Didn’t know anything about Wagner plans
BND apparently initiates internal investigation
06/30/2023, 1:58 p.m
Should the BND have foreseen the Wagner uprising? According to a media report, the service is working on whether it has correctly evaluated information from abroad. In any case, there is displeasure at the traffic lights. “We have now been surprised by the events too often,” says the SPD, for example.
According to a media report, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has initiated a review of its information situation prior to the Wagner mercenaries’ uprising against the regime in Moscow. As the “Spiegel” reports, the aim is to work out whether the service should have recognized the mercenaries’ plans earlier and whether tips from foreign intelligence services were correctly evaluated.
Criticism had already arisen in Berlin over the weekend that the BND may have informed parts of the federal government about the events too late. There are now complaints that the BND was not informed in advance about the militia’s alleged plans to capture Rostov-on-Don and the march on Moscow that was launched later.
“The information situation was obviously thin”
“We’ve been taken by surprise too often by the events,” Ralf Stegner of the SPD, chairman of the Afghanistan investigative committee in the Bundestag, told Der Spiegel. “The BND’s information on the inner workings of Russia was obviously thin,” says Ulrich Lechte, the foreign policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group in the Bundestag, the “Spiegel”. “There is no other explanation for the fact that we parliamentarians have not been given any information about the impending uprising of Prigozhin and the Wagner group.”
“The situation is definitely frustrating,” Green MP Sara Nanni told Der Spiegel. But it is too easy to criticize the service for this. All of this is also a question of resources.
According to US media, American intelligence services had leads to the uprising. The BND is said to have had no information from its own research or from information from partner services. The internal review should now clarify this as well. “The fact that apparently there was no exchange between the secret services makes me think personally,” said FDP politician Lechte.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz had already admitted on Wednesday that the BND had been surprised by the uprising in Russia. The services in Germany “of course didn’t know that beforehand,” said Scholz on ARD. “But they kept telling us what was to be observed.” Scholz also announced that he wanted to discuss the flow of information with the allies. Regarding the reports that the US secret services allegedly knew earlier, he said: “We will all have to discuss that together – including what is the case with the things that are now being speculated.”