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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

Look at Ukraine, and how Russia flooded it with possibly 10,000+ of its spies.

You read stories of ones who were caught, and you cannot make it it up. Their main recruitment target are idiots in places of high power.

KGB recruited more agents than real spies. They had many more people doing lobbying, covert propaganda, and subversion, than peeking into Western secrets.

They really valued their high profile spies, but their influence agents — "pomogaikas" were near disposable. Finding idiots in places of power was always easier than finding smart, ideologically motivated betrayers fit for espionage assignents.

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If thats true, why has the Ukrainian gov held during the war?

I remember reading a report, I think by Bellingcat, which said that there was:

1. A lot of embezzlement by FSB agents in Ukraine, who thought they could get away with it since surely there wouldn't be an invasion.

2. Many targets would take the money, promise to help overthrow the government, and then not do anything when the time came.

I've long thought there should be a easily-discoverable, secure way to register yourself as doing (2) with the local authorities.

Take the bribe, pay the income tax, set up some email forwards, then kick back and relax...

Then these recruits aren't real assets, are they. Sounds like the FSB just engineered some money laundering from the Russian tax payer to the Ukrainian civil service.

Maybe that was the idea all along.

A bit related, few weeks into invasion a propagandist on Russian state TV was lamenting about Ukrainians being supposedly much more "nazistically" brainwashed than Russia expected them to, and as an example he told "I have a friend in Harkiv, he had been pretty pro-Russian, he sat just 6 days in the basement hiding from the bombings, and after that he completely turned around, voluntarily joined Ukrainian territorial defense force and is now running around with machine gun against us".

That comment surely had to be for show. How can someone not understand the act of defending one's home from bombings?

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