Fsb

Saturday

Bethany Elliott

Are the dirty tricks of Russia’s FSB getting even dirtier?

If your toilet is full of excrement that you don’t remember depositing there yourself, you may be the victim of a particularly unsanitary Russian intelligence operation. Or perhaps you’re just going mad. Or maybe that’s what they want you to think. That is the unsettling possibility confronting Finnish MPs, several of whom have, it was revealed earlier this month, reported break-ins at their homes. One found human waste in his lavatory; Ben Zyskowicz, of the country’s National Coalition party, suspects the hand – well, not quite the hand exactly – of Russian spies. At first glance, such reports could easily be attributed to Russophobia, paranoia or simply the poor state of Finnish plumbing.

fsb

Wednesday

Charlotte Hobson

Evan Gershkovich – a pawn in the complex game of hostage diplomacy

In 2017, Evan Gershkovich arrived in Moscow to work at the Moscow Times. Both his parents had emigrated from the USSR in 1979; yet once they’d met and settled in New Jersey, they were determined that their children should grow up knowing their Soviet roots. Evan and his sister Danielle – Vanya and Dusya at home – had Russian lessons every Saturday, even if they made Dusya sob. They watched Soviet cartoons and read Krylov’s fables, not Aesop’s. It wasn’t until Evan chose a career in journalism, however, that Moscow called. Russia, with its habit of newsworthiness, is the gift that keeps on giving to the international press. By 2023, he was making plans to settle permanently in Moscow. The one thing he was not intending was to become a major news story himself.

Tuesday

Charlotte Hobson

Pain passed down: a portrait of Russia and the war that dare not speak its name

Long before Asne Seierstad arrived at the bookseller’s house in Kabul, she studied in Moscow. ‘I tried to be one of them,’ she says, gently scathing of her young self. ‘In all earnest, I sought out the Russian soul.’ Decades spent writing about the post-Soviet world have stripped away her early romanticism. Her new book on Russia has an antihero as its central figure: Andrei Medvedev, a thief, alcoholic, hired thug and mercenary who fought in Ukraine then defected, escaping over the border to Norway. As she follows his story across Russia in 2023-24, encountering the full gamut of oligarchs, angels, monks and drunks, it’s Russians’ own self-image that often feels wilfully blind.

Wednesday

Mark Galeotti

The real reason for Putin’s intelligence shake-up

It has been reported this week that Vladimir Putin is shifting responsibility for covert operations in Ukraine to a different intelligence agency. The Fifth Service of the Federal Security Service (FSB) has now reportedly been usurped by ‘military intelligence’ – still widely known by its old acronym of GRU, but actually called the GU, the main directorate of the general staff. Lt Gen. Vladimir Alekseev, first deputy head of the GU, is now expected to take over Russia’s intelligence capabilities in Ukraine. To some this is evidence of inter-agency conflict and the decline of the FSB inside the Kremlin’s walls. But it is more likely that Putin is simply digging in for a long war.