Kremlin arrests FSB chiefs in fallout from Ukraine chaos
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
See also: This war will be a total failure, FSB whistleblower says
You're going to have to post something to back up your assertion, otherwise you should not claim guesswork as fact.
The arrests were further corroborated by Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian human rights activist who also added that the FSB officers had carried out searches at over 20 addresses in Moscow of colleagues suspected to be speaking with journalists
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russian-spy-chiefs-under-hous...
It's my assumption that they are looking for leakers
they supply like 15% of wheat, 17% of barley, 17% of rye, etc, they are big but not main, and it's not like production will go to zero, and other countries could increase production to supplement them, sounds like larp
"As soon as Lenin died, it turned out that the second person in the Party, comrade Trotsky, was a traitor. Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Stalin overthrew Trotsky and banished him from the USSR.
After a couple of years it turned out that Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin were also enemies and traitors. Valorous comrade Heinrich Yagoda shot them.
A little later Yezhov shot Yagoda as an enemy agent. But after a couple of years it turned out that Yezhov was not a comrade, but simply a traitor and enemy agent. And Yezhov shot Beria.
After Stalin's death, everyone realized that Beria was also a traitor. So Zhukov overthrew and shot Beria.
Soon, Khrushchev learned that Zhukov was an enemy and a conspirator. And exiled Zhukov to the Urals.
A little later, it was revealed that Stalin was an enemy, a saboteur and a traitor. And with him, and most of the Politburo. Then Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, and the Politburo with Shepilov, who joined them, were disbanded by honest party members led by Khrushchev.
Several years passed and it turned out that Khrushchev was a voluntarist, a rogue, an venturer and a traitor. Brezhnev made Khrushchev retire.
Soon Brezhnev died, and it turned out that he was a senile, a saboteur and caused the Stagnation.
Then there were two more seniles which no one remembered because they died like flies.
Young, energetic Gorbachev came to power. And it turned out that the whole Party was a party of saboteurs and enemies, but he would fix everything now.
This is where the USSR collapsed. And Gorbachev turned out to be an enemy and a traitor."
Everyone is embezzling all the time there. It's useful to keep an eye one everyone and then selectively punish them if they do something you don't like it.
> If claims of arrest are correct, this would indicate that Putin is seriously concerned about the FSB’s role in the military campaign
Well Putin is FSB (ex-KGB) so he likely relied on his FSB buddies to set up a number of false flag operations in order to provide a cover for the invasion. Those are have been exposed and failed. Now Putin is looking more "naked" than he planned when invading and ruthlessly bombing civilians.
Some trucks headed to Kiev had riot police gear in them. FSB likely thought people in Kiev would meet them with flowers, salt and bread, and it would be only some rowdy trouble-makers which the riot police would take care of. In other words it was supposed to be a 3 day blitzkrieg followed by police work later. They were wrong.
To expand this a bit, Putin is both ex-KGB (left in 1991 to go into politics) and ex-FSB (he was the head of FSB before he was appointed Prime Minister.)
In his eyes, both FSB and the Army could do no wrong. And I think he may be realizing the "yes" men he surrounded himself from both of those agencies have been lying to him for years about the state of readiness, capabilities, and ability of those agencies.
Now will some of them try to sprinkle some Polonium-210 in his tea? At first I thought it was plausible, but now I don't know. They've been there for so long kissing each others asses killing Putin would be the end of them as well. But, somehow, I see the GRU doing it. They've been more of a wildcard in the past. At some point their children won't be able to get the diabetes or other medicine and they might start thinking thoughts like that.
Imo, Putin is more analogous to GW Bush with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you make a claim for how Putin is worse than even Bush in this regard?
They have zero seats in parliament and no political influence.
No one is saying nazis aren't bad. But so long as they're killing invaders, it's an acceptable evil.
This is not to mention C14 or the свобода (Svoboda) political party aside from the Azov battalion. They have an outsized influence in Ukrainian politics. This is one of the main reasons why they won't concede on NATO membership to end the war, US interests aside.
I think this neglects that:
(1) Putin has painted himself into a corner from which there is no way to back down and save face, period.
(2) The most likely reason for this is that his entire regime is dysfunctional because he has already gone crazy, specifically in a way repeatedly seen in authoritarian rulers where paranoia over disloyalty results in punishing unwelcome news harshly as disloyalty, punishing welcome news that turns out to be inaccurate later harshly as disloyalty, punishing excessive visible success which leads to others achieving a personal following as disloyalty, an punishing failure as disloyalty.
That ship has sailed. He was given multiple opportunities and picked up none.
Also,
> You will hang because you failed to tell me what I needed to hear.
I worry that anyone w/ the will & the means to assassinate Putin would likely be a power hungry would-be dictator making an aggressive play to replace him. Things could shake out better in the chaos, but they could just as likely go worse
(In Finish but with english subtitles)
I’m kidding?
I guess you might say that Russians are kind of collective anarchists. Principled— I mean fairly not based on ethnohistorical pride like say the occasional defiance of the Chinese.
Life is not cheap, only too willing to pay the price. Vodka loosens up the psychic joints..
Here, to the defiance of the soi disant curious of the orange site )
By the time their revolution came, it wasn't democracy that was trendy, but communism. This was bad luck for Russia, and partially happened due to Germany helping the communists prior to the revolt. The communist leadership took things in a pretty wretched direction and Russia was stuck with it for a while. To make sure further revolutions would not happen, Stalin did his famous purge of russian leadership, which crippled them prior to world war 2.
Post soviet russia wasn't very good at democracy, the nation had been run by crooks and murderers for decades. Naturally, a soviet figure was able to take advantage of things. This was bad luck in part, but also not terribly unlikely.
It's not exactly a tendency so much as that it's really hard to get to democracy from a non-democracy, and russia's handful of chances were characterized by some crazy autocrats being at hand to take things over at the right time