Putin's secret trader comes from the shadows in Ukraine Peace Conversions

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Thomas Grove, The Wall Street Journal 9 min Read 12 Apr 2025, 05:51 pm Ist Putin’s secret trader comes from the shadows in Ukraine Peace Conversations Sergei Breda, known to the CIA as ‘the Baron’, also in one of the biggest prisoners. The Riyadh Ritz-Carlton was supervised last month and Russia-American talks on the fate of Ukraine entered their 13th hour when two wooden doors opened to help the exclusive spy-general lead the Kremlin’s negotiations. Col. Gen. Sergei Beseda marched forward until he saw cameras flashing, then uncomfortably moved and offered a tight smile. One of Russia’s most powerful spies, which has rarely been photographed and yet has chosen for decades to lead Vladimir Putin’s most sensitive surgeries, has become a public figure. At this time last year, the Career Spy, known to the CIA as ‘The Baron’, was working on the kind of hyper-secretive enterprise that consumed most of his career-and discussed the officials of the agency in hotels every few weeks discussing the greatest prisoner in US Russian history. The exchange, which was done on August 1, freed 24 prisoners, including the reporter of Wall Street Journal Evan Gershkovich. At the time, the Biden Administration warned the magazine that the mere public mention of Beseda’s name could blow up one of Washington’s only remaining rear channels with the Kremlin in a wartime – and do damage with free Americans. This year, the 70-year-old veteran intelligence chief is very well back in the same hotels to deal with peace negotiations with the Trump administration over Ukraine, which may announce a tectonic re-alignment of the US to Russia. Special envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow on Friday to promote the talks directly with Putin. The appointment of Beseda shows how Putin’s Spioening Ministry’s Foreign Affairs at high-level international negotiations replaced-something security analysts have never happened, not even during the peak of the Cold War. Intelligence officers and diplomats who sat across from him say the involvement of Beseda – which helped plan the invasion of Ukraine – represents a message to Kyiv that Putin is still committed to gaining political control over Ukraine, these people said. This is a goal nor Ukraine or most European capitals say they can accept. Kyiv accused Breda of leding a campaign to undermine his efforts to be free from the Kremlin, saying that before the war in Ukraine, Beseda’s federal security service, or FSB, the office of the Ukraine poll intended to encourage the Kremlin’s plans for invasion. Years earlier, during Kyiv’s 2014 result of a pro-Russian president, former senior Ukrainian officials say he was involved in an operation that culminated in dozens of pro-Western protesters shot dead by police. The Kremlin said he was just there to protect the Russian embassy. Col. Gen. Sergei breda appears in a photo in an FSB magazine, ‘for and against’. Then Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency, was asked in an interview of 2023 with Ukraineka Pravda, which was Russian most dangerous, he first refused to answer, then Beseda mentioned. “He did very angry with Ukraine,” he said. To profile the negotiator of the spokesman-ridden putin, the Journal spoke to Russian, American, European and Middle Eastern and former diplomatic and intelligence officers who worked with him over three decades, and the flight manifesto checked to identify Russian negotiating teams and identify photos of brushes. Beseda, who joined the KGB shortly after Putin, is one of the few Russian officials with a direct line for the president. Little is known about him in the West Beyond Intelligence analysts and Kremlinologists, but a magazine investigation reveals that he has played an instrumental role in some of Russia’s most sensitive missions. When Slovenia sent two Russian sleeping agents who were advocated as ordinary Argentine, he flew to neighboring Serbia to push a case that is personally important to Putin. He learned in a mixture of temporary Italian and the Spanish he learned to be fluent while serving in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and forced the country’s spy head to look after the captive couple and their elementary school kids, who were then housed in a spacious villa and allowed daily video rooms for their mother. Unlike the previous round of the U.S. Russia Peace Talks in Riyadh, there were no news cameras in the hotel when Beseda was present. No comments were made until the next day, when the Russians unexpectedly demanded sanctions relief. Until then, the statement says, they will not comply with a ceasefire of the Black Sea that was in the middle of discussions. The Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and White House refused to comment. Neither the Kremlin nor the FSB responded to a request for comment. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, scene of talks between Russia and the US aimed at ending the conflict in Ukraine. The palatial hotel institution for talks, its corridors richly with stone mosaic, served as an ominous background in 2017 when Saudi Kroon Prince Mohammed Bin Salman cleaned the guests and locked up hundreds of princes, ministers and business people he accused of corruption. It was in the same city where Beseda negotiated the final details of the August exchange with a CIA delegation led by the Deputy Director of the Tom Sylvester operations and a delegation of the BND Intelligence Agency of Germany. Those discussions cemented the so-called “big list” of prisoners that would be exchanged at a finished part of Ankara’s Esenboga Airport. Beseda was a warm and witty presence, a contrast to the stuffy FSB equipment. He cracked jokes and brought gifts for his CIA counterparts during their first meeting: Soviet history themes. The CIA offered him a bottle of bourbon. ‘The Baron’ during the Biden Administration, when the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine diplomatic contacts between Washington and Moscow left at their worst point since the Cuban missile crisis, both countries depended on their intelligence agencies to maintain contact. Beseda was one of the select few Russian officials allowed to communicate with the US in the vacuum, both countries depended on their intelligence agencies to maintain contacts, sometimes delegated to meet with the then CIA Director William Burns. Beseda was a charismatic presence during an annual New Year’s party in Moscow, known as the ‘spy ball’ during a period of warmer relations in the early Obama years. Vodka flowed freely at the FSB issue, where CIA and FBI officials would mix uncomfortably with spies from Cuba, Iran and North Korea. “All types of characters from all over the world,” said former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul. “We felt like a fish out of the water.” In a still made from the video released by the Russian state media, a Russian intelligence officer walks towards Viktor bolt during a prisoner exchange, including American basketball star Brittney Griner, left, on the tar of an Abu Dhabi Airport. His CIA names, The Baron, comes from his love for customized partner and a cigar habit that indicates in Havana at his time. ‘Col. Gen. Beseda was appointed by the Kremlin to negotiate the exchange of prisoners, ‘said one former US official who negotiated with him. “These cases are controlled by the FSB to the smallest details.” His unknown meetings with the CIA took place in the hotel conference rooms, without any phones allowed, across Europe and the Middle East. In 2022, the negotiations led to the exchange of two Americans captured in Russia – gold medalist Brittney Griner and former Marine Trevor Reed – for arms dealer Viktor and the drug smuggler Constantin Yaroshenko. But the two Americans were convicted of ordinary criminal offenses. It was more difficult to make progress in the cases of Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan, who were both accused of spying, who all denied their families and the US government. In these cases, Beseda took a hard line and initially insisted that the US accused Spy trade for Spy. If you keep on our spies, there are only a few photos of brusha that are publicly available. In one, he sits in his office next to a bank with white Vertushka phones, the dietless kind of landline that is used the Soviet bureaucracy to reach the Kremlin safely. The FSB’s website does not contain itself under its leadership. He has almost never spoken to the media, with the exception of a 2012 interview with the FSB magazine, when he talked about Russia’s need to strengthen collaboration with foreign intelligence agencies. “Every healthy person understands that you can’t survive in this world alone,” he said. His star started to stand up with another hind channel about 40 years ago: As a young officer in the 1980s, Beseda worked in the ‘US Division’ of the KGB Second Directorate, who had the task of keeping US intelligence officers in Moscow, which opened a secret communication line for the CIA. One US official who met Beseda in the Lubyanka headquarters described him as a ‘barbaric handler’, who could call on the Americans to support him to drop the FSB’s avid officers. Beseda has been an adviser to FSB director Alexander Bortnikov since last year. Previously, he provided the fifth service, which oversees the communication of the agency with foreign partners and US agencies. It contains the Department of Operative Information, the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, which, according to US and former Russian security officials, led the planning of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. According to the Russian investigative website agentura, Beseda once worked with the Secret Dkro unit of counter -intelligence that revealed the magazine behind the arrest of Gershkovich and other Americans. He moved to the department that oversees the presidential administration after Putin became according to Russia’s leader, according to Agentura. He is one of a handful of Russian officials who can reach Russia’s president directly – the only decision maker. Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and his deputy, Sergei Ryabkov, have been largely disposed of in prison. “I can find out everything” The hind channel for prison conversations was crystallized during the top of June 2021 between Biden and Putin in an 18th century villa to the lake in Geneva. Biden taps on the US Ambassador to Moscow, John Sullivan, like the American in between, while Beseda nods the Russian side. During their first meeting in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Sullivan realized that his host was performing at his watch. Suddenly, Beseda stands off the table and leaves and jokes that he does not need to be informed of the rest of the meeting. “I’m FSB,” he said, using the Russian acronym of his agency. “I can find out everything.” Days later, a message ended up in the White House: If Washington and Moscow wanted to explore imprisonment, the Kremlin would insist that the talks flow through intelligence agencies, as they were during the Cold War. The US has on sailing and the first meeting was pleasant, but unconvincing. The FBI was not interested in the release of Russian prisoners, to the US and convicted of serious crimes in the US courts. The two parties later met again, and when the CIA took the reins, he moved to an agreement to exchange Reed, the former US marine sentenced nine years to assault on assault he and the US government said, for Yaroshenko, the convicted Russian drug smuggler. The exchange was set on April 27, 2022 at the Ankara Airport in Turkey. The details were hammered in a spate of papers between the CIA and Beseda’s subordinates. The CIA was uncertain whether Breda was still in control. The general, an investigation by Russian intelligence specialist Andrei Soldatov, fell with Putin after his invasion of Ukraine did not overthrow the government and was sent to Lefortovo prison, the same notorious prison for political prisoners where Gershkovich and other US detainees were detained. Some US officials are concerned that the channel of the prisoner exchange would collapse. But when US officials entered a bilateral meeting in Moscow a few days later, Beseda smiled behind a conference table and welcomed them with a joke that paraphrased Mark Twain: “Rumors of my downfall,” the general said, “is very exaggerated.” Write to Joe Parkinson on joe.parkinson@wsj.com, Drew Hinshaw on drew.hinshaw@wsj.com and Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com Catch all the news and updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates and live business news. More Topics #trump #russia Ukraine War Coin Special