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12 Mar 2022

‘Very difficult’ for Russian generals ‘to tell Putin something he doesn’t want to hear’, says investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov

Europe Editor and Presenter

The Russian intelligence service the FSB is a successor of the KGB, and was headed by a certain Vladimir Putin in the late 1990s.

Its remit is mainly internal, but also covers former Soviet republics, including Ukraine. Reports yesterday said the most senior officer covering areas outside Russia, and his deputy, were under house arrest, raising speculation that a blame game might be underway in Moscow.

The man who first reported the arrests was Andrei Soldatov, a journalist and author of a history of the FSB. We interviewed him and began by asking him to explain the importance of these developments.