With such sloppy tradecraft, did the spy believe he was contending with formidable Russia or just some local militias?
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
It would seem that the Ukrainian government does not believe in its own propaganda that it peddles about Russian soldiers constantly being in the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. At least if you go by the revelations of one of their spies recently caught by the FSB while apparently vacationing in Russia.
The spy, Artem Shestakov, was embedded within the OSCE Monitoring Mission to Ukraine as an interpreter. But his tradecraft, it turns out, was so appallingly amateurish that the only possible explanation for it is that Kiev always knew that it was dealing with local militias in the east of the country rather than professional Russian regulars.
How else can one explain the use of unencrypted plain text reports, as well as communicating his spying observations by common email to his SBU (Ukrainian Security Service) superior - and then not even deleting that?
Either Ukrainian intelligence are unbelievably incompetent or they don’t believe they’re dealing with a professional, sophisticated enemy as would be the case if Russian regulars were the ones fighting in the separatist republics.
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
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