Thanks to its secret services, Moscow would have already drawn up lists of people to be placed in detention or to be assassinated, in the event of the occupation of Ukraine. This is what the United States asserts in a letter sent in mid-February to Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In this text, unveiled by the New York TimesWashington explains that it relies on “credible information”.
While the hypothesis of an invasion is growing every day, the Russian secret services are already operating across Ukraine and are preparing to sow chaos there in order to prepare the ground for an occupation. The American authorities are not the only ones to be convinced of this: a report by London think tank Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI) is also alarmed by the resurgence of activity on Ukrainian soil by agents of Vladimir Putin – himself a former spy -, as officers stationed in Kiev have assured him.
Ukrainian intelligence claims that the team dedicated to the collection of operational information in Ukraine within the FSB (the heir office of the KGB, the political police of the USSR) has increased tenfold, to “about 200 agents”. The RUSI report specifies that their mission consisted, in particular, in establishing a register of people likely to help them govern in the event of occupation. But also a “list of people most hostile to Russia, who could organize the resistance”.
The suspicions of the Ukrainian services as to possible operations on their soil were confirmed by the holding of simulation exercises, in December, by the FSB team dedicated to this zone, “with the direction of the Russian airborne troops”. The RUSI specifies that these paratroopers and the Russian special forces “would form the vanguard of an invasion”. Objective: “to secure critical infrastructure, government buildings and locate and eliminate Ukrainian leaders who join the resistance.”
Moscow would not be in its first operation of its kind. “The war in Afghanistan thus began on December 27, 1979, with an operation mounted by the KGB, baptized ‘Chtorm-333’, with the storming of official buildings in Kabul by the Spetsnaz (special forces) and the physical elimination of President Hafizullah Amin, recalls historian Andrei Kozovoi, author of the book The Russian Secret Service: From Czars to Putin (Tallandier). The difference today is that the Kremlin no longer has the element of surprise.”
Kiev on high alert
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) is indeed preparing for such attacks. “Ukrainians are not naive and are on high alert to protect political and military figures, argues Joseph Henrotin, researcher at the Institute of Comparative Strategy and editor of the journal Defense and international security (ISD). The Russians’ task would not be easy. Kiev knows perfectly well that clandestine action in foreign lands is part of Russia’s strategic culture, as the poisonings in the United Kingdom of defectors Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko reminded us.
The RUSI report confirms that “senior Ukrainian officials […] anticipate a strategy of decapitation against them”, as well as a “physical sabotage and cyber-attack” against national infrastructures – telecommunications, public services, electricity. “Sleeper cells can sow chaos to disorient and paralyze the state and Ukrainian society, allow the Russian military to advance faster and pressure the government to compromise,” said Katarzyna Zysk, a professor at the Norwegian Institute of Defense Studies.
Again, Moscow has a long tradition of preparing for such subversive actions in enemy territory. “Oleg Lianin, a London-based KGB agent who defected in 1971, was investigating ways to disrupt British society, including poisoning water systems, killing politicians and flooding the London Underground,” recalls Andrei Kozovoi. There were such agents in every major city in the West.”
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