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FSB Academy: the profile
On January 25, 1921 The VChK presidium took the decision to create permanent training and preparation...
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The New Nobility
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The spetsnaz units, the special forces subordinate to the Main Intelligence Directorate at the General Staff of the Armed Forces (the GRU) were actively engaged in the Russian military campaigns of 2000s. This account focusses on the counter-insurgency operations of the military intelligence's special forces during Dagestan's invasion in 1999, the Second Chechen campaign, the spetsnaz operations in the war in South Ossetia and the military reform's impact on the GRU special forces. /September 1, 2010/
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While the Russian media were writing about the American scandal, predicting the coalition's imminent demise, quite unremarked was another episode bearing a direct relation to Russia -- another leak. In June a number of the FSB documents, moreover much more significant ones -- orders and reports stamped top secret -- were published at lubyanskayapravda.com website. Unlike the American reports, the FSB correspondence, although it was put out on the Internet, never did land in the public sphere.
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The scandalous resolution of the story about illegals in America gave answers to not one of the key questions in this affair. The fact that all of the participants, both from the American and the Russian side, confessed their guilt cannot be considered an answer. At the present time the main consequence of the exchange can be considered the fact that new information about the spies, which should inevitably have come to light in court, will not become accessible to the society.
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The Russian spy scandal has focused attention on whether the use of “illegals,” undercover agents with no diplomatic immunity, makes any sense in the 21st century. Comparisons to Soviet-era illegals who were quite successful during the Cold War are not valid. The Cold War was a war of ideologies, and the moral corruption of the enemy was the chief objective. But today, the value of illegals is negligible. It is obvious that 11 — or even 1,011 — Russian illegals in search of “hidden information” from open sources could never harm U.S. interests or undermine its “moral fiber.”
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The surprisingly lenient sentence -- four years in prison -- in the case of Gennadiy Sipachev, who was found guilty in handing secret maps over to the Pentagon, shows that the FSB is changing its tactics in "espionage" cases. Sentences in such trials always bear a demonstrative nature and are little linked to the real damage to the country's national security; it is above all a signal sent by the Kremlin. The question is what signal the Kremlin is sending in this case of Sipachev.
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In more than the week that has passed since the bombings on the city metro, the Russian president Dmitri Medvedev has actively intruded upon Putin’s personal domain – which the war on terrorism is considered to be – and proposed a few solutions. Clearly, they should demonstrate that his approach to this problem differs from the last one, which, considering what happened, has obviously not proven its worth. By now there are three initiatives announced.
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Moscow metro bombings on March 29 represent a fundamental failure of the Kremlin’s strategy for fighting terrorism. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that the tragedy in Russia's capital metro will force the government to change its approach. Under a strategy that the Kremlin adopted in the mid-2000s for fighting terrorism, the main criteria for evaluating the severity of an attack is the potential threat it poses to political stability, not the number of victims.
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The online media in Russia is democracy’s front line: it is the only part of the media that has been able to operate freely since television came under government control and the newspaper industry fell into the hands of oligarchs loyal to the Kremlin. There are a number of theories to explain this relative freedom, including the Kremlin’s supposed desire to leave the arena open for the intelligentsia’s discussions or as a way of monitoring public opinion. But the true reason might be simpler.
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