Russian Presidential Aide Yuri Ushakov announced on Thursday the two main negotiators for the meeting with the US on March 24 in Saudi Arabia on Telegram. He named them as Grigory Karasin, Chairman of the Russian Federation Council Committee on International Affairs, and Sergei Beseda, Advisor to the Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB).
Ushakov said the main focus of Monday’s Russia-US meeting would focus on the implementation of a new initiative to ensure the safety of navigation in the Black Sea which may be based on the July 2022 UN facilitated agreements that he said, “never fully took effect.”
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Beseda had been head of the Fifth Service of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) from 2009 to June 2004, when he was “compulsorily retired” on reaching the age of 70. The Fifth Service is responsible for intelligence gathering from inside Russia and former Soviet Union countries.
As such, his department was responsible for the information provided to Russian leader Vladimir Putin that persuaded him at the end of 2021 that the time was right to conduct the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The information that the fifth service provided made Russia’s military commanders aware that they would not encounter serious resistance and were tasked with seizing Kharkiv in three days and Kyiv in five.
An article in the independent Russian news outlet Inside Stories in May 2022, citing an unnamed intelligence source said: “They [the FSB] made things up, misinterpreted them, and sometimes even fantasized, and the leadership was happy to believe it.”
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Despite reports from international media that Beseda had been arrested and imprisoned as the debacle of the ill-fated “special military operation” unfolded in the early months, he remained in post until June 2024, when he became 70 and reached the age of retirement and was moved sideways into his current post as advisor to the Director of the FSB.
Cynics said he wasn’t sacked or imprisoned because as a serving General the embarrassment for Moscow would be great but, more likely, as chief of the fifth service he knew “where the skeletons are buried.”
Ushakov described Karasin and Beseda as: “Two highly experienced negotiators, well versed in international issues,” that make it likely that Monday’s consultations “will be productive.”
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