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.’
As became evident, the writer of the letters is foremost a Russian patriot and cannot stand the horrors being enacted by Putin and the Kremlin, both against the Russian people and now against the sovereign nation of Ukraine. I decided to translate this first email received by Osechkin into English, to spread the important information it contained. Within days, my translation had attracted the attention of millions, including government officials, parliamentarians, and current and former diplomats. Osechkin and I made direct contact, and we started an active collaboration.
With every letter, Wind of Change reiterates several critical points: firstly, Putin is convinced that, no matter what he does, the West won’t respond militarily. The Wind of Change’s letters reveal that the Russian military has been planning its offensives on this basis.
The Wind of Change’s letters suggest the Kremlin’s chain of command would block Putin from pressing the proverbial red button
Secondly, that Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling is just that – the Kremlin will not start or respond with a nuclear war. The Wind of Change’s insights suggest that the Kremlin’s chain of command would block any desire by Putin to press the proverbial red button. This, coupled with apparent doubts within the FSB over the effectiveness of Russia’s nuclear arsenal suggests that Russia is not as trigger-happy as the West originally feared. I believe the letters have helped shaped Western determination to stand with Ukraine.
The biggest tangible impact of the Wind of Change’s letters came on 1 April. Osechkin received fragments of information from various sources inside the Russian security apparatus about a Putin-ordered FSB operation happening in Europe in real-time. The previous day, multiple FSB agents were sent to crisscross Europe and ‘transfer’ $10 billion (approximately £8.5 billion)-worth of European Gazprom assets to newly formed shell companies belonging to Putin’s mafia. Osechkin compiled all the information, including specific locations the FSB agents had visited and the names of the shell companies, and published it.
My translation of the letter immediately attracted attention. Just a few days later, the German government announced that billions of dollars in Gazprom assets in the country had been seized and the operation had been nationalised. The official reason given for such unprecedented government action? ‘Unclear ownership’ – just as we had detailed in our bombshell report.
Back in Moscow, this of course led to an immediate escalation. The whole story cannot yet be told, but people in danger had to be pulled out of Russia. Osechkin’s wife’s car tires were slashed in the middle of the night in a remote parking lot in France, despite his family living under active security protection.
Added to this, the risk to the Wind of Change himself continued to grow. Shortly after the first letters were published, the FSB began to actively hunt for him. Fake information was fed to various individuals and FSB departments in an attempt to sniff him out, with hopes that he’d out himself by sending it to Osechkin. A mass disinformation campaign was launched online by the Kremlin in an attempt to discredit the FSB letters on all platforms. Multiple massive raids, interrogations, and detentions were conducted in March and April. All their attempts failed. I am happy to report that, to this day, Wind of Change has continued to elude his hunters.
As of 21 August, 29 such FSB letters from the source to Vladimir Osechkin have been translated into English and published. 13 of the emails came in March alone, spurred on by the widespread exposure the first English translation received.
But there is much more to be done. While much of the propaganda targeted at the West has failed, the Kremlin has been incredibly successful at disseminating and amplifying the most critical disinformation: opinion polls indicate overwhelming support for Putin and the invasion of Ukraine.
Polling in a state of authoritarian terror is, of course, largely useless. In reality, the best estimate that we have, and they are consistent throughout Russia – whether in rural or urban areas – is that about 10 per cent of Russians are hard-core supporters of Putin and his war ‘from the comfort of their sofa’. The vast majority does not support the regime or the invasion. Barely anyone is willing to risk their life for Putin’s last imperialist hoorah. The military and even the ‘elite’ VDV Paratroopers are resorting to prisoner recruitment. If the support claimed in polls was real, there would be no shortage of volunteers, especially when the regime is offering 10-20 times the typical monthly salary for military contracts.
A vilification of the Russian people, refusal to acknowledge that Russian people have no agency under Putin, and failure to maintain a distinction between the state and its subjects can and will lead to catastrophic consequences for the entire world and for 144 million Russians.
Instead of talking about off-ramps for Putin, we must be talking about off-ramps for the Russian population. We must stop dehumanising Russians as monsters – even Russian soldiers, many of whom are committing unspeakable atrocities.
We must empower the Russian civilians, empathise with them, give them hope, and most of all try to understand them. This is painful. I write this as my family in Kharkiv and other cities around Ukraine are being bombed by Putin’s terrorist regime. My great-grandmother’s home, hand-built by my family a century ago, was shelled into oblivion in Lyman. I have family from Odessa to Donetsk to Kyiv.
I observe the developing consensus in the West that the Russian people are beyond hope with dread and trepidation. Western media and politicians must lead the charge of educating themselves and our populations on Russia as a society and the everyday realities that face regular people under Putin’s heavy fist.
Surely it should be obvious that the vast majority of people in any country are normal and decent? The FSB letters are a reminder of Putin’s cowardice and evil – and of the quiet courage of those opposing him.
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