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A Russian military convoy that was outside of Ivankiv, Ukraine, on Sunday has since made it to the outskirts of Kyiv, satellite images show.On Sunday, the convoy was roughly 40 miles northwest of the Ukrainian capital, according to images provided by Maxar Technologies.Maxar said that roughly 17 miles of roadway is chocked full of the convoy, which consists of armored vehicles, tanks, towed artillery and other logistical vehicles. The private US company said the convoy was located on the T-1011 highway at Antonov air base around 11:11 a.m local time.Antonov is roughly 17 miles from the center of the Ukrainian...

The Russian regime is tyrannical, criminal, murderous, and every bit as paranoid and predatory as its predecessor, the Soviet Union. It thinks the West duplicitous, arrogant and greedy and it wants our secrets, whether military, business or political. To get them it uses an underground army of spies based here, whose most potent weapon is their ordinariness. They are the kind of people you might meet at the school gates, work alongside in an office or see mowing the lawn next door, stealthily penetrating our society. That Russia runs such agents in the U.S., Britain and Europe (and elsewhere) should...

Twenty-first-century Russia may look like a liberal democracy, with elections, law courts and parliament. In truth there are two parallel states. One is for show. The other is almost completely corrupt, with part of it run by a clique of secret servicemen who owe their allegiance ultimately to the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and the small group of former KGB thugs who surround him. Stay in with them, and you stay safe. Fail to pay your dues, and you risk personal destruction. ....the so-called siloviki, the strongmen who control modern Russia, with a career background in the intelligence or security...

Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, met top Russian officials in Moscow yesterday in an effort to reassure them that the company’s commitment to Russia, the source of a quarter of its oil production, was undiminished after the catastrophic oil spill in the US Gulf of Mexico. The question of Mr Hayward’s future was never very far from people’s minds, however, and in a mysterious slip up, Igor Sechin, deputy prime minister, appeared to raise the issue in press comments before the meeting. Mr Sechin, who oversees energy policy, was quoted by several Russian news agencies as saying “Hayward is leaving...

AN EX-KGB spymaster who subjected the British secret service to its worst embarrassment since the Cold War is the right-hand man of Lord Mandelson's controversial Russian friend Oleg Deripaska, the Evening Standard discloses today. Valery Pechenkin was a high-ranking officer in the KGB and a Colonel-General in its successor, the FSB. He is employed as head of security at Deripaska's company Basic Element, but the part he plays in Deripaska's affairs goes far beyond the role suggested by his job title. According to well-placed sources in Moscow, Pechenkin is one of Deripaska's strongest links to the Kremlin. The veteran spy...

Russian Vice Premier Igor Sechin reached out to OPEC late Tuesday, calling for greater cooperation between the cartel and his country, the world's second biggest oil producer. Sechin, who is chairman of Russia's biggest Russian oil group Rosneft, said a "draft memorandum of understanding" had been submitted to the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries on closer cooperation between Russia and the group

Gerry Adams famously said about the IRA that "they never went away, you know", and researching the current BBC World Service series, After the KGB, left me with a very similar impression. As the BBC's Moscow correspondent in the late 1980s and early to mid-90s, I witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the outpouring of popular hatred for the regime's notorious secret police. I was in Lubyanka Square in front of the KGB's headquarters on 22 August 1991, as demonstrators toppled the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the organisation's founder. When a hawser was tied round Dzerzhinsky's neck and...

It was a typical December night in Moscow. The cold was biting, the snow thick and dry. In the Federal Security Service's headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, hundreds of intelligence officers met as they did every year to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. Champagne glasses tinkled as the officers spoke in jubilant tones. Classical music played softly in the background. The hall grew quiet as Vladimir Putin -- the former FSB director who had been appointed prime minister a few months earlier -- stood to speak. "Dear comrades," Putin said. "I would like to announce to...

October 15, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- No one knows how many people were working for or with the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. That information was never revealed in a country where even rudimentary lustration never got off the ground. Journalist Yevgenia Albats, in her 1992 book "A State Within A State," estimates that 720,000 people actively worked for the agency (across the entire Soviet Union) and some 2.9 million "cooperated" with it. To a large and, perhaps ultimately, unknowable extent, many of these people now rule Russia and seem well on the way to building an undemocratic...

Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin...

Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent who rose to become president of Russia, has recently been a whirlwind of activity. In the last few weeks he has reshuffled his Cabinet, wooed the new German chancellor (and current European Union president), Angela Merkel, denounced the United States at an East-West security conference in Germany, and visited Saudi Arabia and the Gulf state of Qatar for quasi-secret talks on energy. All of these events reflect in different ways the recent revival of Russia as an important power whose interests other nations must now consider. They also reflect the internal success of Putin...

MOSCOW -- The appointment of a former KGB agent to a top post at Russian energy giant OAO Gazprom this week highlights the growing roles former spies have in the country's business world, analysts say. "Since 2003, there has been a tendency of placing former KGB people in the economy," said Olga Krishtanovskaya, who heads up a study centre on Russia's elites at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Valery Golubyev, who was promoted to become Gazprom's deputy chief executive officer on Wednesday, is one of three out of the 17 members of the management board of the state-controlled...

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's defense minister has revealed that two senior Kremlin officials served in military intelligence - underscoring the clout of security service veterans in the administration of President Vladimir Putin. Sergei Ivanov said that Putin's envoy to southern Russia, Dmitry Kozak, and a deputy Kremlin chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, are both veterans of the Russian military General Staff's Main Intelligence Directorate, known by its Russian acronym GRU. "I know two well-known people who served their military conscription terms in GRU's Spetsnaz (special forces) - Dmitry Nikolayevich Kozak and Vladislav Yuriyevich Surkov," Ivanov told Rossiya state television late...

VLADIMIR Putin would like it to be seen as the "energy security" summit, or the "Russia regains its pride" summit, or perhaps even the "Putin leads the world" summit. But this weekend's gathering in StPetersburg of leaders of the Group of Eight nations would more accurately be called "the KGB summit". The streets are crawling with FSB officers, the modern incarnation of the KGB, trying to impose remarkably tight security for the first G8 summit in Russia. The host himself is a former KGB agent. Dozens of his ministers, regional governors and top Kremlin aides are former KGB men, as...

People are puzzled by Russia. It truly is like one of its famous matryoshka dolls--inside the big doll there are more little dolls, each smaller than the last. The big doll is that it is an authoritarian state run by the secret police, the siloviki, or higher police. They are the go-to people when you want anything done. That was so back in 1986 when I was in Moscow to assist in the release of our Moscow bureau chief, Nick Daniloff, and nothing has changed except the name--the KGB is now the FSB. These grim enforcers have been at the...

MOSCOW in February, with its freezing winds and short grim days, is just about the worst possible choice for a conference venue; but the finance ministers from the Group of Eight (G8) richest nations who must gather there next weekend have only themselves to blame. Eight years ago, when it still seemed possible that it would become a liberal democracy, Russia was invited to join Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany, Japan and the United States in what was then the G7; it is now Russia’s turn to take the G8’s rotating presidency, hence next week’s meeting. Darkness by 4pm...

For a glimpse into Russian President Vladimir Putin's views on energy and foreign policy, one need look no further than his years in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. The key players in Russia's energy industry today, in fact, are Putin's former colleagues and mentor from that time. Putin, who had already spent more than 15 years as a Federal Security Service (FSB) agent, returned to school, studying at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. One of the most prestigious academic institutions in Russia, it traces its history back to 1773. Since 1994 its rector has been Vladimir Litvinenko, who also serves...

The contract that ended the gas war between Russia and Ukraine has been the source of great confusion, consternation and argument since it was signed on Jan 4. There is little agreement as to which side "won," who stands behind the mysterious intermediary Rosukrenergo, how much Ukraine is actually paying and for how long, how much damage was done to Russia's international standing and what it all means for the future of Russian-Ukrainian relations and European energy policy. Given the opacity of the deal and its implications, no consensus on these matters will emerge any time soon. It is beyond...

Part of the Kremlin's damage control campaign as it assaulted Khodorkovsky and Yukos was to present foreign investors with an enticing investment alternative to Yukos. Yugansk was to be merged with the last remaining state-own oil company Rosneft and later that new entity would be added to the portfolio of natural gas giant Gazprom. Collectively, these three companies would be poised to not only to become the largest energy conglomerate in the world, but also able to compete with petroleum cartel OPEC. This new energy giant and Russia's new national champion would be open foreign investors. At present, foreign investment...

The recent conviction of researcher Igor Sutyagin on espionage charges is only the latest in a spate of similar cases in Putin's Russia involving researchers, journalists, diplomats, and former security agents accused of having improper contacts with foreigners. An unidentified spokesman for a Russian secret service told Interfax on 9 April that Western intelligence agencies -- particularly those of the United States -- have stepped up their work against Russia. "Among all the special services involved in intelligence activity against Russia over the last five years, the most active has been U.S. intelligence," the source said. The statement was made...