The most striking feature of the past four years for Russia’s security and intelligence agencies is that they have emerged largely intact, in terms of both leadership and structure.
This is all the more notable given that the failure of Russia’s initial attack was blamed in part on the failure of its spies to understand Ukraine’s capabilities and undermine them.
Despite all the talk in and after 2022 among Kremlin supporters about the need to return to Stalin-era methods — famously marked by sudden and dramatic changes, often ending in the Gulag for those who fell out of favor — Putin’s security and intelligence agencies have largely kept their formal names, and the same leaders they had four years ago
In 2026, the FSB, GRU and SVR are led respectively by Alexander Bortnikov (since 2008), Igor Kostyukov (since 2018), and Sergei Naryshkin (since 2016). The only major change took place at the Security Council, but it had more to do with finding a position for Sergei Shoigu, a disgruntled defense minister, rather than with making major changes in the security and intelligence community.
This stands in sharp contrast to Stalin, who created two new secret services during the war — the NKGB and SMERSH — while dissolving an organization responsible for sabotage, espionage and subversive operations, the Komintern. Stalin also constantly reshuffled the leadership of his agencies: military intelligence alone saw three chiefs during the war.
Unlike Stalin, Putin made the conscious decision to avoid dramatic institutional changes or conduct repression against his security and intelligence agencies, despite their multiple failures. He very clearly did consider a bloodbath (either literal or figurative) in the early days as Russian armored columns were first halted outside Kyiv and then withdrew.
The Fifth Service of the FSB, in particular, had given him disastrously inaccurate briefings on the prospects for success at the beginning of the invasion and senior officers were detained. He also chose not to punish anyone in the FSB or GRU for allowing Yevgeny Prigozhin’s humiliating mutiny to unfold in the summer of 2023. In the meantime, a growing number of Russian generals were assassinated or wounded, and yet nobody was held accountable in the departments charged with protecting them.
Despite this, Putin has borrowed from Stalin’s modus operandi, with several big changes clearly drawing inspiration from the past. The agencies have unleashed an unprecedented level of spy mania on Russian society, and the number of high treason cases has risen exponentially. After the full-scale invasion, prosecutions under Article 275 (high treason) surged to 167 verdicts in 2023, 361 in 2024, and 232 by July 2025, according to a UN report published in September. Before the invasion, Russian authorities typically investigated just 10–15 treason cases per year.
As hunting down spies and saboteurs has traditionally been the domain of the FSB, these changes have strengthened the agency’s position to an unprecedented level. This has contributed to the broad repression of society and its elites, which have drifted into complete obedience bordering on apathy and depression.
The definition of treason was also changed, and in a very Stalinist manner. First, the Kremlin begun to refer to the political opposition as traitors — most notably with the opposition and anti-war politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for high treason in 2023 (he was swapped the following year).
Next in the security state’s crosshairs were defectors. In the summer of 2022, an amendment to the criminal code designated any act of “switching to the enemy’s side during military operations” as high treason, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
This change reflects a century-old paranoia of the Kremlin regime. Since the 1917 revolution, Russia has produced a disproportionately high number of defections, a pattern reinforced by the traumatic experience of World War II, when thousands of Red Army soldiers switched sides to the Germans — a phenomenon that became known as the Vlasovtsy.
Putin himself addressed this paranoia in March 2024, when he spoke about Russian military units fighting on the side of Ukrainian forces, comparing them to the Vlasovtsy. He vowed: “We will punish them without a statute of limitations, wherever they are.” Less than two months later, a Russian helicopter pilot and defector, Maxim Kuzminov, was assassinated in a parking garage in Spain.
Inside the country, many of those prosecuted for switching sides never made it to Ukraine. They fell victim to FSB sting operations — the agency’s operatives reached out to Russians, pretending to represent Russian volunteer military groups in Ukraine. Its central aim — to intimidate — was by and large pretty successful: the number of Russian defections has not been high enough to create a vulnerability for the Kremlin regime.
Taking another leaf from the Stalinist playbook, the Kremlin began portraying all its opponents as terrorists. Last year, several Russian political organizations in exile—including Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and the Anti-War Committee—were accused of terrorism, either designated as “terrorist organizations” or charged with plotting a coup and organizing a terrorist entity. This move mirrored Stalin’s approach to Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev — their show trials claimed that their supporters had embraced individual terror against the leaders of the regime as the “main method” of fighting Soviet power.
Putin has used the Stalinist secret police’s methods as a menu rather than a bible. He and his agents have used whatever they felt is best, something that has changed the agencies in a very dramatic way — it made them far more aggressive than they ever were, both inside the country, and their operations abroad.
According to the collective outlook of the secret police, the humiliating Russian defeats of 1941 were excused by Stalin’s repression against spy agencies and the military. This time there has been no repeat, and this reinforces their confidence: they believe the president has their back — after all, he has chosen not to punish them for their mistakes.
Putin’s reasoning has been shaped by another historic trauma, the democratic changes of the 1990s. Many of his KGB colleagues took the view that reform or criticism of the security services during a crisis only weakens them. Since the present war represents the biggest political crisis since 1991, there is a strong predisposition not to rock the boat.
Putin and his spies share the very dark assumption that a lost war would cause the collapse of the state, the country, and the agencies themselves.
The traumatic legacy of the 20th century plays a crucial role in this thinking. According to this narrative, the Russian empire was destroyed by revolutionaries in collusion with the treacherous West during World War I; and defeat in the Cold War, along with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and nearly destroyed the KGB.
In applying that logic, in a game with stakes so high, no methods — from sabotage to subversion — appear to be off limits.
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 Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in June.
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.
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