Vladimir Putin purged 150 FSB spies after the failure of the seizure of Kiev during the invasion of Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin purged more than 150 agents from the Federal Security Office (FSB), the KGB's successor intelligence agency, and sent the head of the department responsible for Ukraine to prison.

In a sign of the Russian president's fury over the failure of the invasion, some 150 officers of the Federal Security Office (FSB) have been fired, including some who have been arrested, according to the British newspaper The Times on Monday.

The expelled agents belonged to the Fifth Service, a division that Putin — then director of the FSB — created in 1998 to carry out operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union, with the aim of keeping those countries in the orbit of Russia.

Authorities placed Sergei Beseda, former head of the Fifth Service, under house arrest last month. He has since been transferred to the FSB-administered Lefortovo prison in Moscow, The Times reported. The NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, used the prison for interrogation and torture during Stalin's Great Purge in the 1930s.

The purge was reported by Christo Grozev, executive director of Bellingcat, the research organization specializing in Military Intelligence.

The officer had been fired for “reporting false information to the Kremlin about the real situation in Ukraine prior to the invasion,” he said.

“I can say that, although a significant number of them have not been arrested, they will no longer work for the FSB,” Grozev told Popular Politics, a YouTube channel about Russian news.

Beseda, who is still under investigation, is being held on official charges of embezzlement. In reality, however, the basis of his arrest is the failed invasion, which has been blamed on bad information about the political situation in Ukraine.

He is believed to have been replaced by his deputy, Grigory Grishaev, 58.

According to Andrei Soldatov, an expert from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Putin's purge seeks to send a “very strong message” to other elites in Russia.

“I was surprised by this,” Soldatov told The Times. “Putin could have fired him very easily or sent him to some regional work in Siberia. Lefortovo is not a pleasant place and sending him there is a sign of how seriously Putin takes these things.”

Soldatov said that the Fifth Service represents “the most sensitive department of the FSB department, which is in charge of espionage in Ukraine. And now it seems that Vladimir Putin finally understood that the intelligence he was given before the invasion was not extremely accurate. And he's started looking around him trying to find someone to blame.”

Soldatov also suggested that Russian authorities may suspect that Beseda passed information to the CIA, the US intelligence agency.

Before taking over the Fifth Service, Beseda worked in counterintelligence, a role that involved a close liaison with the CIA station in Moscow. If it were a double agent, it would explain the Kremlin's suspicions about how American intelligence had been so precise in preparing for the invasion.

Soldatov said he didn't think Beseda was a double agent, but said it was convenient for Putin's purposes to suggest it.

“It's good to be able to blame a traitor. It's a very Russian thing,” he said.

In the years leading up to the invasion, the Fifth Service had been active in trying to destabilize Ukraine by supporting pro-Russian political figures and attempts to foster unrest among far-right groups in western Ukraine.

Grozev said he believed that Russian security services had wasted “billions of dollars” on failed attempts to secure support from the “shady political class” in Ukraine in the run-up to the war.

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