Did Putin Purge FSB Agents to Prevent a Coup? – Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly removed more than 100 agents from the Federal Security Bureau of Russia – the intelligence agency that replaced the KGB – and even sent one official to prison.
Sergei Beseda, formerly the head of the Russian Fifth Service who was placed under house arrest last month, has been moved to the Lefortovo prison in Moscow, according to a report from The Times.
The news comes after reports of increased interest in a possible coup against the Russian president.
Why Putin Did It
According to Britain’s Times newspaper, around 150 FSB officers from the Fifth Service – a division set up by Putin in 1998 to oversee operations in former Soviet states – were dismissed from their roles in recent days.
Andrew Soldatov from the Center for European Policy Analysis told The Times that it sent a “very strong message” to other elites in Russia that Vladimir Putin takes the invasion of Ukraine seriously and is happy to exercise his power.
Referencing the imprisonment of Sergei Beseda, Soldatov said he was “surprised.”
“Putin could have very easily just fired him or sent him off to come 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,” he said.
Is Putin Trying to Prevent a Coup?
Talk of a coup against the Russian president has been around since the invasion began on February 24, and some Russia experts even believed that the chances of a coup were significantly higher as a result of the Kremlin’s military offensive.
Adam Casey of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan told Insider in early March that the chances of a coup were “a lot higher” than they were a month earlier, but that the chances of a coup successfully taking place are slim.
In a piece published by Foreign Policy, Casey also explained how Putin had effectively coup-proofed his administration, and that talk of a coup would be swiftly dealt with by the Kremlin.
“Shortly after Putin came to power, the Federal Security Service (FSB) strengthened the extensive military counterintelligence presence of its KGB predecessor. Counterintelligence officers in the FSB are embedded directly in the Russian military to monitor the armed forces. When Putin ran the FSB, he referred to the counterintelligence department as a ‘mini-FSB,’” Casey explained.
Could Putin’s sudden decision to punish former FSB officers this harshly be designed to prevent officials from considering a coup, or even a response to talk of a coup among Kremlin staff?
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
