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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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE / OPINION — The July 2025 sanctioning and indictment by the United Kingdom of three units and 18 individuals affiliated with the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces - the GRU - highlighted clandestine sabotage and cyber operations by that service against communications lines and the Western transport and supply infrastructure critical to Ukraine’s war effort. "GRU spies,” British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said, “are running a campaign to destabilize Europe, undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and threaten the safety of British citizens."

In fact, GRU sabotage operations against targets in non-belligerent nations pre-date the current conflict and reflect Moscow’s use of sabotage as a tool of statecraft in both war and peace dating back to the Soviet era. During the Cold War, Soviet and Warsaw Pact planners, led by the KGB and GRU, created detailed lists of Western targets —bridges, power plants, rail hubs, fuel depots, pipelines, and communication lines. These operations emphasized covert acts made to look like accidents, aiming to demoralize adversaries and create political discord within the western alliance. To facilitate such operations, the GRU placed highly trained deep-cover “illegals” in target countries.

Fortunately, such plans were never fully actualized during the Cold War. In the post-Cold War era, we have not been so lucky. One GRU entity sanctioned by the UK - Unit 29155 - is assessed as having been responsible for the 2014 destruction of a shipment of Czech-origin 152mm artillery shells on route to Georgia and attacks that same year on a Czech ammunition depot. Officers of the same unit poisoned Russian defector Sergei Skripal in the UK in 2018.

The current Russian sabotage campaign is, however, being waged on a far larger – and potentially much more dangerous – scale than previously seen Russian. Since Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the GRU has engaged in extensive sabotage designed to disrupt the flow of Western aid to Ukraine, to demoralize that country, and to pressure its allies to reduce their support for Kiev. With a focus on entities supplying the Ukrainian military, these operations have targeted air, rail, maritime, and logistics supply chain, as well as energy infrastructure and undersea cables.

Most alarmingly, in 2024 Western intelligence detected a GRU-backed scheme to place incendiaries in air cargo packages destined for the UK, Poland, and potentially North America. In one incident, a magnesium-based device caused a fire on a plane in Leipzig, Germany. This was a method evolved from Cold War sabotage tradecraft. Other incendiary parcels were intercepted or ignited in warehouses in Poland and the UK. The Poles arrested four persons tied to this operation, which is believed to have been the work of the GRU.

Thankfully, plans to down or destroy civilian aircraft have thus far failed. But such plots—and their exposure—are indicative of Moscow’s willingness to accept considerable operational and political risk in targeting logistics and supply networks delivering Western support to Ukraine. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, this is an existential war. The Russian leader appears prepared to do whatever he believes necessary to hammer out something he can call victory. At minimum, this means establishing Russian control over the Ukrainian districts - Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—annexed by Moscow in 2022.

The friction surrounding any intelligence operation can lead to its failure no matter how well planned. But that peril is compounded when the intelligence service concerned has a well-deserved reputation for mounting operations both conceptually imprudent and flawed in their implementation. Soviet and Russian espionage history is rife with GRU operations that failed due to the sloppy tradecraft employed, a reality attested to in extensive open source reporting on that service’s supposedly secret operations by Bellingcat and others.

There can be no doubt that Putin, as a former KGB officer and Director of the Russian FSB, is aware of the GRU’s checkered operational history. The fact that he, nonetheless, sanctioned that service’s sabotage campaign speaks to the importance the Russian leader ascribes to impeding Western military assistance to Ukraine. At the same time, Putin surely also understands that his sabotage campaign might undermine his policy goals. Ongoing GRU sabotage operations – particularly if they result in a high-profile attack – can rebound against Russia’ goal of seeking to undermine Western backing for Kiev. A historical example of a sabotage campaign undertaken against non-belligerent targets by a military intelligence service with less than stellar operational acumen is instructive in this regard.

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Early on July 30, 1916, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history rocked Black Tom Island, located in what is now Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey. A freight terminal and munitions depot storing approximately 2 million pounds of ammunition and explosives awaiting shipment to World War I’s Allied powers (primarily Russia and Britain) blew up with a force that measured between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Richter scale. Guards had noticed fires breaking out on the pier shortly after midnight. Despite efforts to raise the alarm and call firefighters, the blaze eventually reached massive stores of explosives, triggering the first and largest explosion. Additional blasts followed as the blaze spread through adjacent railcars and barges. Debris and shrapnel rained down across the region, injuring hundreds and sending residents fleeing their homes. Windows up to 25 miles away were broken and the Statue of Liberty was damaged, her torch closed to visitors thereafter. The catastrophe caused over $20 million in property damage (equivalent to over $580 million today). At least three adults and one child are known to have been killed, but some estimates put the toll much higher.

American investigators initially thought the disaster resulted from carelessness. There were, however, suspicions from the outset that it resulted from an act of sabotage perpetrated by German Military Intelligence. The only surprise was how long it took the U.S. to attribute responsibility to the Kaiser’s men given the many operational errors they made while carrying out a sabotage campaign against targets in what was then a non-belligerent U.S.

From the outset of World War I, the Germans were confronted with a conundrum as they sought to keep Washington neutral while at same time closing off the flow of food and war materiel from the U.S. to the Allied Powers. The strategy Berlin adopted – to rely on diplomacy to deal with the former challenge and on sabotage to achieve the latter objective – was mutually contradictory unless those sabotage operations were executed with perfect deniability. Unfortunately for the Kaiser, perfection is unachievable in clandestine operations.

Shortly after the 1914 assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Berlin named the German Ambassador in Washington, Johann Count von Bernstoff, as Germany’s espionage and sabotage chief for the Western Hemisphere. This was not a wise choice. Not only was the Ambassador ill-suited to the task, his involvement in intelligence operations, coupled with Germany’s initiation of unrestricted submarine warfare the following year, hamstrung Bernstoff’s ability to fulfill his diplomatic function as he was thrust into the center of a diplomatic firestorm that grew in intensity and culminated in America’s declaration of war against Germany in 1917. Those chosen to assist the Ambassador likewise proved unsuited to the task.

Military attaché Captain Franz von Papen - who, as Germany’s Chancellor in the early 1930’s, would play a key role in dissolving the Weimar Republic and paving the way for Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor - and Naval attaché Captain Karl Boy-Ed operated brazenly out of a commercial office in New York. They set up a proprietary company which ostensibly did business with the intent of providing munitions to the Allied Powers. Their intent, in fact, was exactly the opposite.

Like the GRU, which has blended sabotage operations with cyberattacks on telecommunication and transportation networks in an apparent attempt to disrupt supply lines and undermine public support for Ukraine, German military intelligence disseminated propaganda to counter information unfavorable to their country. Operatives also manufactured counterfeit U.S. passports for ethnic Germans returning to the Fatherland to fight. Papen and Boy-Ed, however, concentrated most of their attention on directly impeding shipments of munitions and food from America to the Allied Powers.

To that end, the Germans sought to recruit agents to assist with sabotage and subversion operations. Americans of German heritage and Irish-Americans, with their innate disdain for Britain, were particularly susceptible to their approaches. Similarly, as the recent Polish arrest of a Colombian national suspected of involvement in two arson attacks on warehouses in that country attests, the GRU has used third country nationals as well as local recruits in their sabotage operations.

Much like the GRU operatives behind the current sabotage campaign, the inexperience of Papen and his colleagues, as well as the bad tradecraft they employed, were evident from the outset. Their involvement in a plot to dynamite the Welland Canal linking Lakes Erie and Ontario - through which raw material needed to produce American munitions transited - was detected by the New York City Bomb Squad. This was not surprising in that they, among other things, had used material linked to a German firm in constructing the explosive device to be used; used the so-called German Club in New York – an establishment that doubled as a bordello - as a safe house (employing a site of criminality for espionage purposes being an operational faux pas); and used the office of a German-run commercial investigative agency for operational purposes (thus coming under suspicion for the wrong reasons).

The financier for German operations in the U.S., Dr. Heinrich Friedrich Albert, committed the cardinal sins of leading surveillance to a meeting with an agent and then leaving a briefcase filled with telegrams from Berlin, communications from German agents and financial records on a New York tram. Some of the material in the briefcase, which was picked up by an alert surveillant, was passed by the White House to The New York Sun. That paper’s publication of it led to the 1915 recalls of Papen; his colleague, Boy-Ed, and Albert to Germany.

As intended, this press reporting also lent support to President Woodrow Wilson’s previously voiced suspicion that he was “sure the country is honey-combed with German intrigue and infested with German spies.” Although Wilson sought to modestly augment the capabilities of the two agencies then charged with monitoring German spies and agents in the U.S. - the U.S. Secret Service and the predecessor to the modern FBI, the Bureau of Investigation – their capacity to do so remained woefully inadequate. Unfortunately, as has been the case with the current GRU campaign, diplomatic responses and legal sanctions did not deter the Germans.

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Boy-Ed’s successor, Captain Franz von Rintelen, arrived in the U.S. in April 1915 on a doctored Swiss passport. He would prove the driving force behind the sabotage campaign, injecting energy - if not operational acumen - into it. Leading a network of intelligence officers infiltrated into the U.S., Rintelen sought to foment strikes, firebomb shipping, instigate embargoes against the Allied Powers, distribute pacifist propaganda, foment revolution in Mexico, and purchase munitions for the German government. His most important mission, however, was to impede or, if necessary, sabotage shipments of arms and munitions from America to the Allied Powers. Rintelen was clear about his intent, saying: “Munitions are my job - what I can't buy I'll blow up, kaput schlagen!"

He immediately set to work, directing a string of attacks against arms shipments to the Allied powers. Employing a tactic echoed by the GRU, his agents placed cigar-shaped incendiary devices in the holds of ships carrying weapons and munitions. The resulting investigations resulted in several of the saboteurs being identified. Soon, operational friction had begun to catch up with Rintelen himself. His involvement in a wide array of operations meant that the exposure of any one of them could lead to the compromise of all the others. The possibility this could occur was made certain by a string of operational errors.

Those mistakes included Rintelen’s personal interaction with German officials and a German bank even though he was ostensibly working undercover in the same job his compromised predecessor had used; using those banks to move operational funds; exercising minimal operational control over his agents who were subjected to minimal vetting; and using potentially hostile intermediaries - the Russians - to facilitate the diversion of arms being shipped to their country, and then bilking them out of money they paid for the shipment; and conveying covert messages over open communications.

Finally, and sensationally, Rintelen got scammed by the original “Wolf of Wall Street,” David Lamar. The German passed Lamar ca. $350,000 to fund a plan to foment strikes in munitions factories and shipping agencies; to hinder the manufacture and shipping of munitions by attacks on financial institutions and by litigation against pro-Allied businesses; to promote a U.S. peace movement; and to enhance public support for Germany. Only later would Rintelen come to realize that Lamar had swindled him.

In August 1915, with investigators closing in, Rintelen fled the U.S. by ship but was arrested by British authorities during a port call in the UK. Extradited to the U.S. in 1917 after America entered the war, he was convicted on a string of charges to include firebombing a ship, perjury and conspiracy to obtain a U.S. passport. Rintelen spent the remainder of the war in prison.

Rintelen’s departure did not, however, end the sabotage campaign. In February 1916, an explosion initiated by the saboteurs destroyed a munitions plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This was followed by equally effective operations against an armaments factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut and a chemical plant in Cadillac, Michigan. After the successful attack on Black Tom, the saboteurs initiated a fire that destroyed a Canadian factory contracted by Russia to manufacture artillery shells. In February 1917, three Germans were arrested for attempting to (again) sabotage the Black Tom Island facility, which had been rebuilt. Because the April 1917 American entry into the war meant sabotage was no longer an option since the penalty was death to anyone caught in the act, the remaining German saboteurs fled the U.S.

U.S. efforts to seek post-war redress from Germany for the damage wrought by its sabotage campaign – and for Black Tom in particular – underscore the difficulty of holding a nation-state legally liable for its clandestine activities. The post-World War I German-American Mixed Claims Commission sought to assess Berlin’s responsibility and adjudicate indemnities for the consequences of the attack. Weimar Republic lawyers argued there was no evidence incontrovertibly linking German intelligence to it and the Commission ruled in their favor. In 1930, with more evidence of German culpability having come to light, the Black Tom case was re-opened. Once the Nazis came to power, however, the German representative to the Commission resigned when it looked like his country would be implicated in the case. Nonetheless, the Commission declared Germany guilty in 1939 and ordered Berlin to pay 50 million dollars. Unsurprisingly, the Nazi regime did not comply.

Although more evidence convincingly establishing German guilt and detailing the breadth of its pre-World War I sabotage campaign has emerged thereafter, Germany was never held to account for Black Tom. One suspects that, absent the arrest of the GRU operatives involved in the current sabotage campaign should they – like Rintelen – be unwise enough to travel to the UK, it is also unlikely Russia will be held to account for its actions.

The recent GRU sabotage campaign seems to have slowed since reaching its peak in 2023-24, possibly due to better coordination European security agencies and a conscious decision by the Kremlin to scale back operations in deference to discussions between Moscow and Washington about ending the war. With Putin apparently having resolved to continue his war against Ukraine, there is every possibility his security and intelligence services will renew sabotage operations in Europe.

But the UK’s public exposure of the GRU’s activities and U.S. warnings to Moscow that any attack causing an aircraft crash would be treated as terrorism and prompt a severe response are useful to the extent they cause Putin to rein in the aggressiveness of that service’s sabotage operations, thereby hopefully avoiding the repetition of a tragedy on the scale of Black Tom.

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