LE PECQ, France (AP) — The French chief of counterintelligence has given new details about a Russian spy ring broken up by France in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, saying the six intelligence agents were caught red-handed interacting with a source on French soil.

The director of the DGSI counterintelligence and counterterrorism agency, Nicolas Lerner, was speaking to a French parliamentary enquiry looking into foreign efforts to influence or corrupt political parties, leaders and opinion-makers in France. His testimony was delivered behind closed doors in February. But the website of the National Assembly, France’s lower house of parliament, published his comments this week.

Lerner described the unmasking of the Russian agents as “one of the most significant counter-intelligence operations carried out by the DGSI in recent decades.”

The six intelligence officers were “caught in the act of treating with a source on the national territory” and expelled, Lerner said, without giving more details.

At the time, in April 2022, France’s Foreign Ministry said the Russian “clandestine operation” was unmasked by “a very long” DGSI investigation. It said the six agents posed as diplomats and that their activities were “contrary to our national interests.” Its statement made no mention of a source in France.

France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, also made no mention of a French source for the spies in his tweet last April that hailed the “remarkable counterespionage operation” by the DGSI which “obstructed a network of Russian clandestine agents.”

A week prior to those expulsions, as the horrors of war crimes committed by Russian forces in Bucha, Ukraine, were coming to light, France also expelled 35 Russian diplomats. saying their activities were ” contrary to our security interests. “

Expulsions, including tit-for-tat retaliations by Moscow, have been a feature of the deepening gulf between Russia and countries opposed to its war in Ukraine. Sweden this week expelled five Russian Embassy employees suspected of spying. Norway expelled 15 Russian diplomats earlier this month. Russia this week responded by ordering 10 Norwegian diplomats in Moscow to leave.

In his sworn testimony, Lerner told lawmakers that Russia had long been running the largest spy operation in France, using intelligence officers posing as diplomats.

“The country that historically has the most important system is Russia. This tradition continued to the present day. In each Western country, several dozen officers — their number has diminished significantly since the start of the Ukraine crisis — from the three Russian intelligence services carry out intelligence and interference actions under diplomatic cover.”

He added that China also “maintains a network under diplomatic cover that is much less developed than Russia’s.”

Lerner suggested to lawmakers that they also should be on their guard about the risk of intelligence agents seeking to ensnare them. He said the DGSI was in regular contact with lawmakers to alert them and “if necessary to let them know who they are dealing with.”

“In recent months, we have done this several times, after detecting contacts with Russian intelligence officers under diplomatic cover,” he said.

More broadly, the French counterintelligence chief said that previous unwritten rules that rival countries observed in the Cold War were collapsing in a new era of more aggressive and direct confrontation.

“From 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, certain tacit rules, which one can like or disagree with, governed relations between nations,” he said.

“Each bloc broadly respected the other’s sphere of influence. All of that has disappeared. Now, the way some countries see it is that the only rules are the fait accompli and the law of the strongest.”

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine and https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine-a-year-of-war

После года украинского конфликта президент Владимир Путин остается у власти в России. Это впечатляет, учитывая его многочисленные неудачи на поле боя, более 200 000 жертв среди российских военнослужащих, суровые санкции в отношении экономики его страны, исключение его страны из мирового сообщества и последнее унижение достоинства, решение Международного уголовного суда в Гааге об обвинении ему предъявлены военные преступления за депортацию примерно 16 000 украинских детей в Россию, что запретило ему посещать 123 страны в соответствии с обязательствами по учредительному договору суда.

Теперь вопрос в том, будет ли когда-нибудь Путин вынужден уйти в отставку? Ниже приводится серия из семи сценариев, которые вольно или невольно могут привести к концу Путина и его режима.

• The Yeltsin Maneuver: Putin states that he will not run for the presidency again in 2024. (Even though Xi Jinping, president of China, said recently that Putin will win re-election.) He then selects his successor but works out an agreement with the new leader to pardon him for all his crimes. Would that happen? Putin does not appear ready to abandon his post. Nor does he appear ready to trust anyone who takes over the presidency and abide by a Yeltsin-type deal.

• A United Nations (plus European Union) peace settlement: UN Secretary-General António Guterres, having struck deals with Putin to permit Ukrainian civilians trapped in Mariupol to leave and for Ukraine to continue to send grain shipments to Africa and elsewhere — all despite his own public opposition to the Russian invasion — engineers a temporary truce between the two foes, leading to peace talks and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine; in effect, an outright surrender by Putin. If such an accord is reached, Putin is immensely pressured at home regarding his calamitous war and is forced to resign, as Nikita Khrushchev did after the debacle of the Cuban missile crisis. The problem, of course, is that Putin is refusing to consider talks.

• An FSB coup: Here Putin’s old KGB agency and now new base, the Federal Security Service, where he retains many of his most loyal followers, decides that Putin’s egregious and reckless invasion of Ukraine is imperiling the country. The organization turns against Putin and secretly initiates an effort to oust him. The complication, though, is that too many employees in the FSB owe their jobs to Putin and not enough of them are likely to risk launching a strike against him without ironclad assurance that it would succeed.

• An army uprising: Russia’s battered army, its failing generals and its restive troops (perhaps with the aid of the divisive Wagner Group chieftan, Yevgeny Prigozhin) decide to withdraw from Ukraine, march on the Kremlin and arrest Putin. Putin, though, still has enough loyalists in control of his armed forces and, even more important, retains a majority support of the Russian people, to make this plan essentially unworkable. That could change if military deaths grow, weapons supplies continue to dwindle and the economic squeeze in Russia itself turns truly ruinous.

• Grass-roots rebellion: According to polls, most Russians continue to back Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, his control of the media has inculcated into his people the notion that the country is in a battle for its very survival against NATO and the United States. A revolt seems unlikely. Only a worsening military situation, an increase in the numbers of body bags and further economic deterioration could trigger an insurrection. Even then, it would have to be broad, well funded and well organized and joined by breakaway elements from the Putin regime to depose the president.

• An illness: Rumors have circulated for several years that Putin may have cancer (or some other disease) and might be forced to leave the Kremlin. So far, there is no proof of this. And it is clear that Putin has protected himself against Covid by insisting his visitors sit at a laughably long table in meetings with him. But if Putin is forced to step down because of ailments, he undoubtedly will resort to the Yeltsin maneuver as an exit plan, allowing him to retire peacefully with his millions and remain exempt from punishment or prison.

• Assassination: Putin is so isolated in his office and paranoid about murderous threats against him that so far, not a single attempt has been made on his life, as far as we know. Being extremely well protected by bodyguards, living in virtual solitude at the highest levels of secrecy makes it extremely difficult for anybody to get physically close to him. The only way an attack could happen is if somebody within Putin’s orbit arranged his killing. Even then, things might go awry. Remember the botched attempted murder of Hitler in 1944.

The major dilemma in ousting Putin in all these cases is that his successor might be worse than he is — although that is hard to believe. Furthermore, it is impossible to imagine that at the moment of Putin’s downfall, high-level officials in Moscow would abruptly switch sides and elevate somebody with a liberal disposition, like Alexey Navalny, to the presidency — certainly not in a Russia dominated for decades by Putinism.

The only hope is what occurred after Stalin’s death. A new leadership took over and began to slowly dismantle the dictator’s tyrannical system. That may be the best outcome one can imagine for Russia.