A Russian whistleblower has described the war as a “total failure” that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany
A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, said that the Russian dead could already number 10,000. The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged the deaths of only 498 of its soldiers in Ukraine
The report said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of sanctions.
The whistleblower added that no one knew the true death toll because “we have lost contact with major divisions”
The letter said that Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and an ally of Putin, was on the verge of outright conflict with the Russians after his “hit squad”, sent to kill President Zelensky, was destroyed by Ukrainian forces
Even if Zelensky were killed, the report said, Russia would have no hope of occupying Ukraine.
“Even with minimum resistance from the Ukrainians we’d need over 500,000 people, not including supply and logistics workers”
The analyst said that the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was trying to “dig up dirt” to claim that Ukraine had built nuclear weapons, a pretext for a pre-emptive strike
The 2,000-word document was published by Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist who runs the anti-corruption website http://Gulagu.net
Christo Grozev, an expert on the Russian security services, said he had shown the letter to two FSB officers, both of whom had had “no doubt it was written by a colleague”
Elsewhere in the letter the author wrote: “Our position is like Germany in 1943-44 — but that’s our starting position”