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.

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........

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