EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Russia’s intelligence services (RIS) have failed spectacularly in Ukraine: in planning, execution, and analysis, yet they will face no reckoning. Vladimir Putin cannot afford to hold the SVR, GRU, or FSB accountable because they are not merely instruments of the state; they are the pillars of his personal power. The RIS misled the Kremlin into believing Ukraine would fall in days, Europe would divide, and NATO would hesitate. Instead, they exposed the rot at the core of Russia’s national security system: corruption, internecine rivalry, and a profound detachment from reality. Understanding this dynamic matters for the West because it reveals not only how Russia fights its wars but how it fails, and how it will likely fight again.
As the war approaches its fourth year, the front lines have grown static, and speculation about an eventual end has returned. Certainly, the world hopes for peace and relief from the suffering that has defined Europe’s largest land conflict since 1945. Yet even when the drones stop flying, Ukraine’s struggle to rebuild will begin, and within the Russian government another kind of reckoning will unfold. The aggressor’s armed forces and intelligence services will take stock of losses and lessons learned. But unlike in the West, where failure invites inquiry and reform, Russia’s services are more likely to protect the system that failed them and pin any blame on each other.
Russian post-war accounting will not play out like we in the West might imagine. We are accustomed to commissions and legislative investigations after wars and major national security events, often resulting in harsh criticism for various agencies, and sweeping reforms. In Russia, however, Putin will largely give the RIS a pass.
To understand why, it is important to understand the roles the RIS played in the war and in the Russian government more broadly. The SVR (the Foreign Intelligence Service), the GRU (the Main Intelligence Directorate - military intelligence), and the FSB (the Federal Security Service), serve first and foremost as Putin’s Praetorian Guard. Their primary responsibility is securing his regime and hold on power. Moreover, Putin rose up through the RIS ranks in the KGB, and later held the post of FSB Director. His feelings toward the RIS are hardly objective. The reputations of Putin and the services are inextricably linked. Anything that significantly tarnishes the highly cultivated myth of RIS omnipotence inevitably damages his own hold on power.
If Putin and the “siloviki” (strongmen) who make up his inner circle try to call the RIS to account for their performance when the fighting stops, the one thing all three services will argue is that the war was an absolute success. Each will extoll their roles with little regard for the number of Russian lives lost and military assets squandered. Going back to Tsarist and Soviet times, casualties and human suffering were never a mark for a war’s success or failure in Russia. The RIS will focus on territory gained, Ukraine’s membership in NATO being halted (from their optic), and the alliance, they will claim, weakened. They will ignore the addition of two capable new members to the alliance (Finland and Sweden), the doubling of the length of NATO’s border with Russia, and the resuscitation of NATO’s military spending and defense industrial base. Facts will not stop the RIS from claiming success with Putin. But it is useful to further break down some of their likely claims, and actual performance, by service.
The SVR: “Speak up Sergey!”
Among the RIS, and especially relative to the FSB, Putin has never been particularly fond of the foreign intelligence service, the SVR. Its claims of success on Ukraine will likely not impress him or the other siloviki much. Recall Putin’s public dressing down of SVR Director Sergey Naryshkin on Russian TV in the days before the invasion for indecisiveness: “Come on Sergey, speak up, speak plainly!” But Sergey did not speak up, nor make much of a difference in the war.
Since they do not have troops or special ops elements in the war (their main Spec-Ops team, ZASLON, is used more for protection abroad), the SVR will likely try to boast of the success of its “active measures” operations. This is the traditional term the Russians have used for covert influence and disinformation activities intended to weaken, confuse, or disrupt their adversaries. Their modern term, however, is to refer to them as “measures of support” (MS). The SVR has an entire “Directorate MS” devoted to this line of operational work: using troll farms, social media, cyber operations, and recruited agents of influence to meddle in the internal politics, public opinion, and elite decision-making of its adversaries to Russia’s advantage. The Russians believe their active measures contributed to their successes in the Georgia invasion in 2008 and occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014. They believed they confused and stunted the West’s response and, to a degree, they were right.
But the SVR will have trouble claiming active measures succeeded in the current Ukraine war. They will perhaps try to sell Putin that the SVR sowed confusion at critical policy decision points when the U.S. and its European allies were not always in sync—hesitation in providing this or that weapons system, unity or lack thereof at times on sanctions, asset seizures, etc. Their efforts, however, did not materially alter Russia’s failure to achieve its war aims. If they were effective at all, it was only in the margins. There will be no dramatic accounting for the SVR but expect to see the SVR’s relative influence decline among the RIS, a continuation of trend since Putin’s rise to power.
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GRU: Plowed into the Grinder, and Re-Special Purposed
The GRU will likely point to the various sabotage acts, conducted in Europe after the invasion, some successful but most not, including exploding packages, industrial arson, cable cuts in the Baltic Sea, and assassinations, or attempts at them. These are the purview of the GRU and its various numbered units, such as Unit 29155, which was behind both the attempted assassination of GRU defector Sergey Skripal in the UK in 2018, and likely also the thwarted assassination plot against the CEO of Germany’s Rheinmetall in 2024. The Lithuanian government is convinced the GRU also was behind the crash of a DHL plane that same year. But these actions failed in their primary mission, to intimidate and deter Europe and NATO from assisting Ukraine. If anything, the actions have only emboldened members to continue support for Ukraine.
Another shocking GRU failure, one heavily criticized in Russia’s pro-war blogosphere but receiving less attention in the West, was its squandering of precious, highly trained Spetsnaz units on the Ukrainian battlefield. There are nine Spetsnaz, or “Special Purpose,” brigades under the GRU’s 14th Directorate (roughly analogous to Tier 1 elements in the U.S. SOCOM). Nearly all were heavily deployed in Ukraine, and all suffered extremely heavy casualties. The planned decapitation strike against the Ukrainian leadership in the first days of the war, spearheaded by Spetsnaz units, was a complete and costly failure (the failed seizure of Hostomel airport was part of this). Many Spetsnaz were also used foolishly in frontal assaults and to plug gaps in forward lines when Russian “kontraktniki” (paid soldiers, but often supplemented in frontline units with conscripts) failed. GRU Spetsnaz have a storied history and culture. It will be hard for them to recover the reputation for being “elite” without notable successes to point to in Ukraine. They failed to impact the direction of the war in any significant way.
As with the SVR, the GRU will likely avoid any dramatic negative consequences. There will probably be some modest reorganizations, just as there have been since the collapse of the USSR. In fact, the GRU is technically not even called the GRU any longer. It was formally redesignated the “GU” (Main Directorate), although many stubborn officers still refer to themselves as “GRU-chniki.” One reorganization has already occurred since the war began, the standup of something called the Department for Special Tasks (SSD). Its function and exact composition are still not fully known, but it appears to combine various Russian-termed “direct actions” (e.g., assassinations, sabotage) units, such as Unit 29155, into a unified structure. The SSD is broadly equivalent to the CIA’s Special Activities Center in terms of covert action, but dwarfs it in size (and the CIA is bound by law not to carry out assassinations). The GRU is a mammoth bureaucracy and it will likely only grow more after the war.
FSB: Failed, But Still Putin’s Favorite
Despite their many failures, there will be few significant negative consequences for the FSB, which Putin once ran. In many ways, though, the FSB’s shortcomings in Ukraine were the most egregious and consequential. The FSB was in charge of the war’s planning, particularly the hybrid dimensions, or what Russian doctrine refers to more broadly as “non-contact war.” The FSB's lead for the Ukraine invasion was its Fifth Service, which heads up both operational analysis and reporting to the President on the war. The FSB has organizational primacy for RIS operations in the “near abroad,” i.e., the states of the former USSR, including Ukraine. In the pre-war planning phase, the Fifth Service was wrong about everything: wrong about Ukrainian resilience, wrong about how quickly and substantially Europe and NATO would react, and wrong about the FSB and Russian Armed Forces’ capabilities on the ground.
FSB Spetsnaz units Alpha and Vympel all participated in the war, but like their GRU cousins, they have not distinguished themselves. Still they are still frequently lauded in the Russian press for “actions that cannot be disclosed.” The FSB also has the lead for cyber operations against Ukraine with its 16th Center, but those cyber-attacks have not materially altered the direction of the war in Russia’s favor. The battle over bytes was not won in any way by Russian FSB hackers, whose ranks were bolstered by Russian criminal groups hacking for the state and their coffers.
The FSB will likely be the RIS agency most affected by the war. But instead of accountability for failure, its power and influence will likely only grow. First, because of all the services, the FSB, in its secret police role, is the critical player in securing Putin’s rule. In the bureaucratic pecking order, the FSB sits at the very top and will remain there. FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov holds the military rank of full General, and he is treated as such by Russian military generals, despite never having served in the military. Second, if there is a formal investigation or after-action when the fighting stops, the FSB will lead it, just as it did in the investigations of the 2002 Nord-Ost theater terrorist attack, the 2004 school seizure in Beslan, and the more recent Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in 2024, each of which involved breathtaking intelligence and operational failures, but did not have significant negative repercussions for the FSB. The FSB pretends to clean up after it performs incompetently.
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In conclusion, the one thing the West can count on is that the Russian services will continue to relentlessly compete with and back-stab one another. There is no “intelligence community” in Russia remotely similar to the one we have in the United States. The rivalries within our community pale in comparison. This presents opportunities to recruit personnel from all the RIS services, many of whom will have lost colleagues in the war for a cause and for leaders whose competence an increasing number of them will come to doubt. This and the pervasive corruption in Russia are still strong incentives for espionage against those who have led Russia down this disastrous path.
The RIS will not prevent another war for Russia; if anything, they will foment one. Before they do, the US and our allies must understand these failures, but also, and critically, the Russian services’ likely self-evaluation and the lessons they themselves will draw, or fail to draw, from those lessons. When the current war ends, Putin may plan another intervention or aggression--in Europe, again in Ukraine, or elsewhere. Before he does, we need to be ready to counter the next iteration of the FSB, GRU, and SVR tactics to encourage and support war. We can better do so by studying their playbook and some of their attempted actions, and dramatic failures.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
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