Russia was preparing to attack Japan in the summer of 2021, months before President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an email featuring a letter from a whistleblower at Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), shared with Newsweek, reveals.
The email, dated March 17, was sent by the agent, dubbed the Wind of Change, to Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human-rights activist who runs the anti-corruption website Gulagu.net, and is now exiled in France.
The FSB agent writes regular dispatches to Osechkin, revealing the anger and discontent inside the service over the war that began when Putin invaded neighboring Ukraine on February 24.
Igor Sushko, the executive director of the Wind of Change Research Group, a Washington-based non-profit organization, has been translating the correspondence from Russian to English since it began on March 4. He has shared all the emails in full to Newsweek, including the March 17 brief.
A letter authored by the whistleblower, and published by Osechkin, has been analyzed by Christo Grozev, an expert on the FSB. He said he had shown the letter "to two actual (current or former) FSB contacts" who had "no doubt it was written by a colleague."
In August 2021, Russia was "quite seriously preparing for a localized military conflict with Japan," the agent said in an email to Osechkin in March.
The FSB agent suggested that Russia instead chose to invade Ukraine months later.
"Confidence that the countries would...
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