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Russian military leaders reportedly described his intelligence service as "deeply incompetent" after Western investigators accused his agents of being at the origin of nerve agent poisoning in England, and said he was "in the dark." an attempt to pirate the global monitoring of chemical weapons.
In the last two weeks alone, Western investigators have discovered that Russian military intelligence agents – commonly known as GRUs – were behind the assassination attempt. former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and an attempt to access the headquarters of the Chemical Weapons Monitoring Group early in the year.
The two missions finally failed, and the investigators pointed to the GRU agents – the Russian leaders would not be happy.
The Ministry of National Defense on Saturday held a secret meeting to discuss recent reports of errors made by the GRU, and had some angry words to say, the Russian news website reported on Monday. MBK, citing an unidentified source.
MBK described the GRU as "deeply incompetent", "infinitely carefree", "morons" and people who "would still carry the budenovka", which means "to be obsolete". Budenovka was a military hat worn in the late 1910s and early 1920s, soon after the Russian tsar was deposed.
The defense leaders are also considering a "big sweep" at the GRU and are asking some of its generals to leave, MBK said.
MBK was founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a leading critic of the Kremlin.
Last month, the United Kingdom accused two Russian men of traveling to Salisbury, England, and of poisoning Skripal and his daughter with a nerve agent of military rank in March. They were also GRU agents and used pseudonyms.
Putin, whose government has long denied having knowledge of the attack, first claimed that the names of the two men – identified at the time under the names of Alexander Petrov and of Ruslan Boshirov – "do not mean anything to us", then claimed that they were civilians.
The two men also went to Russian national television to say that they only went to England to visit a cathedral.
However, the Bellingcat investigative journalism site has since identified Petrov as Dr. Alexander Mishkin, "a trained military doctor serving the GRU" and Boshirov as Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a highly decorated GRU officer.
Last week, the Netherlands also accused four Russian GRU agents of trying to launch a cyberattack against the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the watchdog of the chemical weapons in the world. At the time, the OIAC was investigating the Skripal nerve agent attack and a chemical attack that allegedly took place in Duma, Syria, where Russian planes bombed.
The two men – two technical experts and two support staff – were arrested in flagrante delicto and tried to destroy some of the equipment to conceal their actions, said the Dutch authorities.
The Netherlands then determined that they were GRU agents after discovering that one of their phones was activated near the GRU building in Moscow and discovered a receipt for a taxi ride from a nearby street from the GRU to the Moscow airport, reported the BBC.
Mark Urban, a British journalist who recently wrote a book on Skripal, wrote in Tuesday's Times: "It would be amazing that this series of compromised operations does not entail realignment in Moscow, a new confrontation between the heads of espionage.
"The GRU's taunts for its recent upheavals, both global and on Russian social media, had to be bothered." Whatever the intentions of the Salisbury operation, they could not have included the opening to the ridiculous of the decorated heroes of the agency, "Urban added, referring to the newspaper. in Chepiga and Mishkin.
Putin's popularity at home also hit a record high this year when he broke a promise made 13 years ago not to raise the national retirement age, which could mean that many Russians will miss a pension altogether.
