Just flaming coincidences in Russia?
27 April 2022 (Berlin, Germany) – Fires, explosions, train derailments, dead executives and oligarchs: there’s a lot of weird stuff happening in Russia lately. Just a few points I am working on, more detail to come:
• Earlier this week, two major oil depots went up in flames in the city of Bryansk (photo above), a major support hub for Russian forces just a few hours north of the Ukrainian border by car. Russia is investigating, but military analysts say the blaze looks like the result of sabotage or an attack by Ukraine.
• Just three days earlier, a locomotive derailed while traveling along a nearby stretch of rail used to supply the Russian army. As I noted in a previous post, Belarusian railway workers have helped thwart Russia’s attack on Kyiv and are part of a clandestine network of railway workers, hackers and dissident security forces in Belarusian and Russia that have wreaked havoc on supply lines.
• That, meanwhile, happened on the same day that fires erupted at a major defense research institute and a chemical plant, both within 100 miles of Moscow. The research institute blaze, which was blamed on faulty wiring, claimed half a dozen lives. Fires in Russia’s poorly maintained Soviet-era buildings aren’t uncommon, but the chattering has begun: were these Ukrainian operations? Sabotage by disgruntled employees? False flag “attacks” staged to rally opinion against Ukraine?
• Meanwhile, another oddity: Russian executives turning up dead in apparent murder-suicides with their families. That fate recently befell former executives from energy giant Gazprombank and Novatek, Russia’s largest independent gas producer. Their deaths are among a number of high-profile oligarch deaths in recent weeks.
Military analysts I have spoke with have said U.S. intelligence is clearly at work in Ukraine, as in the case earlier this week when they helped Ukraine protect air defenses which shot down a Russian plane carrying hundreds of troops. Ukrainian forces have used specific coordinates shared by the U.S. to direct fire on Russian positions and aircraft. As Russia launched its invasion, the U.S. gave Ukrainian forces detailed intelligence about exactly when and where Russian missiles and bombs were intended to strike, prompting Ukraine to move air defenses and aircraft out of harm’s way. It was part of what American officials call a massive and unprecedented intelligence-sharing operation with a non-NATO partner that they say has played a crucial role in Ukraine’s success to date against the larger and better-equipped Russian military. This is a murky area which I will address is an upcoming post.
Inside Russia, we do know there is dissent among serving and retired Russian military officers and intelligence officers, some of whom declared the Ukraine War as “pointless and extremely dangerous”. And we know from disclosures that the slow going and the heavy toll of the war exposes the military’s poor planning capability, and the quality of the intelligence that reaches Putin – perhaps deliberately by those against the war. The failures in Ukraine have started to create fissures within Russian leadership, according to Andrei Soldatov.
NOTE: Soldatov and his partner Irina Borogan wrote “The RedWeb” which examines the history of surveillance technologies in Russia from the beginnings of the internet to the Internet age. I met Soldatov during my research on Russia’s authoritarian control over information and its distribution, and the legacy of this mindset as it reverberates in the Russia in the Internet age.
Andrei Soldatov has written extensively about the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the perspective of the cyber elements of the conflict, the history of Russian military operations, and Russian intelligence throughout the invasion.
Right now I am on a train back to Poland to meet with my Ukraine War team. I will write in more detail about the reports of purges within the security services after Russian diplomatic and military failures in Ukraine, plus the possible reasons for Vladimir Putin’s turn against his intelligence agencies, and the increasing power of the military in Russia.