In addressing his “dear comrades” in Russia’s FSB or security service, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukraine was not only seeking a military end to the conflict, but was also “openly speaking of organizing sabotage and terrorist activities, subversion, including in Russia”. Evidence was not provided, and such assertions have only ever been backed by an ever-increasing number of arrests. Putin knows he can rely on his ‘comrades’ to come up with ‘confessions’ to such sabotage and terrorism, with Russian courts then rubberstamping the sentences demanded. As problems linked with Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea mount, it is doubtless useful to distract the population by inventing terrorist threats that the FSB is allegedly thwarting.
Russia's War Against Ukraine
OP-ED
Halya Coynash: The FSB has ways of making credibility irrelevant in Crimea
A man with his dog walks by a mural depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Crimean city of Yalta, on Sept. 19, 2015.
