Captain of the Federal Security Service (FSO) Gleb Karakulov, who until mid-October 2022 worked as an engineer in the department that provided secret communications for Russian President Vladimir Putin, traveled abroad and condemned the war against Ukraine. File Center on Tuesday published an interview with Karakulov, in which he recounts the details of his work and his decision to leave. The dossier highlights that Karakulov has been the most senior intelligence official since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which fled the country and denounced the war. In Russia, a desertion case was brought against him.
How and why the officer fled Russia
Captain Karakulov said in an interview that the main reason for his departure was the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to a former SFO employee, he “simply could not serve this president”. He called Putin a “war criminal” and said he no longer considered it possible to be in his service.
Karakulov recounted the details of his flight. In October, he was sent on a business trip to Kazakhstan. His wife and child also came there. From there, on the last day of Karakulov’s business trip, he and his family flew to Istanbul with a service passport. He was “caught” the same evening, but he had already left Russian territory.
Palace, special train and quarantine
The officer gave a number of details about the functioning of the FSO, calling this special service “a very independent organization”. Vladimir Putin, according to him, does not use a cell phone or the Internet. “All the information he receives only comes from people who are directly close to him. He lives in a kind of information vacuum,” explains the special communications officer. He also confirmed that people who will need to be in the same room as Putin are still subject to a two-week quarantine. According to Karakulov, he does not know that the president is seriously ill.
Karakulov himself did not visit Putin’s so-called palace near Gelendzhik, but referred to one of his colleagues, who often goes there and checks the connection. He confirmed that we are talking about an object used by Putin. The officer also confirmed that Putin uses a special train.
“The president also has a chat booth that we take on every trip abroad. It’s a place from which you can conduct negotiations with guaranteed secrecy. The booth, of course, is cumbersome. It’s such a cube about 2.5m high through which you can speak without fear that the conversation could be overheard or read by foreign intelligence services,” Karakulov said. He also confirmed that Putin’s offices in St. Petersburg, Sochi and Novo-Ogaryovo are completely identical inside.
“Two Different People”
The SFO captain described Putin in 2009 and the current president of Russia as “two different people” in their behavior. “Now he is very closed. He has protected himself from the whole world with all kinds of barriers, the same quarantine, the lack of information. His perception of reality has been distorted,” he says. Most of his former SFO colleagues, in public conversations, he says, support Putin and the war. Nevertheless, Karakulov addressed them and other Russian officers with an appeal, as he put it, not to carry out criminal orders. “SFO officers are constantly around the president. You can just walk in and make it clear that this is a crime. And in your hands is the ability to stop this madness very quickly,” said Karakulov.
Representatives of the Russian authorities have not yet commented on the interview with the former FSO officer.
In March 2023 in Barnaul, the court sentenced at 6.5 in a strict regime colony of SFO Major Mikhail Zhilin, who fled to Kazakhstan because of the war with Ukraine. He worked as a shift chief in the Department of Special Communications and Information of the Federal Security Service of Russia in the Siberian Federal District, was responsible for communications of the government of Vladimir Putin with the regions and had formal access to the secrets of state, because of which it was forbidden to leave the country. In September 2022, Zhilin crossed the Russian-Kazakhstan border, was arrested, but soon released on bail. He applied for political asylum, but in December he was deported to Russia.
