Stephen Blank: Russia’s intelligence state and its war

Russia is conducting a global war against the West. But this war’s central theater is Europe which, from Ukraine, is under increasing attack, especially in the Baltic. This war validates Clausewitz’s insight that war is a chameleon. Among the multiple forms of attack Russia has employed are attempted coups d’etats, election interference, influence operations, unceasing cyber and information attacks, arson, assassinations, attacks on terrestrial and maritime civilian infrastructure, employment of organized crime groups as Russian proxies, subsidizing of foreign political parties, and plain old espionage. Indeed, attempted coups are part of the huge expansion of Russian-backed gray-zone activities whose number has quadrupled since 2022 making this a truly global war. Moreover, some Russian military thinkers who believe that proxy wars, i.e where Russia incites natives or foreign third parties to fight for its interests, cause in their home countries, e.g by coups, may be increasing into the future.

Western observers have been unable to assign a definitive name to these attacks confirming their shape-shifting character. Nonetheless, we can discern certain commonalities in their direction, planning, and operation. Specifically, the evidence shows that these “hybrid” or “gray zone” attacks are led by, planned and conducted not by Russia’s armed forces but by its intelligence agencies, both military intelligence (GRU) and its domestic and foreign intelligence agencies (FSB, SVR). Thus, whatever else they are, they are and represent intelligence wars.

This should not surprise us for Russia is and for some time has been an intelligence state where the leadership, not just Putin, is over-represented by people having known (and probably covert) links with these intelligence agencies. Furthermore, these elites have grown immensely rich and powerful by virtue of these linkages between the intelligence community and both organized crime and Russian business. Therefore, there is every reason to believe that these elites who are connected both in terms of their families and institutionally have every reason to fight to maintain their position and the system that has endowed them with such wealth and power.

In fact, led by Putin, these alumni of Russia’s Soviet intelligence heritage have steadily recreated the classic traditional Russian paradigm of state power with an allegedly all-powerful Tsar ruling in the absence of any institutional or legal constraints on his power through his network of servitors (Boyars) in the classic formulation. Indeed, since these servitors of the patrimonial state where the Tsar literally owns the state receive rents, i.e. posts atop key industries, in return for their service thereby recreating the Muscovite service state where a rent-granting state is served by rent-seeking officials. Thus, corruption and criminality as well as violence and repression are pervasive. It is no accident that we see the recrudescence of the Gulag under “the organs” administration even before the war against Ukraine that has triggered a major and continuing increase in both repression and the scale of the Gulag. In line with Russian legislation the FSB has the unlimited right to interfere with any business that it chooses to engage. Thus, it has become impossible to do business in Russia without FSB approval or involvement in a firm.

Likewise, the state and the intelligence organs have propagated the myth that these organs are the true knights in shining armor defending the state against internal and external enemies. Those enemies are the reformers who alone (but with sizable foreign help) brought down the USSR in an information war launched from abroad but with the help of these alleged subversives. This mythology of the exalted intelligence officer also extends as well to Russian foreign and defense policy. This is because what Alexander Herzen termed the romance of the police is tied to an equally long-standing series of interlinked myths prevalent among the security services. These myths are that Russia alone is a true Christian state and foreordained to be a great global power, yet it is permanently under attack from external and internal enemies. Thus, pace Carl Schmitt, Russian security power starts from thew presupposition of conflict.

And since Russia is militarily technologically inferior to its enemies it must have recourse to the weaponization of every instrument or relationship of power. And outside of large-scale force majeure this campaign, like what we are seeing must be directed not only by the Tsar or its contemporary equivalent, the Presidential Administration and the intelligence community who compete for Putin’s favor, resources, and standing. In this war the main front for Russia’s so-called hybrid activities appears to be the Baltic region and Baltic Sea. Information warfare, influence operations, espionage, have gone on constantly for years and evidently have increased by an order of magnitude since the aggression against Ukraine began. Baltic Sea infrastructure, e.g. cables linking the various littoral states, have become prominent targets for Russian attacks. Jamming of aerial GPs has also become a permanent feature of Russian attacks across the Baltic Sea to include Finland and Sweden. An in September Russian jammers attacked EU President Ursula Von Der Leyen’s plane signaling a noticeable escalation in these attacks.  Russia’s “shadow fleet” of third party ships carrying sanctioned Russian products have also become a persistent challenge to NATO navies in the Baltic Sea. Worse yet, “Mezhdunarodnaia Zhizn’ (International Affairs), the Foreign Ministry’s official journal, has just published an article calling the Baltic Sea region a “potential theater of military conflict” because NATO countries are. allegedly threatening Russia. This article not only justifies the gray zone attacks against the Baltic littoral states but justifies an escalation as well in their number and type. And since many Russian military thinkers view such attacks as preparing the ground for large-scale military engagements, we too must view them as potentially preparatory attacks for a larger war and prepare accordingly. In short, Russia’s intelligence state is not just a Mafia state or criminal enterprise as many have written, it also is a permanent war state for which we must be ready.