The presence of the dark-haired, 70-year-old FSB Colonel-General sent a strong message about the Kremlin’s true intentions in Ukraine, and marked a sharp change in fortunes for a man thrown into the infamous Lefortovo prison in 2022 amid a top-level blame game over the disastrous Ukraine invasion.
Beseda was widely blamed (not least by the Russian military) for the failure of the Kremlin’s blitzkrieg in February 2022. Until the summer 2024, he headed the Fifth Service of the FSB — officially known as the Service of Operative Information and International Ties.
This department has two main objectives: overseeing connections with foreign partners, including the Americans (which explains the “International Ties” part of its name), and safeguarding and promoting the Kremlin’s interests in countries Moscow considers particularly sensitive, including the entire former Soviet Union., by all means available – from espionage to direct political interference.
Putin granted the FSB the powers to conduct operations abroad, spying in particular on Russia’s nearest neighbors, when he was the director of the FSB, in the late 1990s.
When a series of popular uprisings known as the “color revolutions” began to overthrow pro-Russian regimes on the territory of the former Soviet Union, now-President Putin tasked the department with protecting its friends.
In a way, Putin echoed Tsar Nicholas I’s strategy of making the Russian army the “Gendarmes of Europe” in the 19th century, directing them to crush revolutionary movements across the continent, from Hungary to Poland. This time, the soldiers were replaced by chekists, led by Sergei Beseda since 2003.
Ever since, Beseda’s operatives have routinely been exposed for interfering in elections in countries like Belarus, Moldova, and Abkhazia, a breakaway region in Georgia, and most spectacularly, in Ukraine.
In April 2014 it became known that Beseda himself was in Kyiv during the Maidan revolution, when the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry sent a request to its Russian counterpart to question Beseda “within the framework of pre-trial investigation in criminal proceedings on the crimes committed during mass events in Kyiv in [that] period” — a period that included the gunning down of dozens of protesters.
Beseda was in Kyiv as the Kremlin’s fixer and adviser to the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich. Since that time, he has been on US and European Union (EU) sanctions lists. The scandal, however, didn’t harm Beseda’s standing. He retained his position, and in February 2022 it was Beseda’s department that offered Putin critically important briefings about the political situation in Ukraine that, by and large, led the Kremlin to believe the country would be easily subdued.
When the February invasion stalled, with large numbers of Russian tanks and armored vehicles burning out across the Ukrainian countryside, the finger was pointed at Beseda.
He disappeared from his office in Lubyanka and was first placed under house arrest before being transferred to Lefortovo, a move that was never publicly acknowledged but was praised by the Russian military.
But something changed. Rather than pursue the man with a reasonable claim to have made grave errors over the invasion, Putin decided Beseda had been punished enough. Why? The answer lies at the heart of the Russian regime. Everyone in a senior position is guilty of something (be it incompetence or corruption or something else) and can fall from grace in an instant. But this did not, and could not, apply to the FSB top brass during a war whose outcome would determine the regime’s survival.
The logic of Beseda’s rehabilitation was as follows: there had been no failure in the February 2022 invasion, so there was no reason to punish those who had prepared it.
The Kremlin made the point of sending that message to the media, to the Americans, but also to the Russian elites. At the end of 2022, Beseda’s son, Alexander, was made head of a crucial department at the government, which oversaw the secret services and the military.
That’s not to say that Beseda Sr. was quite the towering figure he had once been. In 2023-2024, he continued participating in sensitive conversations with the Americans, but the Americans noticed that his role was limited now to that of a postman delivering messages from those who really made FSB decisions.
In the summer of 2024, Beseda left the FSB’s Fifth Service and was made an assistant to the FSB director, a largely ceremonial position, with no clear responsibilities.
His appearance at the Riyadh talks is thus a signal to the Americans and the Ukrainians. US negotiators face a man whose presence communicates a direct and cynical message about the true Russian attitude toward elections in Ukraine — after all, Beseda has previously overseen the FSB’s interference in Ukraine’s presidential vote and possibly in the 2014 repression and violence. His agency might well expect to be part of future Russian plans to interfere in voting and to help organize other disruptions.
But Beseda’s inclusion also reflects a significant shift in the Kremlin’s handling of talks on the most important and sensitive issues.
Over the decades, Putin’s internal and foreign policies have become increasingly hybrid, with the growing role for his security services in almost every area. That became more pronounced in Russia’s international relationships after 2022. FSB generals, but also those from the SVR (external intelligence) and the GRU (military intelligence), became involved in a series of negotiations, stealing the show from an enfeebled Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
This never happened during the Cold War — Soviet leaders like Brezhnev and Andropov, not to mention Gorbachev, never made the chairman of the KGB part of their teams during talks with the Americans.
One key reason for this growth in influence was the agencies’ control of Putin’s hostage bank — foreigners held on spurious charges as currency for exchanges for Russian spies, killers and hackers convicted by the West’s independent judiciaries (think American journalist Evan Gershkovich, arrested while reporting in Russia and later swapped for the assassin Vadim Krasikov.)
Russia’s hostage policy allowed the intelligence services to emerge as a powerful communications backchannel between the United States and Russia.
Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, became involved in such negotiations with Washington for quite some time, including in 2022, when Biden’s CIA director William Burns met him in Ankara. Among the items discussed at that meeting was the issue of US prisoners in Russia.
In the summer of 2022, General Vladimir Alexeev, first deputy head of the GRU, was identified as a participant of the Russian team in the negotiations on the opening of sea corridors to ensure Ukrainian grain exports.
On March 11 this year, Naryshkin held his first phone conversation with Trump’s CIA director, John Ratliff, and the two agreed to establish regular communication to ease tensions between Moscow and Washington. The two spy agency directors also discussed collaboration between the SVR and the CIA in areas of “mutual interest and crisis management.”
Beseda’s presence in Saudi Arabia demonstrates the three Russian intelligence agencies represent a darker and increasingly powerful aspect of Russian foreign policy. While it’s still unclear what exactly the Kremlin could extract from the Americans and Ukrainians at the talks, the Russian spy agencies have already emerged as winners.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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