The Autocrat’s Indispensable Service: How Russian Intelligence secured Vladimir Putin’s Regime after failing him in Ukraine

Abstract

Russian intelligence failed President Vladimir Putin in supporting the most consequential decision of statecraft – war – before Russia’s 2022 (re)invasion of Ukraine but has since somewhat recovered, possibly redeeming itself in Putin’s estimation by securing his regime nearly two and a half years since his shambolic invasion. This article complements our previous article in this journal, The Autocrat’s Intelligence Paradox: Vladimir Putin’s (mis)management of Russian strategic assessment in the Ukraine War, which examined the systemic roots of Russia’s intelligence failure in early 2022. In this follow-on article exploring Russian intelligence’s traditional areas of (relative) competence in the period following the full-scale invasion, we consider the categories of espionage, sanctions evasion, active measures, and repression, and conclude that Putin’s security and intelligence organs have reasserted themselves with terrible vigour, domestically and internationally. Despite notable failings – and some flaps – they have been indispensable to Putin by securing his regime, at least through mid-2024.

Keywords

cyber intelligence Putin Russia security Ukraine

Introduction: An avoidable failure

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s late February 2022 full-scale (re)invasion of Ukraine was presaged and accompanied by significant intelligence failures, some of which can be expected to occur with more frequency in autocratic regimes (see Dylan et al., 2023a). These failures concerned many key issues facing Putin’s war planners; chiefly, the likely level of resistance that Russian forces would face in Ukraine and the immediate response of the West. Intelligence support to Putin’s war machine also stumbled in tactical ways, such as providing outdated maps and erroneous targeting packages to an ill-prepared invasion force. The net result was, initially, catastrophic for Russian forces. On the congested road to Kyiv, they suffered significant losses of troops and equipment before retreating and regrouping. In a stinging rebuke to Putin’s imperial illusions, Kyiv remained sovereign and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky alive, free, and an inspirational figurehead (Gioe and Styles, 2022).

Our article The Autocrat’s Intelligence Paradox, published in these pages in December 2022, explored Russia’s intelligence failures leading to a botched invasion of Ukraine. Specifically, it considered the puzzle of why a leader who was as steeped in intelligence as Putin – having enjoyed a modest career in the Cold War KGB, and later, during Boris Yeltsin’s term, headed the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service – with a large, resourced intelligence machine at his disposal, presided over such a failure. In that article, we evaluated the strategic culture and history of Russian intelligence, concluding that the root causes were both characteristically autocratic and quintessentially Putinesque.

In the world of the autocrat, the intelligence and national security apparatus exists principally to secure the regime from political opposition and popular dissent, not to offer assessments that might discourage foreign policy (mis)adventures or provide a good-faith second opinion beyond the leader’s echo chamber. Therefore, autocrats and their regimes can struggle to leverage an information advantage into insight or a decision advantage. Putin seems typical in this regard. Traits that are considered advantageous, even essential, in western intelligence systems – including intellectual independence, intellectual integrity, and a capacity to dissent from a prevailing political orthodoxy – are devalued under his leadership. To Putin, like many autocrats, contradicting the leadership’s view with an impartial assessment constitutes disloyalty, and (dis)incentives exist to generate intelligence packaged to please the consumer. In this sense, assessment, to the extent that it exists, amounts to a form of institutionalised confirmation bias. As we argued in 2022, though Putin’s spies were both central to his power abroad and security at home, they were, equally, complicit in a grave mismanagement of intelligence and subsequent military disaster that has posed the biggest threat to his position since he took office.

The full-scale war in Ukraine has raged for nearly 2.5 years at the time of writing, not including the conflict that was already stalemated in the Donbas since 2014. A significant amount of material has emerged that complements our judgement that Putin’s spies performed poorly before the war, and that leaders in the Kremlin – chiefly Putin – proved to be poor consumers of intelligence. Notable surveys, like the Washington Post’s series on ‘Putin’s Gamble’, underline the disinclination of the Russian federal security service (FSB) in the field to give Moscow unwelcome news, and their failure to ‘incapacitate Ukraine’s government, foment any semblance of pro-Russian groundswell or interrupt Zelensky’s hold on power’ (Miller and Belton, 2022). Others cast more light on one of the key issues highlighted by The Autocrat’s Intelligence Paradox: that strategic intelligence assessment, at least in the sense that democratic governments would consider it, was not a notable factor in Putin’s decision, other than by its absence. According to an unnamed oligarch, who, among others, was summoned to a meeting at the Kremlin the day Putin broadcast to the nation that his euphemistic ‘special military operation’ was taking place, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told them, contrary to the consultation one would expect before such a major military undertaking, that ‘[Putin] has three advisers[:] Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great’ (Seddon et al., 2023). Putin’s political project created a situation where his political assessment, whatever it may have been, could go unchallenged at best and, at worst, tacitly or even actively encouraged (see Waller, 2023). As we argued then, this kind of arrangement between intelligence agencies and political customers is brittle. It works until it does not.

The autocrat’s indispensable service

However, Putin’s intelligence machinery serves purposes other than compiling strategic assessments and fulfils functions other than generating decision advantage. It is now – perhaps more than ever – principally concerned with ensuring the survival of the regime. It has not only survived its catastrophic failure, but has, in many senses, thrived. This was by no means a foreordained outcome. How this outcome occurred is the principal question animating this article. It suggests that the factor explaining the resurgence is, quite simply, the continued utility to Putin of the core skills of Russian intelligence, particularly those honed during the Soviet era: espionage, active measures, internal counterintelligence, and domestic repression. Each of the core agencies – the FSB, the GRU/GU, and the SVR – have in one way or another risen to the challenge of securing the regime within their areas of responsibility. The FSB has been at the forefront of Putin’s war in Ukraine and the war against Russian citizens at home. Russian military intelligence (GU, but colloquially still GRU) has transcended their original, somewhat removed role in the operations of the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group, and are now expanding operations not only in Ukraine, but also in Syria and several African states (Marten, 2023). The SVR (Russia’s foreign intelligence service) has been working hard to channel essential goods to Russia’s war economy. Collectively, despite notable failures, Russia’s spooks have been serving Putin rather effectively.

Whereas The Autocrat’s Intelligence Paradox focused on key weaknesses of the system – lack of impartial assessment, no presentation of unwelcome news to Putin, and both financial and intellectual corruption – this article examines its key areas of competency. However, here too Putin uses intelligence in a manner typical of autocratic leaders, where elements of the autocrat’s paradox is visible. Security provided by intelligence is now perhaps more central than ever to sustaining Putin’s regime. However, it comes at a potentially high price. Putin may gamble that his active measures abroad will ease both the political pressure internationally and the military pressure in Ukraine; he may well be correct. However, the bulk of his security machine’s work is focused inwards, domestically, on suppressing dissent while leaving pressing, serious security threats, like terrorism, under-resourced or even ignored. This appears to have been a factor with the March 2024 Crocus City Hall terrorist attack, where Islamic State terrorists killed 145 people, despite apparently actionable US intelligence community warnings of a pressing threat. Moreover, the levels of surveillance, repression, and punishment that have been a prominent – and increasing – characteristic of Russian life since the 2022 invasion may be effective for the time being in securing the regime. But increased repression wins Putin few new friends, and alienates many, especially the relatives of hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Russian youth. The system may be able to absorb the muted pressure of resentment for some time, but it may find few options at its disposal should releasing some of this pressure become necessary. The activities of Putin’s intelligence machine implementing his policies, paradoxically, both secure his future and also drive some of the dynamics that threaten his grip on power.

Putin and intelligence: A legacy of repression and blood

Russia’s paranoia about spies and subversives predates Putin. It both derives from and helped foster a strategic culture – the Russian approach to viewing and managing threats, whether real or imagined – in which its security apparatus has traditionally focused inwards, views the external world as almost implacably hostile, and that, as a consequence, to quote Yaacov Falkov (2022), ‘granted the [Russian Intelligence Services] the most exalted position among other Soviet strategic tools’. It was to (counter)intelligence that Soviet leaders turned almost reflexively to secure their positions throughout the 20th Century. The revolution’s bloodiest butchers deployed the NKVD and the KGB to arrest and harass the guilty and innocent alike in its hunt for the ‘enemies of the people’ to secure the new order (Andrew and Mitrokhin, 1999). During the USSR’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ the infamous ‘SMERSH’ (a Russian portmanteau of ‘death to spies’) was brutally enthusiastic about rooting out German spies in the Soviet Army, even executing an estimated 30,000 returning prisoners of war (POWs) who, in their paranoid view, could be Nazi Manchurian candidates once returned to Stalin’s ranks. Even under the reformers, the architects of late Cold War perestroika and glasnost, the system still stifled deviation and dissent. In 1986, just a few years before the collapse of the Soviet experiment, the KGB persisted in its traditional role of targeting those who deviated from the Politburo’s line, which claimed that the nuclear catastrophe dissipating from the exploded reactor at Chernobyl was due to human error and not because of fundamental flaws in the reactor’s design (Falkov, 2022).

The strategic culture, the norms, mindsets, and institutional memories that calcified during the Soviet years retreated, ever so slightly, with the collapse of the empire. But following what appeared to be the relative liberalisation of the 1990s and the heady days of rampant unbridled criminal capitalism, where enterprise ran riot, and when historians, critics, and the opposition had a little space for dissent, the screw again tightened on civil society and civil liberties. Swiftly closed again were the State’s archives to foreign or critical historians. Long gone was the optimism, felt in some quarters, that there was the possibility of a reckoning with the Soviet past, of Russia cooperating – even occasionally aligning – with NATO’s Balkans deployments and democratic norms. By the turn of the millennium, Putin, ever the Chekist, and a custodian of this strategic culture, had created something new but also turned back the clock: a form of state management akin to a feudal court, where loyalty trumped all, laws served the leadership, and intelligence identified and rooted out subversives (Galeotti, 2023). The machinery of intelligence once again had a clear purpose: Protect the Tsar.

Identifying the precise tipping point in Russia’s descent into Putinist autarchy is a matter of judgement. However, following the 1999 apartment bombings and the second Chechen War, the room for dissent, be it political or personal, was squeezed inexorably. This applied to practically everyone. Spies who spoke out, accusing the regime of complicity in the 1999 bombings and other outrages, and of being mired in rampant corruption more generally, were assassinated, some rather theatrically like former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned with Polonium-210 in London in 2006, which was ‘probably approved by Putin’ according to British authorities (Gioe et al., 2019). Politicians who questioned and investigated the bombings were murdered, as were Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin in 2003. Serious political challengers were also subjected to unrelenting intimidation and violence. Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in the shadow of the Kremlin in February 2015. Putin’s most potent political threat, the campaigner Alexey Navalny survived an attempted assassination in 2020 but died in February 2024 while languishing in Putin’s gulag, his funeral becoming a contested locus of protest.

For Putin, the definition of a traitor encompassed far more than turncoat as he conflates independence or criticality with subversion and disloyalty. The natural corollary of this is that all dissent is a threat, a potential nucleus for an alternative node of political power – and therefore a matter for his counterintelligence service to address. Matters for the attention of the intelligence services have therefore included politicians who would not come to heel, but also journalists, the business elite, and the notion of an independent civil society. Those who braved the risks of challenging the government’s line on all manner of topics have been abused and worse. Most famously, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot on Putin’s birthday in 2006 after accusing Putin of building a police state (Filipov, 2017). Recalcitrant oligarchs, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, were exiled, brought to heel or assassinated (Leonard, 2016). In 2021 Freedom House (2021), the pro-democracy advocacy group, in its annual Freedom in the World survey scored Russia dismally: 5/40 for political rights, 15/60 for civil liberties, overall judging it to be ‘Not Free’. Putin’s challengers have all been marginalised, not infrequently in a bloody manner, at the hands of his intelligence community. Putin’s tactics may be more modern than his predecessors, but he is cut from the same cloth, steeped in a strategic culture that stresses the existence of an ongoing western war against the besieged fortress that is Russia (Falkov, 2022).

Putin’s counterintelligence state: Repressing everything, everywhere, all at once

Despite the low bar set by Freedom House in 2021, the situation has only deteriorated since. Following the 2022 Ukraine invasion the screw tightened again. Putin strangled civil society of what little oxygen it had. Having failed to win the quick and decisive military victory that he anticipated, nor enjoyed the inevitable domestic bump in popularity that would have accompanied a triumph like his 2014 seizure of Crimea, Putin has set a premium on his security in power. His miscalculation, and the increasing vulnerability of his position that accompanied such an exposure of fallibility and weakness, was (probably rightly) perceived as a potential rallying point, or foil, for dissent, protest, and even challenge. As Putin well knows, success breeds allies, whereas failure projects weakness and portends trouble.

This manifested a little too close to home for the President in the form of his erstwhile chef and general proxy-force-fixer Prigozhin’s abortive-though-lethal mutiny on 6 June 2023. The reality of this insurrection forced Putin to reckon with the clear and increasingly audible muttering in his ranks. And he did so with patient ruthlessness once the coup stalled. Prigozhin was ostensibly brought back into the fold, apparently believing his position was secure. Unsurprisingly, he was killed a few weeks later, on 23 August when his plane ‘crashed’ after exploding in mid-air outside of Moscow. Recognising his mistake in allowing an armed force – more loyal to his underling – to reach within striking distance of Moscow, Putin ordered the integration of Wagner forces into the Ministry of Defence under the aegis of the GRU. And, without missing a beat, Russia’s bevy of private military corporations, like Wagner, were brought closer to the fold while they also continued to do some heavy lifting for Russia’s strategic goals in Africa. Putin’s counterintelligence service failed to offer a coup warning, but the GRU proved adept at absorbing a useful proxy capacity shorn of the risks posed by a freewheeling, mercurial leader.

Leaders like the late Prigozhin require followers if they are to pose a genuine challenge. Thus, a key plank of Putin’s campaign to ward off any threat to his position has been to ensure that potential followers either do not exist or cannot be mobilised. Integral to his strategy for warding off the threat of dissent among the population has been the construction and maintenance of a parallel reality, where certain things cannot be questioned, including but not limited to: the assertion of the official position that must be adhered to that there was a special military operation, rather than a war (TASS, 2022); that the invasion was essentially defensive (Ivanova, 2022); that hostile western powers are attacking Russian institutions, interests, and values abroad, but especially at home, and must be guarded against (Timofeev, 2021); and that to question Russian foreign policy or the government’s narrative is almost inherently subversive, tantamount to treason (Fond Tsentr Zaschity Prav Smi, 2022). In this environment, protest, criticism, and dissent have been thoroughly stifled (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2022). Individuals and groups have been intimidated for considering even minor acts of protest (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Russian Service, 2023b), and harassed on the occasions they dared stage a protest that posed a minor threat to the curated reality the regime has built since the (re)invasion (Kuznetsova, 2022). Harking back to Stalin’s purges, spies, both real and imagined, have been sought, found, and punished (Deutsche Welle, 2024; Parkinson and Hinshaw, 2023). Russia’s intelligence services have been central to this crackdown (Chevtaeva, 2022). They have operated using tried and tested techniques of Soviet and Russian repression, and they have been extremely aggressive even when measured by the yardstick of Putin’s years in power. This aggression and the impunity it underlines acts as a force multiplier. The brazen, performative violence and oppression serves as much as deterrent as punishment. Few dare challenge it.

For those who do, the Kremlin has created a legal framework that criminalises any form of individual opposition to the war, much less organised political opposition, of the sort attempted by Navalny or more recently by Vladimir Kara-Murza. But generally, there is no need to resort to murder when lawfare and intimidation will suffice. Opposition-minded individuals are frequently not even allowed to register as candidates for elections. Yekaterina Duntsova, a prospective presidential candidate with, by her own admission, an extremely limited base of support, was barred from standing in December 2023 (Osborn, 2023). Boris Nadezhdin, a broadly anti-war candidate whose campaign had acquired a degree of momentum early in 2024, was (predictably) barred from the ballot by the election authorities in February for ‘irregularities’ (Sauer, 2024). Navalny’s Anti-corruption foundation was declared an ‘extremist organization’ in 2021 (Freedom House, 2023). But, beyond party politics, early and even individual protests against the Ukraine war were met with harsh crackdowns and violence. Reportedly ‘some 13,500 people were arrested in early March’ 2022, and 2400 arrested in the wake of the partial mobilisation announced in September 2022 (Freedom House, 2023). Putin has created a system where there are a series of disincentives and legal barriers for any expression of dissent. Underpinning it is the potency and the fearsome reputation of the intelligence and surveillance system: an efficient modern counterintelligence state.

There are conceptual and empirical parallels between the Soviet surveillance state and today’s Russian variant. However, to view it only as an analogue of its Soviet ancestor would be to overlook and underplay the power that the contemporary counterintelligence state wields owing to its capacity to intrude in and exploit digital systems. Indeed, reflecting the expansion of the digital traces that every citizen generates on a day-to-day basis, and following the migration and expanding volume of Russian citizens digital communications, much of the FSB’s counterintelligence work takes place online, where the FSB has rapidly extended its capacity to suppress and repress. Telecommunications service providers have been mandated by law to cooperate closely with the agency, and they must install Roskomnadzor’s¹ Technical Measures to Combat Threats (TSPU) system, among other digital tools, to facilitate surveillance, searching, and the blocking of websites (Freedom House, 2023). Blocked content includes Western news and social media websites, along with Ukrainian news outlets. Users who have attempted to circumvent the restrictions by using VPNs have reported issues with their connections (Freedom House, 2023). In a modern variant of the jammers used by its Soviet predecessors to block western radio, the current surveillance state has both the tools and the will to choke off Russian citizens’ supply of external or independent media. But it has access to digital content on a scale and at a level of granularity beyond what its analogue predecessors enjoyed.

The capacity to exploit the digital space enables the regime to undermine potential dissent at an early stage. Surveillance is tight in digital spaces where individuals may previously have interacted and organised. The scope of the various systems’ capacities remains somewhat opaque, but many reports, including those based on a large cache of leaked documents, ‘the Vulcan Files’, offer insight into the hardening line (Harding et al., 2023). They illustrate that, as noted, Internet providers must by law ‘install equipment that allows security services to monitor Internet traffic’ (Freedom House, 2023), known as System for Operational Investigative Measures (SORM). Developers at Vulcan built the FSB a ‘bulk collection’ programme known as ‘Fraction’, which scans social media sites for key words, seeking to ‘identify potential opposition figures from open-source data’ (Harding et al., 2023). Popular messaging and networking applications are routinely monitored, and groups infiltrated, including on Telegram, with a particular focus on groups where support for Navalny was apparent (Freedom House, 2023). They may also have developed a limited capacity to monitor encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal (Krolik et al., 2023). A New York Times investigation into the proliferation of the surveillance state concluded that Russia, which had hitherto lagged behind China and Iran in exerting control through digital technology, was ‘quickly catching up’ (Krolik et al., 2023).

The deterrent effect of such a capacity, the contours of which are not secret, is intangible but likely substantial and is boosted by demonstrations of the system’s actual capacity and invasive pre-emptory power. Critical voices are routinely identified and intimidated or arrested before they can protest. Examples of the reach of the system into people’s communications are plentiful. Some are typical: In Arkhangelsk, a student’s social media posts were reported to the FSB, who intimidated and pressured her to admit her ‘crimes’ before placing her in home detention (Chentemirov and Krivtsova, 2023). Others absurd: there are reports of a school child’s artwork leading to the FSB visiting her school, her home, and resulting in the arrest of the father and the removal of the child – who would have been about 13 years of age – to a children’s shelter (Vorobyov, 2023). A New York Times investigation quoted an opposition figure, Alena Popova, explaining ‘It’s made people very paranoid, because if you communicate with anyone in Russia, you can’t be sure whether it’s secure or not . . . It used to be only for activists. Now they have expanded it to anyone who disagrees with the war’ (Krolik et al., 2023).

The echoes of the Stalinist past are resonant in Putin’s digital clampdown. But some of the roots of Putin’s specific fears can probably be traced back to more recent Russian and Soviet history that makes him more categorical in his clampdown. He may have in mind the ‘mothers’ campaigns’, and the corrosive effect that organisations like the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia had on Gorbachev’s power as he waged his fruitless campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a feat they repeated later for Boris Yeltsin in 1994 as he waged his bloody war in Chechnya (Sauer, 2023). The numbers alone underline that this growing constituency could pose a risk. The US intelligence community estimated in December 2023 that Russian forces had, by then, suffered circa 315,000 dead and wounded in the war (Landay, 2023). But the FSB’s crackdown on the gathering of any information about the military rendered the work of family advocacy organisations like ‘Soldiers’ mothers of St. Petersburg’ very difficult, even as the demand for its services grew throughout 2022 (Sivtsova, 2022). Individual activists have been harassed. Olga Tsukanova, then leader of the Council of Mothers and Wives of Russian Soldiers was arrested in January 2023 on her way to Moscow, where she had planned to submit to the Prosecutor-General some 700 complaints from the relatives of soldiers (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Russian Service, 2023a). Having tried to co-opt other organisations, like the ‘Council of Mothers and Wives’, an organisation established in 2022 following the mobilisation to coordinate the activities of concerned relatives, the authorities played their trump card and deemed it a ‘foreign agent’ in May 2023 (Noble and Petrov, 2023). It was disbanded soon thereafter.

But this was not the end of the movement. In its wake sprung another network of wives and mothers with a similar objective, securing the return of soldiers from the battlefield. The catalyst for the movement’s activities was the announcement by Andrei Kartapolov, chair of parliament’s defence committee and a former general at one time heading the Main Military-Political Directorate of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GVPU VS RF), that mobilised troops would not be rotated, rather they would fight until the end of the ‘special military operation’ (Sauer, 2023). Organising and communicating online – and claiming not to be anti-war, but anti-mobilisation – they published a manifesto on a Telegram channel Put Domoy (‘The way home’; Noble and Petrov, 2023). As Noble and Petrov (2023) note, despite being at pains to state that they are not political, they are not beyond noting the grim Heller-like logic of Putin’s approach to his war: the mobilised must fight indefinitely, whereas the criminals and prisoners can fight for their freedom.

Preventing a repeat of the humiliations, as he would probably view them, of having to concede anything to the latest manifestation of this lobby was a growing priority for Putin as the war continued over 2023 and into 2024. Put Domoy’s platform has been subject to attacks, typically those accusing it of being a tool of hostile foreign interests (Noble and Petrov, 2023), their husbands at the front harassed and threatened by the FSB (Sivtsova, 2022). Preventing any protests was a high priority for all regional authorities as the 2024 Presidential elections drew near (Noble and Petrov, 2023). This has been coupled with personalised intimidation. Online chats between the wives of the mobilised have been infiltrated, with members being visited in person by the security forces and prevented from engaging in interviews (Mylnikov, 2023). Others have been offered money for their silence (Sauer, 2023).

These types of groups pose particular challenges to Putin: either acceding to their demands or cracking down harshly carry risks. The repression is reflexive, and probably deemed the less risky option in the short term. However, one of the lessons of Soviet/Russian history is that containing such dissent indefinitely is difficult. As Maria Andreeva, one of the unofficial leaders of The Way Home, declared, she was not afraid because she was fed up (Sauer, 2023) or, like Navalny, willing to risk everything for one’s principles. Another noted ‘there is no reason to be afraid and hide, because the worst thing has already happened to us – they took our loved ones’ (Talmazan, 2024). In the face of significant deeply personal criticism, the FSB will probably continue to tighten the ratchet, risking the further alienation of bereaved relatives. Given its obligation to sustain a system that brooks no dissent while maintaining an official yet illusory reality, the FSB has few other options.

In the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine we have witnessed the intelligence services redouble their efforts to protect Putin. They have done so in two fundamental ways. First, they have continued the work in removing and eliminating individuals who are perceived as posing a threat to him. The pattern of opponents or perceived traitors finding themselves in the dock or meeting untimely ends has been maintained. Most notable in this regard have been the unlikely pairing of brave Navalny and treacherous toady Prigozhin, but they are two among many. Second, they constitute the core of a machinery of surveillance and repression not out of place in Stalin’s USSR. This reminds observers of the deep reservoir of grim counterintelligence talent in Russia, a cadre that seems still to embody core, enduring tenets of a Russian strategic culture, which has been mobilised to prevent any meaningful dissent from emerging or snowballing. Perhaps surprisingly – given its thuggish reputation – the security organ’s prowess and adaptation in the digital space has managed to stifle protest movements. Furthermore, it has cleverly harnessed of the potential offered by databasing and networking technologies to link monitoring online activity with repression in the physical world, this limiting the underground organising utility of encrypted applications in this suffocating environment. Russia’s services may have failed to warn of the dire consequences of a full-scale war with Ukraine, but they have ably dealt with the task of stamping out any dissent that the misadventure threatened to generate by reasserting a modern-day variant of the Soviet counterintelligence state.

From domestic counterintelligence to foreign espionage and influence

The last decade yielded a mixed record for Russian intelligence abroad. They achieved undoubted successes and managed to stir considerable mischief while leaving a profound legacy in the bodies politic of many of its core adversaries, notably in the United States before and after the 2016 election. Meanwhile, defectors and dissidents were hunted down and brazenly killed on foreign soil, frequently with little blowback. Oversight committees like Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee (2020: 1) commented on Russia’s well-resourced services and ‘enormous risk appetite’. But this was balanced with many setbacks. The Autocrat’s Intelligence Paradox identified several ways in which the Russian intelligence services failed seriously – and unnecessarily – before the war on Ukraine in 2022. This included the weakness in all sources assessment, a legacy of Soviet intelligence culture where assessment was actively discouraged (Soldatov and Borogan, 2022).

Failures were also visible in their traditional areas of competence, like human source collection, which was poor in Ukraine, probably owing to corruption as much as anything else. But add to this the 2010 defection of SVR officer Alexander Poteyev, which led to the unmasking of Russian ‘illegal’ networks in the United States (Corera, 2020), the identification of many Russian operatives who had been involved in various espionage, active measures, and paramilitary operations targeting Ukraine, the United States, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (to name but a few), the sloppy tradecraft that allowed the assassins or would-be assassins of Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal to be identified largely through open sources, left the impression that Putin’s intelligence agencies had lost their way. These setbacks dented capacity – over a 100 alleged intelligence officers were expelled from their European posts following the Skripal poisoning in 2018 – and undercut the grudgingly respectful reputation that Russian intelligence enjoyed abroad. It appeared clear that they were still operating the way their predecessors might have, but not as artfully: less the subtle spies, more the bruising gangsters – fitting, given the close links between Russian intelligence and organised crime (Soldatov and Borogan, 2023).

But the Russian intelligence services have proven resilient. Following the disaster of the initial military thrust in Ukraine, the expulsion of Russian intelligence officers across Europe, investigative media stories exposing Russian influence operations and identifying agents of influence, arrests of Russian recruited sources working in NATO allies, and subsequent recriminations in Moscow, Putin’s spies have recovered in several ways. Putin appears to have punished many ‘directly’ responsible for some of the Ukrainian failures (Jankowicz, 2022), but the machinery remains intact and even making progress on a few fronts. It continues to engage in the traditional work of stealing secrets abroad despite reports of FSB agent networks being uncovered in Ukraine. In February 2024, Ukrainian security (SBU) officials briefed journalists that 47 ‘Russian spy networks’ had been unearthed over the previous year, with some 2000 suspects having been arrested on similar charges since the 2022 invasion (Harmash, 2024). This suggests that despite the war and the SBU’s success in uncovering spies Russia remains capable of recruiting agents to service their requirements. Beyond Ukraine, Russian agents have also been identified lurking in Kyiv’s key partners. In March 2024, a sixth member of an alleged Russian spy ring in Britain was charged. The ring had allegedly been operating between August 2020 and February 2023 (De Simone, 2024). In Poland, it appears that the GRU was managing a network of potential saboteurs and informers offering useful insights regarding the shipping of military supplies to Ukraine (Pearson et al., 2023). In Germany, in April 2023, the domestic security agency, the BfV, warned that Russian intelligence and disinformation activities had ‘increased markedly’ since the invasion (Knight, 2023). This has been borne out with arrests of a parliamentary aide to a member of the Bundestag from the right-wing AfD party, and, more damaging, a senior level employee of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND.

The clear campaign to develop human intelligence from Ukraine and its allies has been complemented by relentless exploitation of digital systems. Many exposures have revealed both a sophisticated capacity to penetrate networks, and the ability to capitalise on a target’s basic security mistakes. An example of the latter was publicised in March 2024 when Russian spies had recorded a sensitive conference call between senior German military officials, a recording that was subsequently leaked to Kremlin-friendly media (Connolly, 2024), an instrumental and well-timed leak that helped deny Kyiv the much-needed long-range Taurus missile system. The Russian attackers exploited poor cybersecurity hygiene on the part of the meeting organisers and a German official who joined the call on his device from an unsecured network while at a conference in Singapore (Connolly, 2024). There are many examples in this category. Indeed, Russian spies have notched significant successes in infiltrating major digital infrastructures in the west, including ‘Cozy Bear’ (SVR)’s remarkable Solar Winds hacking operation that deeply penetrated US government networks (NCSC, 2024). Furthermore, these hackers and their sister groups have successfully attacked Microsoft’s corporate email system and the Australian government, both in January 2024, and US State Department emails in September 2023 (CSIS, 2024).

The above cases represent only a fraction of what is publicly known about successful Russian espionage against – or penetration of – western governments. Yet these cases are indicative of Russia’s continued, advanced capacity to conduct espionage online, as well as in person. Russian espionage has not only been pursued with renewed vigour since the invasion, but also with not inconsiderable success despite the identification and arrest of agent networks, routine cyber attribution, and the diplomatic expulsion of Russian intelligence officers. Its failures of 2022 notwithstanding, online and offline Russian intelligence seems active as ever, and the clear implication is that observers should not conflate the weaknesses of the system under Putin with total incompetence. Putin’s spies remain a potent counterintelligence threat, one that operates with a formidable combination of general competence, an aggressive sense of impunity, and a considerable risk-tolerance for attribution and violence.

New spies, old tricks: Disruption, subversion, and evading sanctions

It is not only repression and information that Putin’s spies have pursued since the invasion. They have been redoubling their efforts in fields that are resonant of their Soviet legacy; namely, circumventing sanctions and active measures targeted at Russia’s enemies wherever they are found (Gioe et al., 2020). Regarding the former, gathering advanced foreign technologies and products was a priority for the Cold War KGB. This included standard industrial espionage (the work of Line-X), the product of which was to bolster the Soviet military capacity and the civilian economy (Ingesson, 2023). But stealing secrets was accompanied by creative intelligence-led rouses to evade sanctions and to acquire Western goods that the USSR was barred from importing directly via multilateral arrangements like the Coordinating Committee on East-West Trade (‘COCOM’) that maintained lists of strategically sensitive items that were barred from expert to the Soviet bloc (Dylan, 2014). This applied particularly to controlling the export of advanced electronic technologies where western leaders rightly believed they enjoyed a significant advantage (Leese, 2023). Following the redoubling of sanctions on Russia after 2022, re-learning and re-applying these classic material procurement skills have become a crucial focus for Russian intelligence. Networks tasked with procuring and delivering denied technologies from the West and beyond have been uncovered, and government officials are working closely with industry to identify and avert attempts by Russian intelligence to subvert the sanctions system (Shalal and Lawder, 2023).

Despite the newly enhanced multilateral efforts to retard Russian illicit procurement, Russian intelligence has enjoyed notable successes with their shopping lists. An investigation by the Financial Times revealed that the FSB-run ‘Serniya Engineering’ managed through several front companies to purchase from EU suppliers machine tools, microchips, and sundry industrial supplies (Johnson et al., 2023). The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has brought charges against suspected FSB officers involved in this network; they had been working with US citizens. Breon Peace, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, noted of the charges that ‘as alleged, the defendants perpetrated a sophisticated procurement network that illegally obtained sensitive US technology to facilitate the Russian war machine’ (DOJ, 2022). Nor was this an isolated example. A NATO contractor was found to be collaborating with SVR procurement networks, providing sensitive military technology to among others, SVR’s Military Unit 33949 (DOJ, 2023). Invading Ukraine has instigated a renaissance for Putin’s spies in adapting to its exclusion from crucial supply chains: Old dogs, old tricks, new weapons.

The echoes of historical Soviet practice are also audible when examining Russian intelligence operations beyond espionage and sanctions-busting: namely, sabotage, assassinations, and the broader range of active measures. That many of these operations have been uncovered since the invasion of 2022 is at once both an illustration of the pressure under which Russian services are operating and the readiness of Western counterintelligence services to move against them or to expose their activities, but also their retained capacity to operate in hostile environments and continued willingness to take significant risks. Many examples of sabotage and murder bear this out. Russians have targeted critical digital and physical infrastructure in several European states (Psaropoulos, 2023). Simultaneously, assassination squads have been active in Europe among Russian journalists and emigres (Mackinnon, 2023). In February 2024, Maksim Kuzminov, a Russian helicopter pilot who had defected to Ukraine in his advanced aircraft, was murdered in Spain. His death was widely attributed to Russian intelligence organisations, either directly or more likely via a proxy (Chiappa, 2024). In engaging in these disruptive operations, Putin is in accord with his Soviet forebears by utilising the core skills of Russian intelligence as weapons in a war against enemies at home and abroad. The message he sends has historical echoes: regardless of where they may find themselves, those who display disloyalty or dissent are subject to punishment.

The murders and sabotage have been complemented by an ongoing and aggressive campaign of active measures. This is a concept that is frequently evoked by policymakers and observers, but often without precision. It is unpacked conceptually by scholars including Abrams (2016) and Rid (2021). At its heart, as underlined by Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB Major General who found refuge in the United States, is subversion. Subversive activities, he noted, were ‘the heart and soul of the Soviet intelligence’. ‘Active measures to weaken the West . . . to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies’ (Kalugin, 1998). As with many elements of Russian operations abroad, little has changed other than the technology employed to launch and circulate the active measures.

Much as their Soviet predecessors exploited social fissures in various western targets, the Russian services nudged the polarisation in US society further along before and after the 2016 US Presidential election. In a similar vein, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the SVR and GRU have been deploying their tried and tested techniques. The failures of elements of their active measures before the 2022 invasion were, in practice, of little or no significance beyond their local context (Dylan and Maguire, 2022). They have continued to target and exploit wedges in an opportunistic yet strategic way. For example, in a direct parallel to legacy campaigns, such as the Cold War practice of defacing synagogues in West Germany with swastikas (Gibney, 2020), the FSB likely sponsored a campaign to graffiti Stars of David on Paris buildings in the weeks following Hamas’ October attack on Israel as a way to sow anxiety and confusion (France24, 2024). Elsewhere, during Polish farmers’ demonstrations against Ukraine and the EU, which spanned 2023 and 2024, one of the demonstrators displayed a sign calling for Putin to come and clean up Poland and Brussels. He was later identified as a Russian plant with an extensive history of participation in pro-Russian actions. (Rybalchenko, 2024).

Across the Atlantic, SVR officers under diplomatic cover in the United States, Canada, and Europe were engaging in propaganda and active measures and have been identified using leaked databases (Smart, 2023). As was the practice with their Soviet forebears, rather than attempting to generate discord out of whole cloth, Russian spies have proven adept at exploiting existing divisions in western politics and civil society. As they did during the Cold War, ‘useful idiots’ are – wittingly or unwittingly – parroting Russian talking points and repeating falsehoods (The Economist, 2023). These include myriad false claims designed to undercut support for Ukraine, such as false claims about President Zelensky’s personal corruption and shopping sprees for luxury yachts with American taxpayer money intended to buy weapons, and to garner sympathy for Russia’s justification for the war (Robinson et al., 2023). While difficult to quantify, Russian information operations do seem to be contributing to a weakening of western resolve to support Ukraine, which serves Putin’s aims by affecting tangible policies, such as delays on financial and material support.

The success of Russia’s information machine in influencing elements of the US Republican Party has been particularly notable, even remarked upon by a fellow Republican, Michael Turner, Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who, in April 2024, commented that a number of his colleagues were ‘absolutely’ repeating Russian propaganda (Vargas, 2024). (N.B.: Although some of the disinformation was organically American, the Russians had seized upon and amplified it.) Indeed, as he made his remarks the tangible effect of diminishing US support was clear in the battlefield. It had become apparent that momentum had shifted to Russia owing to dwindling external material support for Ukraine. This achievement, from the Kremlin’s perspective, was an element of its overall strategy. Encouraging a softening of political support for Ukraine across the United States and certain members of NATO, combined with sanctions busting and sowing confusion, was designed to exhaust and isolate Ukraine and enable Russian forces to advance in eastern Ukraine. The US Congress managed to agree an aid package to support Ukraine in April 2024, but only after much rancour and significant delays, both of which have likely been stoked by cheap and seemingly impactful Russian active measures.

While their playbook is well known to observers, that knowledge does not seem to have diminished the success that Putin’s spies have enjoyed in certain areas. Nevertheless, many Russian operations are still exposed rather quickly and frequently. In Kevin Riehle’s (2024) judgement, this is because they embody one of three characteristics: ignorance, indifference, or incompetence. Riehle’s taxonomy chimes with the aforementioned Russian intelligence services characteristically high tolerance for risk taking. However, it would be a mistake to equate exposure with failure or incompetence necessarily. The strength of Russia’s approach is that it does not always matter whether particular cyber or information operations are exposed, clumsy, or crude. They are intended to contaminate the information ecosystem, to corrode trust in western or international institutions, to devalue the concept of good-faith political debate, and to polarise. While much mis- and disinformation in the West is organic, Putin’s spies amplify the lies, and it is nearly impossible to disentangle whether certain disinformation campaigns were started abroad and picked up domestically, or vice versa. In either scenario, they operate on a model of persistent engagement and the seeds of their disinformation campaigns grow best in polarised fields, which are ready to ready to receive their malign messages, leaving fact-checkers, public attribution, and measured debate in their wake. As in his war at home, Putin’s intelligence services abroad are crucial to his war effort and have achieved a measure of success.

Vulnerabilities remain in the Russian intelligence redux

As with the failure of net assessment explored in The Autocrat’s Intelligence Paradox, the successes of Russian intelligence that we have examined in this article are illustrative of an intelligence system and culture that is different from that of Western states. It clearly bears typically authoritarian characteristics, such as being mostly focused inwards rather than outwards and on security rather than insight. Furthermore, it bears the hallmarks of Putin’s rule, like ruthlessness and endemic corruption. But it retains long-term characteristics, ones that Putin appears to embrace, perhaps owing to his Chekist conditioning. In particular, it sustains and embodies a long-term strategic culture reaching back into the Soviet KGB and even the Tsarist Okhrana, manifested, for instance, in the enduring siege mentality (Skak, 2016). Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent political, economic, and military resistance to the occupation, this traditional Soviet/Russian perspective has been reinforced. Aggressive operations to resist what is perceived as an implacably hostile and aggressive outside world are both necessary and justified, even defensive when viewed through this prism. Russian intelligence, like their Soviet forebears, were always better at doing – collecting intelligence, recruiting agents, employing useful idiots, domestic repression, and running active measures – than at assessing the information they worked so hard on obtaining, much less presenting it without spin to political powers. Viewed from this perspective, the rapid and aggressive reassertion of Putin’s spies after the initial, unsuccessful lunge for Kyiv is perhaps as unsurprising as the initial analytical failure to warn Putin that his original plan to reorient Kyiv by force was beset with faulty assumptions.

Nevertheless, despite their recovery from the mistakes of early 2022, Putin’s spies remain under significant pressure while operating in western countries that have mostly awakened from their previous passive or permissive attitudes to Putin’s spies. And, internally, they still operate in a stifling authoritarian context. While dedicated and aggressive Western counterintelligence and security measures have complicated things for Putin’s spies, Putin’s own shambles may invite his intelligence officers to consider the moral dimensions of their work. Western agencies anticipate that a number of Putin’s spies – including those who consider themselves Russian patriots – will view the unnecessary war, the financial effects of sanctions and isolation, the tarnishing of Russia’s image, and the decimation of a generation of Russian youth, as a destructive act, thus diminishing Russia rather than restoring any sense of greatness. Their route to resistance has been all but blocked at home, but they can still resist by doing what they can to undermine Putin. This is certainly the calculation in Washington and London. US CIA director Bill Burns suggested that American intelligence was not squandering the opportunity to clandestinely recruit disaffected Russian intelligence officers. His British counterpart, Richard Moore, the Chief of SIS, has also publicly invited Russian intelligence officers to be on the right side of history, offering protection and rewards for those who spill Putin’s secrets (Dylan et al., 2023b). This has probably borne some fruit and would also make a paranoid Putin even more so.

Like the secret police of any autocracy, Putin’s spies will continue to conduct to repress, to disrupt, to disinform, and to collect intelligence – in that order of priority. They do so effectively, given their long experience. Their mission in these respects is clear: Putin’s power is to be sustained, and his reality must dominate public discourse. To date, they delivered. Putin has grasped Russian civil society in a vice-like grip. Dissent is not tolerated, and the brave few who defy him face a technologically enabled security machine of significant power, reach, and ruthlessness. However, the success of his modern counterintelligence empire underlines a key weakness of Putin’s mode of statecraft: he has no other options. He well remembers what happened when Mikhail Gorbachev slightly eased the Politburo’s grip on society. Putin and his spies may have erred drastically in their judgement before launching their invasion, but the past 2.5 years of war have highlighted some of the ways that his intelligence and security machinery has risen the challenge, prolonging Putin’s rule, and with it the misery of the Russian, as well as the Ukrainian people.

Secure thus far, but not guaranteed

That Putin’s intelligence and security apparatus has secured him in power for at least two and a half years since the shambolic invasion of Ukraine is an indicator of the success of his model of autocracy, at least when viewed in regime security terms. His March 2024 sham-reelection to an unprecedented fifth term in power with record high of 88% of the ‘vote’ may suggest a tyrant relatively comfortable on his throne. But in Russian politics, the tables can be turned overnight, and Putin’s seemingly invulnerable facade may yet be a brittle one that masks deeper weaknesses that, like the Soviet Union, can collapse suddenly, revealing rotten foundations in the resulting rubble. All that can be judged about Putin’s indispensable services is that, through their aggressive, ruthless, pervasive, and occasionally clever activities at home and abroad, they have helped him to defy the odds and survive longer than some had expected, given the high social, military, diplomatic, and economic costs of his war in Ukraine. But past is not always prologue for Russian autocrats secured by their (counter)intelligence and security services. Even a competent intelligence and security apparatus is no guarantee of permanent insulation from unpopular policies or catastrophic military blunders. Despite Putin’s ostensibly absolute power as of mid-2024, Tsar Paul I (assassinated 1796), Tsar Alexander II (assassinated 1881), and Tsar Nicholas II (assassinated 1918) might remind Putin of the popular but ominous Russian proverb: ‘No one knows what the night prepares’.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was partially funded under the British Academy Global Professorship program.

ORCID iDs

Huw Dylan

David V. Gioe

Elena Grossfeld

Notes

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