught
Ukraine’s counterintelligence
agency says it has captured a top
Russian spy who worked in the
country’s armed forces and the
administration of Petro
Poroshenko, the former president.
The agent, codenamed Regin, is
alleged to have spied for up to
eight years. The state security
service published photos of the
suspect, surrounded by armed
officers, being held against the
wall in a flat. Several suspected
agents have been exposed by the
agency in recent weeks.Oligarchs’ art held
A painting owned by a Russian
oligarch has been seized by France
from a collection of works being
returned to Moscow after an
exhibition in Paris. The self-
portrait by Pyotr Konchalovsky is
owned by Pyotr Aven, who has
been sanctioned by the EU and
Britain because of his ties to
President Putin. A painting
suspected of belonging to
Viacheslav Kantor, another
billionaire on the sanctions list,
has been held for investigation.President critic jailed
Vladimir Kara-Murza, an
opponent of President Putin who
criticised the invasion of Ukraine,
has been jailed for 15 days for
disobeying police orders, his
lawyer said. Vadim Prokhorov said
a police report described Kara-
Murza, 40, as behaving strangely
when he found officers waiting
outside his home in Moscow
before he tried to flee. “There is an
objective to put him behind bars,”
Prokhorov said.ukraine in brief
Expats deny planning rally in Dublin
in the event, which was said to have
Garda permission.
The organiser of the rally was named
as Natalja Rudskaja, 31, a former
administrative assistant for a fitness
company, who was photographed last
year standing next to the Audi.
Rudskaja said that she had not
organised the weekend convoy but
added: “It was in support of Russian-
speaking people from different
countries. It was a peaceful rally. They
didn’t break any law, there is no law that
says you can’t put Russian flag out.” A
spokesman for the bikers at the Kosa
Club denied being part of the convoy.
The owner of one of the Wanderer
vehicles was identified by The Sun as
Yuriy Larigin, a mechanic who runs the
SPB Motors repair shop in Clane, Co
Kildare. He said that the Z had nothing
to do with Russia but was a Zorro
symbol. He also claimed that Russians
were facing discrimination and
described Ukrainian refugees as
aggressive.
The Russian embassy in Dublin said
it was not aware of the demonstration
until it was reported in the media.Charlie ParkerThe cars were draped in Russian flags
and bearing the infamous “Z” symbolF
ormed in the aftermath of
the Bolshevik revolution and
having achieved notoriety as
the KGB during the Cold
War, Russia’s spy agency has
been seen as the ruthless right hand
of the Kremlin under a succession of
leaders, from Lenin and Stalin to
President Putin.
But the war in Ukraine has exposed
divisions in Moscow’s security elite,
and the Federal Security Service (FSB)
and Putin are increasingly dissatisfied
with each other’s handling of the
conflict, according to an expert on the
Russian secret services.
Andrei Soldatov, an investigative
journalist and author of well-regarded
books on the Kremlin’s intelligence
agencies, said that while the FSB
“supports the war in general... they
do see that things aren’t going well”.
He added: “They blame bad
intelligence, and of course Putin
himself, for launching the war in the
way that he did. Now, I have a certain
feeling that the security services are
trying to put some distance between
themselves and the supreme
commander-in-chief.”
General Sergei Beseda, 68, chief of
the FSB’s Fifth Service, which is
responsible for intelligence-gathering
in the former Soviet Union, has been
sent to Lefortovo prison, a former
KGB interrogation centre in Moscow,
weeks after being placed under house
arrest, according to reports. His arrest
was originally revealed by Soldatov,
who has been reporting on the FSB
since the 1990s, when it emerged as
the main successor organisation to the
KGB, its director answering directly to
Putin himself.
Formally, Beseda, who was one of
the FSB’s top ten officials, has been
charged with corruption, but Soldatov
believes that he has been blamed by
Putin for inaccurate briefings that
suggested Ukraine would swiftlyNews
Purge of spy chief hints at
widening cracks in Kremlin
like saying you’d like to cancel winter.
They can’t conceive of themselves
without him.”
Given its links to Putin and the
KGB, the FSB has traditionally
enjoyed political clout far beyond that
of intelligence agencies in western
countries. For Soldatov the agency is
more akin to Iran’s powerful Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps than to
MI5 or the FBI, with sprawling
political powers and control over wide
sectors of the economy.
“In western societies the secret
services’ job is to gather intelligence.
In countries like Russia their main
task is the preservation of the political
regime,” he said. “Everything is looked
at through this prism.”
The title of his 2010 book The New
Nobility, written jointly with his
partner, Irina Borogan, referred to a
speech made by Nikolai Patrushev,
then the FSB’s director, in which he
described the agency as the backbone
of Russia’s political system.
However, Soldatov described a
gradual loss of influence at the FSB
and other intelligence agencies after
Putin came to believe that his spies
had failed to prevent the 2014 Maidan
revolution in Kyiv, which triggered the
annexation of Crimea and the war in
east Ukraine. “After that, Putin began
to trust the army over the FSB. He
began to believe that the army was
better at solving problems, as it did in
Syria and Ukraine.”
Over the past two decades
Soldatov’s website Agentura.ru
became widely known for its reporting
on Russia’s powerful but opaque
intelligence services. This made him
an apparent target and enemy of the
state. Soldatov and Borogan fled
Russia in 2020 after receiving an
official notification from the state
censorship agency that the editor of
their website had died. They
interpreted it as a macabre threat by
the FSB and moved to London.
For Soldatov, whose most recent
book is a history of political émigrés
and exiles from Russia, life outside his
homeland comes with a certain
piquancy. “We didn’t expect [to have
to leave Russia], but it was the only
way to keep working,” he said. “It’s
forbidden to write about this topic in
Russia now.”capitulate in the face of the invasion.
Christo Grozev, executive director
of Bellingcat, the investigative
website that unmasked the two
Salisbury poisoners in 2018 and the
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s
would-be assassins, has also reported
an FSB purge of more than 100
officers since the start of the invasion
in February.
Soldatov said the report was
credible and in line with the FSB’s
history of infighting. The service,
which is principally responsible for
domestic intelligence, is thought to
employ about 66,200 uniformed staff,
including about 4,000 special forces
troops, as well as up to 200,
border guards. Before the invasion,
the Fifth Service is believed to have
been tasked with fostering a pro-
Russian network in Ukraine to lead a
puppet administration that would
replace President Zelensky’s
government in Kyiv. The plot
crumbled when western governments
revealed what was going on.
“When one department of the FSB
gets into trouble, it starts coming
under attack from all sides,” Soldatov
said, referring to the internal purge of
officers that followed. However, he
added that many within the service
had also become frustrated with Putin
— a former KGB officer and FSB
director — as Russia’s losses mounted.
Although Moscow has made gains in
the south and east of Ukraine and is
threatening a new offensive on
Donbas, the assault on Kyiv and other
northern cities appears to have failed
spectacularly.
“Many in the FSB are very critical.
They think things should have been
handled differently,” said Soldatov,
adding that he did not believe most of
the FSB was included in the decision
to go to war. “They’re victims of
circumstance here. A decision was
made by the supreme commander,
and it was a very bad one.”
However, he said resentment of
Putin’s actions within the FSB did not
yet equate to a real threat to the
president. “They may think he is
acting strangely, but ... for many
security services officials Putin is the
only president they’ve ever known.
For them he’s almost part of nature.
Saying you’d like a new president isThe jailing of a general
and removal of officers
shows president’s fury
with his former agency,
reports Felix Light
EVGENY BIYATOV/SPUTNIK/REUTERS