Putin’s biggest problem: his own secret service, Fukushima’s cooling water, may soon be discharged into the sea

In December 1917, Vladimir Lenin commissioned the creation of the Cheka, a secret police force that soon became notorious for pursuing and killing all enemies of the Bolsheviks with unrelenting brutality. Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, took it a step further with the NKVD. The misdeeds of Stalin’s accomplices can rightly be compared to the atrocities of Hitler’s Waffen-SS.

After the war, the Russian secret service was renamed the KGB. Compared to its predecessors, the members were downright civilized. In our country, the KGB was best known for its spies during the Cold War – and as an opponent of James Bond. A certain Vladimir Putin was also known as a KGB agent, stationed in Dresden in what was then East Germany.

Why were the secret services so ill-prepared?

Today there are several secret services in Russia: the FSB is responsible for internal security, similar to the FBI in the US. The SVR spies abroad, similar to the CIA, and the GRU is the military’s intelligence agency. Putin is by no means lacking in ‘Chekists’, as the members of the secret service are still often called today. But can he still trust them?

Probably not, that is the statement of Andrei Soldierov and Irina Borogan in “Foreign Affairs”. The two state:

Although Prigozchin’s operetta coup was quickly put down, how the Wagner boss is handled is still a mystery. He is presented and ridiculed on state television. “He is humiliated,” writes Tatiana Stanavaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in the Financial Times. “Apparently it was decided to finish Prigozhin as a politician. But they still don’t know how to treat him as a businessman.”

Special units of the National Guard even stormed Prigozhin’s villa in St. Petersburg. Photos of the unspeakably tastelessly decorated chic castle were published. At the same time, Wagner’s boss is said to have received back the confiscated money and gold bars.

It is also unclear whether Prigozhin is currently in Saint Petersburg or in Belarus. The Kremlin is clearly disinterested. The government has “neither the resources nor the interest to continue Prigozhin’s steps,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Meanwhile, Alexander Lukashenko contradicts the widely held belief that Prigozhin feared for his life. “Whoever thinks that Putin is so evil and vindictive that Prigozhin will soon be killed is wrong. That is not going to happen,” the president of Belarus said on Thursday. He arranged the deal between the Wagner leader and the Kremlin.

How to explain the Kremlin’s strange reaction? According to Soldierov and Borogan, the key to this mystery lies with the intelligence services. Shortly before his march to Moscow, Prigozhin met with Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, deputy defense minister, and Vladimir Alekseyev, deputy head of the GRU, in Rostov.

Both apparently agreed with the Wagner leader’s statement that the real reason for the disappointing results in Ukraine so far lies with the military leadership. Prigozhin had therefore repeatedly demanded the resignation of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. “You can have them,” Alekseyev is said to have laughed.

Soldierov/Borogan conclude that Putin now faces a dilemma. The problem is not so much Prigozhin’s operetta coup, but the response of the army and the secret services. “Now he has to find a way to deal with the failure of reconnaissance and security without creating new insecurities about how firmly he is still in the saddle,” says Soltov/Borogan. “Unlike previous crises, however, he may no longer be able to rely on his security services.”

Putin’s dilemma could also explain why the secret service chiefs have so far not been held accountable, even if they have not just failed pre-emptively. When Prigozhin began his advance on Moscow, they holed up in their headquarters and went into hiding.

The strange way Prigozhin was treated, the strange statements by Lukashenko and the strange leniency towards the heads of the secret service: all this suggests that Putin is no longer a guarantee of stability. Or as Abbas Gallyamov, an analyst and former Putin speechwriter, put it in the Financial Times: “The system is currently so weak that even the smallest shocks can have fatal consequences.”