Vladimir Putin is rumored to have punished several officials over theUkraine invasion.- Top officials are likely to have given Putin overly optimistic assessments, one analyst said.
President Vladimir Putin, enraged by military setbacks in Ukraine, has reportedly launched a purge of some of Russia's most powerful officials.
On Thursday, reports in Ukrainian media claimed that Putin had fired Roman Gavrilov, the deputy chief of Rosgvardia, the Russian national guard.
Rosgvardia had been deployed into Ukraine alongside the regular military and suffered heavy losses as Ukraine resisted with unexpected ferocity.
Christo Grozev, the lead Russia investigator for the outlet Bellingcat, said three sources confirmed the firing to him.
The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that Gavrilov had resigned.
—Коммерсантъ (@kommersant) March 17, 2022
One source told Bellingcat that Gavrilov was detained by the FSB's military counterintelligence department over "leaks of military info that led to loss of life," while two others say it was "wasteful squandering of fuel."
The details of top-level moves in the
But even the scant details available suggest that all is not well in Putin's inner circle.
Before Gavrilov's departure, there were reports that other senior military and intelligence officials had faced Putin's wrath over the invasion.
Andrei Soldatov, a Russian Moscow-based journalist and expert on Russian security services, tweeted last week that Putin had punished two senior FSB officials over intelligence failings in Ukraine.
Soldatov said Putin had placed its head of foreign intelligence, Sergei Beseda, under house arrest, along with Beseda's deputy.
The FSB has a special place in Putin's heart: Before taking the Russian presidency, Putin ran the agency and had a long career in its predecessor, the Soviet KGB.
—Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) March 17, 2022
Last week the head of Ukraine's security council said that Putin had fired eight generals over the invasion. Four more have been killed while fighting in Ukraine.
Although the Kremlin hasn't confirmed any internal reprisals, Putin has spoken broadly of purging Russian society of traitors.
In a menacing speech on Monday, Putin denounced "fifth columnists" and said Russia needed to undergo a cleansing.
Experts told Yahoo News that the speech resembled the words of Josef Stalin when he launched his "purges" of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, which led to show trials, executions, and mass detentions.
Philip Ingram, a former senior British military intelligence officer, told Insider that the reports on punishment of senior officials appeared plausible, but warned that Russia had a history of planting deceptive stories for its own gain.
"It's all about utilizing information in a way to try and throw people off the scent with different things and it's ingrained in everything that they do," he said.
But Ingram doesn't doubt that officials would be punished for events in Ukraine. "Russia is failing militarily and in quite a spectacular way at the moment," he said.
Ingram said that Gavrilov's reported firing could have been due to operational failings in Ukraine, where Russian advances have been hampered by logistical and planning problems.
The punishment of FSB officials, he said, could be due to intelligence agencies having given Putin an overly optimistic assessment of how easily Russia could defeat Ukraine.
"They have failed at the beginning by not giving him a real understanding of the strength of the Ukrainian armed forces and their resolve to protect their homeland," Ingram said.
"But his military forces have also been feeding false information by saying they're better than they actually are. Therefore, it's almost a perfect storm for him."
The failings have resulted in the Russian military making, at best, faltering progress in its invasion of Ukraine.
Units have bogged down and sustained high casualties in ambushes by Ukrainian armed forces, and no major city has yet been captured. So far, around 7,000 Russian troops have been killed, including top officers, US intelligence officials told The New York Times this week.
The Russian military has used increasingly brutal tactics in a bid to break the Ukrainian resistance, especially in the besieged city of Mariupol. Russian forces have launched attacks on hospitals, bomb shelters for civilians, and convoys of people trying to get away from the violence.
Ingram said that the firings could be seen as a "win at all costs" signal to Russian military commanders in Ukraine, and would likely result in escalating violence as commanders seek to avoid the fate of their predecessor.
"He is sending a very powerful message that this commander has failed. And it sends a powerful message to the new one that takes over, saying you need to get this right, and what that tends to turn into on the ground unfortunately is greater violence," Ingram said.
"We're likely to see redoubling of attacks against centers of population and potentially expanding the attacks outside the eastern part of Ukraine and the southern part of Ukraine," he said.