The ousted agents belonged to the Fifth Service. Which is a division that Putin set up when he directed the FSB in 1998. The agency’s directive was to carry out operations in countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. And the goal was to keep those countries in Russia’s orbit.
Last month he placed Sergei Beseda, the former head of the Fifth Service, under house arrest. And he has been transferred to Lefortovo prison in Moscow.
Lefortovo is the worst prison in Russia. It was used as a place for interrogations and torture during Stalin’s 1930s Great Purge.
Putin’s imprisonment of Beseda sent a “very strong message” to other government elites in Russia, Andrei Soldatov, an expert with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), said in an interview.
Beseda’s arrest initially seemed like retaliation for intelligence errors in Ukraine.
“I was surprised by this,” Soldatov said. “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.”
