There is much talk about peace in Ukraine as US-brokered talks continue, and much skepticism. But if Vladimir Putin does sign a deal, there is one rarely voiced but critical question worth asking: how will Russian intelligence agencies respond?
The answer? It would taste like poison to the Russian security state. At the very least, it would refuse to stop increasingly aggressive shadow war operations abroad. A pause is possible, but renunciation of the sabotage, political assassination, and other dark arts is unimaginable.
How do we know? Look at recent history.
When the KGB-orchestrated coup d’état failed in Moscow in August 1991, leading to the swift collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin appeared fully committed to reforming the KGB. He went as far as splitting a monstrous, all-encompassing organization into several agencies.
But the division responsible for its offensive capabilities proved the most resistant to change, and the most resourceful.
The KGB’s foreign intelligence department, which became the SVR, went through a thorough rebranding. An academic with experience in the West, Evgeny Primakov, was made director and worked to make the agency look more like an academic institution or think tank than an intelligence service.
The SVR even made an institutional change that suggested it no longer regarded the US as Russia’s Main Adversary: its First Directorate, responsible for North America, was merged with the directorate covering Latin America. This sent a signal that things were no longer political — it was just about geography.
But when the CIA asked the SVR to cease its subversive operations in the US, what was known in KGB parlance as “active measures,” the reaction was far from straightforward.
SVR generals told the Americans that the “A Service” (responsible for active measures) had been disbanded, but it had not. It simply changed its name and became Department M, while the KGB’s active measures were renamed MS (Meropriyatiya Sodeystvia, or Assistance Measures/Operations). The same people who had run the service in the KGB continued to run it in the SVR.
As for military intelligence, the situation was, if possible, even worse. Despite the humiliation of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the GRU went wholly unreformed under Yeltsin. It kept its Soviet name, its Soviet traditions and its Soviet ways of working.
There was, however, some reshuffling following the abolition of the Communist Party’s role in the armed forces, and military intelligence absorbed offensive capabilities from other parts of the giant Soviet military apparatus.
For instance, the military’s psyops department had been part of GLAVPUR, the Chief Political Directorate, which was in charge of brainwashing the rank and file with Communist ideology. When GLAVPUR was disbanded, the psyops department was absorbed by military intelligence.
This completely changed its modus operandi. Whereas under GLAVPUR the unit was supposed to operate only on the battlefield during wartime, it became operational in peacetime.
Thanks to those maneuvers, the offensive capabilities of the KGB and military intelligence were not degraded by Yeltsin’s reforms. Even so, Yeltsin only operated with intelligence services that were partially mobilized.
It is quite different under Putin.
Branches tasked with offensive operations were greatly expanded, starting in 2008–2009. Within military intelligence, spetsnaz veterans were promoted to mission-planning roles, bringing their spetsnaz mentality with them.
Meanwhile, the Special Operations Forces (SSO) were formed and played a key role in the annexation of Crimea. After 2022, the GRU sabotage unit was elevated to departmental status, becoming the Department of Special Activity (SSD).
In the FSB, the units directly involved in military operations and warfare were also expanded and elevated. This included the Center for Special Purposes, which grew from two departments to five, including one based in Crimea.
The Internal Troops, which had been part of the Interior Ministry, were reorganized into the Rosgvardiya and turned into a second army, with its own tanks and heavy weaponry. Even the SVR became more militarized.
Unlike the war in Afghanistan, when the Soviet KGB was involved on a very limited scale, the Russian security services have been heavily involved in the war in Ukraine. This is thanks to a system of “rotation,” under which operatives from HQ and regional departments are regularly sent to the occupied territories on temporary attachment.
Russian veterans of the war in Ukraine also became a natural recruitment pool for departments of the FSB, including those operating abroad, and for other intelligence agencies.
This, together with the strengthening of the departments responsible for conducting sabotage and the growing militarization of all the agencies, makes it unlikely they will be happy to halt the operations that have made them so powerful.
Not that they are likely to challenge Putin directly. Instead, they would do everything they could to keep going by using their access to Putin, for instance, by briefing him in a way that would prompt him to restore sabotage as an option. That’s simply in the genetic make-up of Russia’s security state.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov 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 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.
