"The Washington Post" revealed this weekend the extent of the distortion of the intelligence picture provided to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the fateful days and weeks before the invasion of Ukraine.
According to the report, the central intelligence body in the country subordinate to the Kremlin, the FSB, raised a gear in regards to the attempt to set foot in the neighboring country as early as 2019, and that apparently this shows that the plan to invade Ukraine was in the works for years before the decision itself on February 24 of this year.
As mentioned, the FSB increased the collection effort towards the neighbor to the west and the number of agents entrusted with this jumped from 30 to 160 from 2019 to the summer of 2021, and in order to achieve this goal, harsh conditions and free housing were imposed for the agents to join, including by "stealing them " from other bodies within the organization.
Their ultimate goal: intelligence penetration so deep that it would be possible to "overthrow the regime in Kiev" given the order and establish a regime that would in fact be a Russian puppet.
But as mentioned, despite all these efforts, President Putin received information that did not at all correspond to the reality on the ground, which led to the fact that after six months of fighting, Ukraine was on the side with the momentum.
Among other things, the FSB managed to cultivate an extensive network of agents inside Ukraine, who even before the invasion tried to sabotage Ukraine's military preparedness, but in many cases they did not do any activity of value to the Kremlin.
A senior Russian official in the FSB, Igor Kovalenko, was so sure that the mission to overthrow the regime would succeed, to the extent that six days before the invasion he had already found a luxurious apartment in Kiev to live in to closely manage the puppet regime.
According to the report, the FSB told the assistant who located the Kiev apartment for him to pack their belongings and leave Kyiv, leaving the keys behind.
As mentioned, the ranks of the FSB were sure that they had quality intelligence that would deliver the goods to Putin, and therefore in the days before the invasion they did not bother with the intelligence mission but instead in looking for apartments for them and their assistants and prepared for "flooding Ukraine" with Russian officials who would be sent to Kiev to manage the protectorate they expected to establish.
"Good luck on the successful trip!"
said one FSB officer to another officer when he left for Ukraine to run the country.
A senior American intelligence official told the "Washington Post": "The Russians made a colossal mistake, they built an entire military array for strategic purposes that were beyond their reach."
If that's not enough, what's surprising is that the organization apparently kept to itself data that showed the war would fail, including polls it commissioned that showed the Ukrainians were determined to resist the Russian occupation and would not accept them as liberators.
"However, despite all this, the FSB continued to feed the Kremlin with rosy predictions that the masses in Ukraine would happily welcome the Russian army with bouquets of flowers," according to the Post's report based on conversations with Western intelligence sources.
The FSB even sided with a war plan based on a lightning attack on Kyiv that would overthrow the government there within a few days, and that President Volodymyr Zelensky would die or be captured, or at the very least flee abroad, and that the governmental vacuum that would be created would be filled by the FSB.
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