Russian intelligence officials must hunt down “traitors” and punish them, President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday.
“When I said about these traitors, I ask you, as it has always happened in our history, to not forget who they are, to identify them name by name,” Putin said in an address to the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. “We will punish them without time limitations, wherever they may be.”
Putin, a former KGB officer who led the FSB prior to his appointment as Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s heir apparent, addressed the board of his old agency after celebrating a victory in a purported presidential election. The tenor of the meeting was not entirely celebratory, however, as the Kremlin chief had to acknowledge an array of Ukrainian operations targeting Russian energy facilities and other targets, which he characterized as “terrorism.”
“I ask the FSB, as well as other security services and law enforcement agencies under the coordination of the National Antiterrorist Committee to significantly increase antiterror work in all directions, in lieu of the fact that our enemy is strong and dangerous,” Putin said. “Our adversary has a wide array of information, technical, and financial capabilities.”
The FSB has functioned as Putin’s dirty tricks squad throughout his rule. A series of apartment bombings across Moscow and other Russian cities in 1999 are widely believed to have been orchestrated by the FSB, in part because three FSB officers were arrested on suspicion of placing explosives in the basement of an apartment building after a local resident reported their vehicle to local authorities. The agency’s leadership claimed subsequently that “it was a security training exercise,” and the most prominent investigators of the case were murdered over the years to come.
FSB agents also were identified as the perpetrators of two separate assassination attempts that involved the use of a Novichok chemical weapon. One operation targeted the late Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who survived the attack in 2020 but died in prison last month after being jailed upon his return to Russia. The other targeted former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, whose poisoning in England in 2018 was interpreted as an act of retaliation for his previous cooperation with the United Kingdom as a military intelligence officer.
“I see that some of your colleagues are pushing the theory that Mr. Skripal was almost some kind of human rights activist,” Putin said in 2018, several months after the poisoning attack. “He was simply a spy. A traitor to the motherland. There is such a concept — a traitor to the motherland. He was one of those.”
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Anti-Putin protesters also should be regarded as “traitors,” a top Kremlin official said last week.
“This is direct assistance to those degenerates who are shelling our cities today,” Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev wrote Saturday on social media in response to demonstrations at polling stations.
