An SUV or a truck with a heavy machine gun mounted in the trunk bed along with a three-man crew is an increasingly common sight on Russian roads. Grouped into mobile fire groups, their task is to shoot down the Ukrainian drones proliferating across the country’s airspace.
They also demonstrate the latest, extraordinary FSB effort to expand its growing empire, with the spy agency’s tentacles becoming ever-more evident as they reach across the authoritarian state.
Since July, articles praising those gun carriers have increasingly been appearing on Russian TV and pro-Kremlin media, even though they are uncomfortably reminiscent of footage from the Syrian war, when such trucks were ISIS’s favorite weapon. Heavy machine guns on open vehicles hardly scream reassurance in a police state, but the regime judges it wise to acknowledge this everyday reality, and dress it up the best it can.
The mobile fire groups began emerging across the country in the spring as Ukraine stepped up deep strike attacks on Russian targets. By July, reports of the formation of such teams came from Russian regions as far from the Ukrainian border as the Leningrad region, Karelia, North Ossetia, Siberia and Archangel.
It didn’t escape even pro-Kremlin media that the tactic isn’t very sophisticated: the cars used by the groups became nicknamed tachankas — a reference to the horse-drawn cart or wagon carrying a heavy machine gun pointing out the back that was widely used during the Russian Civil War of the early 20th century.
On the surface, it appears a motley, ad hoc attempt to find a solution to the looming Ukrainian drone threat. This is why some groups are staffed with army reservists who signed military contracts. Some act as part of established army units, and some, apparently, are not within the military at all; in early July, it became known that Gazprom had signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense to set up mobile fire teams tasked with “patrolling and protecting gas supply facilities.”
But here and there, the introduction of these new units also appears to be used by the FSB to build the agency’s own anti-drone empire.
In the occupied Donetsk region this spring, the mobile fire groups became an integral element of the regional air defense system, which was baptized, apparently in imitation of the Israeli system, as the “Donbas Dome”, and run by the Donetsk regional department of the FSB.
In the republic of North Ossetia in the Caucasus, the local FSB department formed the first mobile groups. And in the Krasnodar region, the governor has been urging private companies to help create the mobile groups with, and under the oversight of, the regional FSB.
This is part of a wider plan. On August 11, FSB director Alexander Bortnikov made a strong claim for the agency’s expanding role in drone defenses. Speaking at the National Antiterrorist Committee, a sort of government coordination body, he called for “improving the system for countering drones” and adopting a “comprehensive approach,” which in Russian bureaucratic lingo usually means supervision by his agency.
The FSB boss’s interest in leading the fight against Ukrainian drone attacks is quite extraordinary even against the backdrop of exploding refineries and warehouses across Russia.
The main mission of the FSB as the country’s major security service was traditionally focused on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, e.g., preventing terrorist and sabotage attacks and exposing spies. Gunfire was generally left to others.
Russia already has plenty of means at its disposal, including its 2.4-million-strong Armed Forces and the National Guard (Rosgvardia), which is essentially another small army of approximately 370,000 people, and which includes numerous anti-drone units as well as a separate department in charge of protecting enterprises and companies.
Rosgvardia, which evolved from the Interior Ministry’s armed units, is equipped not only with modern assault rifles and machine guns, but also with armored vehicles, artillery, and drones. Rosgvardia’s main role is, essentially, to maintain political stability in the country by military means.
Now this role is being increasingly taken over by the FSB, and here, as in many other areas, the agency has been doing so by duplication; by creating substitutes for existing military units.
This is part of a much wider and more ambitious program. The FSB has also been expanding its powerful special forces, seemingly rivaling the military’s Special Operations Forces Command; the FSB also has its own air force including helicopters and transport aircraft, and since last summer the agency has been building its own nationwide system of prisons and prisoner transfer system, including its own boats and trains, parallel to the system operated by the Federal Prison Service.
It appears that the FSB, relying on Putin’s support, is using his trust to turn itself into a more militarized force. With more people, more money, more guns and more responsibility, the FSB is no longer merely a secret police force.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book , Our Dear Friends in Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in 2025.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
