As Russia’s war in Ukraine becomes increasingly costly and its end is in sight, the Kremlin continues to tighten its grip on Russian society. Along with expanding repression, including against some state officials and bureaucrats, and silencing negative reporting on the war and the economy, this pressure has in recent months included frequent internet outages and new draconian restrictions on social media. For Russians themselves, these measures stand in stark contrast to the relatively moderate freedoms they enjoyed before the war began in 2022, write Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan for Foreign Affairs.
Less obvious, however, is the dramatic shift in the domestic security doctrine that underlies these efforts. For much of the first two decades of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule, the leading model for state security was the fight against terrorism and extremism. The wars in Chechnya early in his reign, for example, were presented as a "counterterrorism operation." By 2022, the Kremlin’s main political opponents—among them the exiled oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and later the opposition activist Alexei Navalny and his organization, as well as the exiled opposition-founded Russian Anti-Government Committee—— were declared terrorists or supporters of terrorism.
As the war in Ukraine dragged on, the Kremlin needed a more aggressive strategy to keep perceived opposition figures — as well as ordinary Russians — under control. For the Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor to the Soviet KGB, this meant a shift in focus — from fighting terrorists to hunting down spies. Using tactics honed during the Soviet era, the security forces began a campaign to root out any threats to the regime’s power. And because potential foreign agents could be found anywhere, the counterintelligence approach allowed the FSB to penetrate much deeper into ordinary society, private companies, and state institutions themselves.
But ruling by hunting down spies and instilling paranoia also comes at a significant cost. As both state institutions and private businesses fear FSB reprisals, they have begun to withhold accurate data, avoid decision-making, and generally go into survival mode. Among ordinary Russians and civil servants, increasing social control and prosecutions for treason have created a pervasive atmosphere of distrust and heightened feelings of paralysis. For the Kremlin, building an all-powerful security state could ultimately undermine its ability to govern.
Spies Everywhere
It is difficult to overestimate the extent to which Putin’s regime has used counterintelligence tools since the invasion of Ukraine. The first question was how to control the Russian elite, much of whom was not particularly enthusiastic about direct confrontation with the West. To restore discipline, the Kremlin has not only intensified the use of selective repression, but has also frequently resorted to anti-espionage legislation.
Selective repression was introduced even before 2022, with the imprisonment of a number of governors, ministers, and high-ranking civil servants on charges of corruption and abuse of power. In the years that followed, however, the security services have used this weapon in an unprecedented manner. So far, they have arrested representatives of a wide range of ministries — digital development, defense, energy, science and education, industry and trade, internal affairs, transport, culture, emergencies, development of the Far East and the Arctic — as well as members of the Moscow city government. They are also aggressively pursuing allegations of abuse of power, fraud, and embezzlement against employees of federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Federal Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Guard, the Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Customs Service.
The FSB has been involved in many of these prosecutions, providing compromising information about targeted officials. It often seems that the aim was to use them as a warning to others. A case in point is that of Maxim Parshin — a competent civil servant who was deputy minister of digital communications and was arrested in July 2023. Parshin headed Russia’s national import substitution program — crucial to the military effort — and was on good terms with Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov. Nevertheless, the FSB chose to make him a showpiece to demonstrate that no one is beyond its reach. In October 2025, he was tried on dubious bribery charges and sentenced to nine years in prison. For the rest of his ministry, the message was clear: the FSB would tolerate nothing less than complete obedience.
In many cases, these prosecutions involved espionage charges, with the FSB’s counterintelligence unit providing the incriminating information. In a number of cases, the Department of Military Counterintelligence — the structure officially responsible for uncovering foreign spies in the armed forces — was also involved. This reflects the growing dependence of Russian industry on military contracts.
The war also changed the way the FSB treated perceived political opponents of the regime. During the first 20 years of Putin’s rule, his political opponents were rarely charged with political crimes. Instead, they were usually charged with economic wrongdoings such as embezzlement and fraud. This strategy allowed the Kremlin to publicly deny the existence of political repression while portraying the opposition as inherently corrupt.
However, this approach changed soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In April 2022, the Federation Council’s Committee for the Protection of State Sovereignty — the upper house of the Russian parliament — announced plans to investigate the activities of the so-called non-systemic opposition in Russia: political groups and opposition parties that are not represented or are excluded from the State Duma. Senators close to the Kremlin have said that some of these figures are guilty of treason. Under Russian law, treason is understood as a form of espionage — actions that compromise or work against the Russian state for the benefit of a foreign power.
By that time, Russian security forces had already arrested opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. In October 2022, Kara-Murza was formally charged with treason for his public statements against the war in Ukraine in Lisbon and Washington. (After two years in prison, he was released in August 2024 in a prisoner exchange arranged by the Joe Biden administration.)
In the early months of the war, the treason charge was expanded to include Russians who joined the enemy. The FSB used it to launch a large-scale operation in which it lured young Russians into communicating with Ukrainians or with Russian units fighting on the side of the Ukrainian armed forces, then accused them of aiding the enemy. FSB officers posing as Ukrainians or members of Russian units fighting on the side of Kiev contacted Russians known for their anti-war stances and enticed them to agree to either fight for Russia’s opponents or provide them with financial support.
One of the most striking indicators of the scale of this campaign is the explosive increase in treason and espionage cases since the beginning of the war. Before the invasion, Russia registered an average of 10-15 treason cases per year. Since then, the number of prosecutions under Article 275 — for high treason — has increased sharply. According to a UN report tracking Article 275 cases between 2022 and mid-2025, there were 167 convictions in 2023, 167 in 2024, and 167 in 2025. 361, and in the first half of 2025 — 232. Today, the pace may be even higher: according to the human rights organization "First Department" based outside Russia, there were 143 state security-related cases in the first quarter of 2026, compared to 125 in the same period in 2025; in March, courts set a new record, handing down 48 verdicts — more than one a day. The average sentence for treason is 15 years and five months. Many of these cases would not have qualified as treason under the pre-war legal framework.
"Stalin's "Big Brother"
While the counterintelligence strategy represents a change for Putin’s regime, it is not new. Many of its specific tactics have long been around, and the security services can draw on decades of Soviet experience in using them. Russian security forces have adopted a counterintelligence mindset since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. That war ended in a humiliating defeat by an opponent considered far weaker, and many tsarist officials blamed the outcome on Japanese spies and saboteurs.
During World War I, when the Russian military’s performance again fell short of public expectations, entire social and ethnic groups were accused of aiding Germany. Among them were Jews, foreign businessmen who had remained in Moscow, and eventually even the empress herself, because of her German ancestry. It was rumored that a direct telephone line was laid from Tsarskoye Selo — the tsar’s residence near St. Petersburg — to the Russians. to the German General Staff to pass on military secrets. The authorities also accused revolutionaries, especially the Bolsheviks, of working for the enemy, with the Provisional Government of Russia declaring Vladimir Lenin a — the belief that the Soviet state was constantly surrounded by external enemies who sought to act through their collaborators inside the country.
Early on, the Soviet security services developed the concept of "counterintelligence cover": military units, state institutions, and key Soviet enterprises were to be "covered" by counterintelligence agents to prevent infiltration by foreign intelligence services. As a security strategy, it was comprehensive, emphasizing intrusive surveillance and preventive action rather than investigation after a violation had occurred. To be effective, it required a constant presence of security service personnel in the institutions being monitored. The Kremlin considered this entirely justified given the perceived existential nature of the threat. Having developed it in the 1920s, the Soviets continued to employ this strategy throughout World War II, after Stalin’s death, and during the “thaw” that followed his successor, Nikita Khrushchev.
Soviet counterintelligence doctrine survived even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When Putin became director of the FSB in 1998, he created a powerful new Directorate for Economic Security, headed by his close ally Nikolai Patrushev. Although its task was to bring the oligarchs under control — something its predecessor, the Soviet KGB, was never tasked with — it continued to build on this long-standing Soviet tradition. Therefore, the government includes counterintelligence teams to monitor industry, transportation, and the financial system.
By the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, "counterintelligence cover" was already being used as a broader tool for social control. However, the war gave the FSB the opportunity to apply it to virtually every sphere of Russian political, military, and economic life. In this sense, the FSB does not need to invent a new strategy; it can simply significantly strengthen and expand practices that are already deeply rooted in the Russian security architecture.
For the security services, counterintelligence cover serves a dual function. On the one hand, it gives Putin an effective means of ensuring regime stability and consolidating his power within the country. But for the FSB, this cover also provides an opportunity to expand its own influence over the government and the state administrative apparatus. And it seems to be working: despite more than four and a half years of war, the elites have been forced into complete submission, and there are almost no signs of open dissent.
The bad news is that there is no news
Yet the spy-hunting approach creates a paradox. The same practices that allow the Kremlin to relentlessly tighten political control also undermine the state’s ability to govern. In its quest to turn any perceived political threat into a potential act of treason, the state no longer relies on legal norms but on secret FSB assessments, which often become the basis for criminal prosecutions. Faced with this unchecked state, Russian officials, elites, public institutions, and private organizations have resorted to self-censorship and are increasingly reluctant to publish information about potentially unpopular facts or events.
The ties of Russian industry to the military further complicate the situation. As military demand grows, private companies often feel compelled to participate in military initiatives or dual-use projects that serve military purposes. But these contracts bring with them counterintelligence surveillance that could expose industry executives to treason charges if they fall behind schedule or go over budget. Now the FSB could be brought into action to discipline them in a Stalinist fashion. On July 30, for example, the FSB’s counterintelligence department for industry surveillance arrested the deputy CEO and two senior executives of Gazprom Energoholding, a subsidiary of Gazprom, which is Russia’s largest operator of electricity and district heating assets, with 80 power plants across the country. The arrests, made on bribery charges, sent a clear warning to Gazprom. and the entire oil and gas industry, which is facing a deepening crisis in production and distribution as a result of war-induced disruptions.
Faced with such scrutiny, Russian research institutions have become reluctant to share information with outside organizations. Data that would normally be considered innocuous — research results, statistics, assessments, technical analyses — is now viewed as a potential security risk. At the same time, universities, think tanks, and research institutions have sharply limited their cooperation and contacts with foreign partners, not only because of Western sanctions that have tightened visa rules and increased travel costs, but also because of fear of the security services. In June 2025, Putin signed a law that requires all Russian organizations engaged in scientific, scientific-technical, and technological activities with foreign participation to submit detailed reports to a database managed by the FSB. Participation in such projects also depends on the approval of the FSB.
The logic of ruthless surveillance by the security services has also led to a sharp restriction on the publication of even routine statistics. In 2025, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) stopped publishing the country’s demographic data. This year, Rosstat also stopped providing data on the salaries of civil servants, teachers, and doctors; on Russians’ spending on housing and utilities; and on household income and expenses. In doing so, Rosstat follows the example of at least 14 other state agencies that have stopped publishing statistics since the beginning of the war. The Prosecutor General’s Office stopped updating crime data; the Finance Ministry stopped publishing detailed budget information; and the central bank limited the disclosure of data on international reserves. Meanwhile, the government has extended a ban on publishing statistics on oil and gas production, in effect since April 2023, and has allowed banks and publicly traded companies to withhold financial information. Annual income declarations for civil servants — a standard requirement before the war — have disappeared altogether.
Sometimes the lack of data is apparent even in Kremlin statements. Take, for example, the severe energy shortages in Crimea. Local publications this summer indicated that only 1-2% of gas stations had gasoline — contradicting Putin’s mid-July assurances to Crimeans that a “secure system” was being built to provide the peninsula with a steady supply of fuel — a system that “will be really hard for the enemy to reach.” In fact, there is no evidence of such a system, and it seems likely that Putin was not informed of the real situation.
Bite the hand that feeds you
Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when faced with the choice between greater control and more efficient governance, the Kremlin has consistently chosen greater control. As a result, many of the ministries and agencies that are key to the war effort and keeping the economy afloat despite sanctions — including the Defense Ministry and the Ministry of Digital Development, which is responsible for the country’s program to replace Western technology — have become targets of selective repression.
It is therefore hardly surprising that Russia is experiencing a severe shortage of cloud computing and data storage infrastructure. Both require rapid domestic solutions to Russia’s data center crisis, caused by aging equipment and power grid constraints. And because of sanctions, these problems can no longer be solved the old-fashioned way — by acquiring newer technology from the West. As a result, companies and investors are hesitant to invest — for fear that their solutions, which incorporate international technology, could provoke a backlash from the FSB.
That’s one lesson from working with the American technology company Cloudflare, whose services many Russian websites previously relied on. Cloudflare is popular in Russia because it helps websites load faster by connecting users to the closest server. Since the summer of 2025, however, Russian censors have been trying to restrict access to Cloudflare’s services. And the situation has worsened significantly since June 2026, when the FSB accused Cloudflare of working with American intelligence. The accusation, which could lead to more arrests, has sent shivers down the spine of the Russian telecommunications industry.
The counterintelligence-based model has undoubtedly helped the Kremlin achieve its immediate political goals. But these advantages have come at a high price. Officials stop reporting problems before they become crises. Regional authorities avoid taking the initiative unless they receive an explicit order. Researchers, statistical agencies, and companies withhold information that could attract the attention of the authorities. And civil servants throughout the administration put effective governance on the back burner, awaiting instructions from above.
For the Kremlin today, the risk of elite paralysis is real: it now extends beyond the scientific and expert community to include senior civil servants and industry leaders in Moscow and the regions. By destroying the feedback loop that any stable government—even the most authoritarian—needs to remain in power, Putin’s regime is becoming increasingly incapable of understanding the real state of Russia. And this could make Putin much more vulnerable to a real political crisis in the long run.