As Russia’s war in Ukraine becomes increasingly costly with no end in sight, the Kremlin has kept tightening its grip over Russian society. Along with expanding repression, including of some officials and civil servants, and the silencing of negative reporting about the war and the economy, this suffocation has included, in recent months, frequent Internet shutdowns and draconian new restrictions on social media. For Russians themselves, these measures are a stark contrast to the moderate freedoms they were allowed before 2022, when the war began.
Less apparent, though, is the dramatic shift in domestic security doctrine that undergirds these efforts. For much of the first two decades of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s time in office, the reigning model of state security was fighting terrorism and extremism. The wars in Chechnya at the start of his time in office, for example, were framed as a “counterterrorism operation.” And up until 2022, major political opponents—among them the exiled oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and more recently, the opposition activist Alexei Navalny and his organization, as well as the Russian antiwar committee, launched by the opposition in exile—were branded as terrorists or supporters of terrorism.
As the war in Ukraine has become protracted, the Kremlin has needed a more aggressive strategy to keep perceived opposition figures—and ordinary Russians—in line. For the FSB, the main successor to the Soviet KGB, this has meant a change in focus from fighting terrorists to hunting down spies. Drawing on tactics perfected during the Soviet era, the security forces have led a campaign to root out any threats to regime power. And since foreign agents are potentially everywhere, the counterintelligence approach has allowed the FSB to penetrate more deeply into ordinary society, as well as into private-sector companies and state institutions themselves.
Yet rule by spy hunting and paranoia has also come with significant costs. As state institutions and private enterprises alike fear FSB repression, they have begun to withhold accurate data, avoid making decisions, and, in general, switch to survival mode. Among ordinary Russians and civil servants alike, proliferating social controls and prosecutions for treason have created a pervasive climate of mistrust and fueled a sense of paralysis. For the Kremlin, building an all-powerful security state could ultimately undermine its ability to govern.
SPIES EVERYWHERE
It is hard to overstate how widely the Putin regime has deployed counterintelligence tools since the invasion of Ukraine. First was the question of how to manage Russia’s elites, many of whom were less than enthusiastic about a direct confrontation with the West. To reassert discipline, the Kremlin not only ramped up its use of selective repression but often drew on anti-spying legislation to do so.
Selective repression had already been introduced before 2022 with the imprisonment of a number of governors, ministers, and high-ranking civil servants on charges of corruption and abuse of power. But in the years since, the security services have wielded this weapon in unprecedented ways. To date, they have arrested officials at a wide array of ministries—Digital Development, Defense, Energy, Science and Education, Industry and Trade, Internal Affairs, Transport, Culture, Emergency Situations, Development of the Far East and the Arctic—as well as members of the Moscow city government. They have also aggressively pursued charges of abuse of power, fraud, and embezzlement against employees of federal agencies such as the Penitentiary Service, the Service for Supervision of Natural Resources, the National Guard, the Deposit Insurance Agency, and the Customs Service.
The FSB has been involved in many of these prosecutions, supplying compromising information on targeted officials. Often, the targets appear to have been chosen to serve as a warning to others. Consider Maxim Parshin, a competent bureaucrat who served as deputy minister of digital communications, who was arrested in July 2023. Parshin oversaw Russia’s national import-substitution program, crucial for the war effort, and was on good terms with Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov. Nevertheless, to show that nobody was immune from its reach, the FSB chose to make an example of him. In October 2025, he was tried on dubious bribery charges and sentenced to nine years in jail. For other members of his ministry, it was clear that the FSB would not tolerate anything other than complete obedience.
Frequently, these prosecutions have invoked spy charges, with the FSB’s counterintelligence wing supplying the incriminating information. Yet the Department of Military Counterintelligence—formally responsible for detecting foreign spies within the armed forces—has also been involved in many cases, reflecting the growing dependence of Russian industries on military contracts.
The war has also transformed the way the FSB handles perceived political opponents of the regime. During Putin’s first 20 years in power, his political opponents were rarely charged with political crimes. Instead, they were typically accused of economic offenses such as embezzlement and fraud. That strategy allowed the Kremlin to publicly deny the existence of political repression while portraying the opposition as inherently corrupt.
But that approach changed shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In April 2022, the Commission on the Protection of State Sovereignty, which is under the aegis of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, announced plans to examine the activities of Russia’s so-called nonsystemic opposition—political groups and opposition parties that are not represented in or are excluded from the State Duma. Senators aligned with the Kremlin claimed that some of these figures were guilty of treason. In Russian law, treason is understood as a form of espionage—compromising or working against the Russian state to benefit a foreign power.
At that moment, Russian security forces had already arrested the opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. In October 2022, Kara-Murza was formally charged with high treason for speaking against the war in Ukraine at public events in Lisbon and Washington, D.C. (After two years in prison, he was released in a prisoner swap arranged by the Biden administration in August 2024.)
During the first months of the war, the charge of high treason was also expanded to apply to Russians who joined the enemy. The FSB used it to launch a large-scale operation enticing young Russians into communicating with Ukrainians—or with Russian units fighting alongside the Ukrainian armed forces—and accusing them of helping the enemy. FSB officers pretending to be Ukrainians or members of Russian units fighting for Kyiv contacted Russians with known antiwar stances and lured them into agreeing to either fight for or financially support Russia’s adversaries.
One of the most striking indications of the scale of this campaign is the explosion of high treason and espionage prosecutions since the start of the war. Before the invasion, Russia averaged ten to 15 treason cases annually. Since then, the number of prosecutions under Article 275 (high treason) has exploded. According to a UN report tracing Article 275 cases between 2022 and mid-2025, there were 167 convictions in 2023, 361 in 2024, and 232 for the first half of 2025. Today, the pace may be even higher: according to the exiled Russian human rights group Pervy Otdel, there were 143 cases involving state security in the first quarter of 2026 compared with 125 over the same period in 2025; in March, courts set a new record, issuing 48 verdicts—more than one per day. The average sentence for high 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
Although the counterespionage strategy marks a shift for Putin’s regime, it is not new. Many of its specific tactics have long been available, and the security services can draw on decades of Soviet experience using them. Russian security forces had already absorbed a counterespionage mindset as early as the Russo-Japanese war, in 1905. That war ended in a humiliating defeat by an enemy regarded as much weaker, and many tsarist officials blamed the outcome on Japanese spies and saboteurs.
During World War I, as the Russian army’s performance once again failed public expectations, entire social and ethnic groups were accused of helping Germany: these included Jews, foreign businessmen who remained in Moscow, and ultimately the tsarina herself because of her German origins. A direct telephone line was rumored to have been laid from Tsarskoye Selo—the tsar’s residence just outside St. Petersburg—to the German general staff to pass on military secrets. Authorities also accused revolutionaries, and the Bolsheviks in particular, of working for the enemy, with the Russian Provisional Government famously denouncing Vladimir Lenin as a “German spy” months before the October Revolution.
After 1917, the Bolsheviks aimed to destroy everything they inherited from the ancien régime—except Russia’s spy mania. The intervention of Allied troops on the White Russian side in the Russian Civil War deepened Bolshevik paranoia, and Bolshevik leaders concluded that hostile powers would always seek to destroy Russia by cultivating internal enemies. The result was a fortress mentality: the belief that the Soviet state was permanently encircled by external enemies seeking to act through domestic collaborators.
Early on, the Soviet security services developed the concept of “counterintelligence coverage”: military units, state institutions, and key Soviet industries were to be kept “covered” by counterintelligence agents to prevent foreign intelligence penetration. As a security strategy, it was expansive, stressing intrusive surveillance and preemptive action rather than reactive investigation. To be effective, it required the permanent presence of security service operatives within supervised institutions. The Kremlin considered this fully justified given the perceived existential nature of the threat. After developing it in the 1920s, the Soviets continued this strategy through World War II, Stalin’s death, and the thaw that arrived with his successor, Nikita Khrushchev.
Soviet counterintelligence doctrine even survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. When Putin became director of the FSB, in 1998, he set up the powerful new Department of Economic Security, with his close ally Nikolai Patrushev as head. Although its mandate was to bring the oligarchs to heel—a task unlike anything its predecessor, the Soviet KGB, had ever been charged with—it still drew on this long Soviet tradition. Thus, the department included counterintelligence teams to supervise industry, transport, and the financial system.
By the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, counterintelligence coverage was already being used as a broader tool of social control. But the war gave the FSB the opportunity to apply it across virtually every sphere of Russian political, military, and economic life. In this sense, the FSB did not need to reinvent this strategy; it could hugely intensify and extend practices that were already embedded in Russia’s security architecture.
For the security services, counterintelligence coverage has served a double function. On the one hand, it gives Putin an effective means to ensure regime stability and strengthen his power at home. But for the FSB, the coverage has also provided an opportunity to expand its own influence across the government and the administrative state. And it also seems to be working: despite more than four and a half years of war, the elites have been harassed into complete obedience, and there are hardly any signs of open dissent.
NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS
Yet the spy-hunting approach has created a paradox. The same practices that have allowed the Kremlin to relentlessly tighten its political control are also undermining the state’s capacity to govern. For one thing, in its effort 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 form the basis of prosecutions. And in the face of this unaccountable state, Russian bureaucrats, the elites, public institutions, and private organizations have resorted to self-censorship and are increasingly reluctant to release information about potentially unpopular facts or events.
Russian industries’ ties to the military have exacerbated the situation. As wartime demand grows, private companies often feel compelled to take part in military ventures or dual-use projects that serve military aims. But these contracts bring with them counterintelligence oversight, which in turn may expose industry leaders to accusations of high treason if they fall behind schedule or run over budget. The FSB can now be unleashed to discipline them, in Stalinist fashion. On July 30, for example, the FSB’s department of counterintelligence coverage of industry arrested the deputy CEO and two top executives of Gazprom Energoholding, a subsidiary of Gazprom that is the largest operator of electric and thermal power assets in Russia, with 80 power plants across the country. The arrests, ostensibly for bribery, have sent a stark warning to Gazprom and the entire oil and gas industry, which faces a growing crisis of production and distribution as a result of war disruptions.
Facing similar scrutiny, Russian research institutions have become reluctant to share any information with external actors. Data that would ordinarily be considered benign—research findings, statistics, assessments, technical evaluations—are now treated as potential security liabilities. At the same time, universities, think tanks, and research centers have radically curtailed cooperation and contacts with foreign counterparts, not only because of Western sanctions, which have tightened visa rules and increased travel costs but also out of fear of the security services. In June 2025, Putin signed a law requiring all Russian organizations pursuing scientific, scientific-technical, and technology development that involves foreign participation to submit detailed reports to a database run by the FSB. Participation in such projects is also contingent on FSB approval.
The logic of relentless security oversight has also radically curtailed the release of even routine statistics. In 2025, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) ceased publishing the country’s demographic data. This year, Rosstat stopped providing data on the salaries of civil servants, teachers, and doctors; on Russians’ spending on housing and utilities; and on household income and expenditure. In doing so, Rosstat followed the example of at least 14 other state agencies that have stopped publishing statistics since the start of the full-scale war. The prosecutor general’s office has stopped updating crime data; the Treasury has ceased publishing detailed budget information; and the central bank has restricted disclosure of international reserves. Meanwhile, the government has extended the ban on publishing oil and gas production statistics that has been in effect since April 2023, and it has allowed banks and listed companies to withhold financial information. Officials’ annual income declarations, a standard requirement before the war, have disappeared altogether.
Sometimes the lack of data has been directly apparent in Kremlin statements. Take the drastic energy shortages in Crimea. Local reporting this summer has shown that gasoline is in stock in only one to two percent of gas stations—contrary to what Putin announced in mid-July, when he assured Crimeans that a “protected system” was being put in place to provide the peninsula with a steady supply of gas, a system that “the enemy would find really difficult to reach.” In fact, there is no evidence of any such system, and it seems likely that Putin has not been briefed on the actual situation.
BITING THE HAND
Ever since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when faced with a trade-off between greater control and more effective governance, the Kremlin has consistently chosen greater control. As a result, many of the ministries and agencies that are crucial to the war effort and keeping the economy afloat under sanctions—including the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Digital Development, in charge of the national program of import substitution for Western technologies—have themselves become targets of selective repression.
It should hardly be surprising, then, that Russia is experiencing a severe shortage of cloud computing and data-storage infrastructure. Both require rapid national solutions to Russia’s data center crisis, which is driven by obsolete equipment and energy grid limits. And because of sanctions, these issues can no longer be addressed in the usual way, by acquiring newer technology in the West. So companies and investors are hesitating to invest—out of fear that the solutions they would suggest, involving international technology, would trigger an FSB backlash.
This has been one lesson of working with Cloudflare, the American technology company many Russian websites previously relied on. Cloudflare is popular in Russia because it helps websites load more quickly by connecting users to the nearest server. Since the summer of 2025, however, Russian censors have been trying to limit access to Cloudflare services. And the situation has gotten much worse since June 2026, when the FSB accused Cloudflare of working with U.S. intelligence. That accusation, which could imply further arrests, has put a chill on the entire Russian telecom industry.
Undeniably, the counterintelligence model has helped the Kremlin achieve its immediate political goals. But these advantages have come at a steep price. Officials stop reporting problems before they become crises. Regional authorities avoid initiative unless explicitly ordered. Researchers, statistical agencies, and businesses withhold information that could attract official scrutiny. And civil servants throughout the government set aside efficient administration in deference to anticipated orders from above.
For the Kremlin today, the risk of elite paralysis is real: it now extends beyond the research and expert community to top officials and leaders of the industries in Moscow and the regions. By eroding the feedback loop that every stable government—even the most authoritarian—needs to stay in power, the Putin regime is becoming less capable of understanding the real condition of Russia. And that could, in the long run, make Putin far more vulnerable to a true political crisis.
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