The FSB agent exposing the secrets of Putin’s war from within

Deep inside Russia’s secret state an agent is working against Vladimir Putin. The FSB officer, dubbed the Wind of Change, writes regular dispatches revealing the truth about the barbarism being carried out in Russia’s name. The revelations within needed to be shared with the West. It fell to me to translate them.

In early March, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I came across a Facebook post by Russian dissident exile Vladimir Osechkin. Osechkin had received an email in Russian from, he said, a source inside Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, laying out the anger and discontent inside the agency at the invasion.

The letter was deeply intimate; the source had already been corroborated – as much as that was possible – by experienced Bellingcat investigator Christo Grozev as authentic from previous content. On 5 March, referring to the first FSB letter from Wind of Change, Grozev stated: ‘I showed the letter to two actual (current or former) FSB contacts, and they had no doubt it was written by a colleague.’