President Vladimir Putin has reportedly conducted a mass purge of 150 Russian intelligence agents, according to numerous media outlets.
The move came Monday night against agents of the FSB intelligence service — the successor to the KGB, the Daily Mail reported. Some of the officers were also arrested.
The newspaper said Putin is looking for traitors after Western intelligence agents had reportedly obtained Russia's battle plans for Ukraine before the invasion.
Col. Gen. Sergei Beseda, who was in charge of the FSB's foreign intelligence unit, has been sent to Moscow's Lefortovo prison after initially being on house arrest, the Daily Mail reported.
The 68-year-old spy chief is under investigation for embezzlement, but unofficially it is being said the Kremlin is blaming him for leaks that have stalled Russia's war effort.
And The Times of London reported the ousters are a sign Putin is furious over the failure of the invasions. All those removed worked in a division set up in 1998 when Putin served as FSB director.
"I can say that although a significant number of them have not been arrested, they will no longer work for the FSB," Christo Grozev, executive director of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organization told Popular Politics, a YouTube channel about Russian current affairs.
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services, said, in sending Beseda to Lefortovo, Putin had sent a "very strong message" to others 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."
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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