Spetsnaz: Inside The Russian SAS - Killing For The Kremlin

• Report rights infringement
• published: 05 Sep 2014
• views: 14397

Spetsnaz is the Russian for Special Forces. In this series this highly secretive organisation will be laid bare. Since the mid-seventies the unit has seen active service in Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia and the crime-ridden streets of Moscow. The films follows some of the different units on operations in Chechnya, Angola and Moscow, as well as their competitive selection process. This film delves inside the domestic counter-terrorism unit ALPHA GROUP, the KGB's foreign commando force, VYMPEL and the special police commandos, OMON. For the first time, our cameras record how new candidates to Spetsnaz units are put through their paces at Balashikha, the joint KGB/Interior Ministry training centre outside Moscow. We will get to know the men and women who aspire to make the transition from regular soldier / policeman to fully-fledged Spetsnaz. We talk to the officers themselves, Spetsnaz veterans, who have the responsibility of converting these ordinary soldiers into the elite of the Russian security services. We learn how, like, James Bond's 'M', the Spetsnaz have developed a whole array of weapons, communications systems, armour and electronics which are made in their own dedicated factories and sold by an international sales network. For the first time, Spetsnaz men tell their secrets including how the ALPHA GROUP and VYMPEL went through a baptism by fire when they seized the Dor-al-Aman Presidential palace in Afghanistan and how a severed head was used to free Soviet diplomats taken hostage in the Lebanese Civil War. Through exclusive access, we reveal secret operations in Angola, Nicaragua, India, Bosnia, Chechnya and even perhaps, Alaska, where they are said to have practised infiltration operations on US soil.