NextFin News - Russia's security services convicted a record 468 people on treason and espionage charges in 2025, the peak of a campaign that has turned the Federal Security Service from a counterterrorism force into a domestic spy-hunting machine - and is now paralyzing the very state it claims to protect. The Kremlin's answer to a grinding war in Ukraine has been to expand repression inward: treason prosecutions doubled in a single year, the "foreign agents" regime now carries a punitive 30 percent income tax, and mobile internet shutdowns reached Moscow in the spring of 2026. The paradox is that a security apparatus strong enough to intimidate every official into silence is becoming too strong for the regime to govern through.
The Doctrine Shift: From Terrorists to Spies
For most of Vladimir Putin's first two decades in power, Russia's domestic security doctrine had a defined enemy: terrorism and extremism. The Chechen wars were framed as "counterterrorism operations," and political opponents - from Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky to Alexei Navalny's organization and the antiwar committee in exile - were branded as terrorists. Since the 2022 invasion, that model has been replaced by something broader and harder to defend against.
The FSB, the main successor to the Soviet KGB, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorists to hunting spies. The tactical logic is straightforward: terrorists are a finite population, but foreign agents are potentially everywhere. A scientist who emails a foreign colleague, a civil servant who attends an international conference, a company that takes foreign investment - all become plausible targets. Counterintelligence, unlike counterterrorism, has no natural boundary, and therefore no natural off-ramp.
The scale of the shift is visible in the court data. In the first half of 2025 alone, Russian courts sentenced 151 people on charges of treason, espionage, or confidential cooperation with foreigners - twice the number from the same period in 2024 and the highest tally in a decade, according to figures from the Judicial Department of Russia's Supreme Court. For the full year, an analysis by Parubets Analytics on behalf of the rights group Perviy Otdel counted 468 convictions on espionage, treason, confidential cooperation, or aiding the enemy, up from 385 in 2024. At least 420 more people remained under investigation, with 179 cases awaiting court review, bringing the total number of defendants to no fewer than 1,627 as of December 10, 2025.
Severity has risen with volume. The median prison term in treason and espionage cases climbed from 12 years to 15 in 2025, and courts handed down at least four life sentences under espionage statutes for the first time. Roughly three-quarters of these cases are heard with the defendants' names concealed, behind closed doors. A lighter statute, Article 275.1, criminalizes "confidential cooperation" with foreigners on evidence that can include donations, correspondence, contacts with alleged provocateurs, or mere "intent" to commit a crime.
The legal architecture has been made durable. In April 2023, the maximum penalty for treason was raised from 20 years to life imprisonment. In October 2025, the foreign-agents law was amended so that criminal prosecution can follow a single administrative offense, where two prior convictions were previously required. On January 1, 2026, a flat 30 percent income tax took effect for anyone designated a foreign agent, compared with the 13 to 22 percent brackets that apply to other Russians. The European Union Agency for Asylum estimated that as of October 2025, between 25 and 30 percent of designated foreign agents faced criminal charges, with Moscow courts alone registering around 140 new cases in September and October 2025.
The Purge That Ate the State
The spy-hunting doctrine has its most visible expression in the purge of the Russian state itself. Since the spring of 2024, an unprecedented sweep has targeted the Ministry of Defense, where nearly one-third of the leadership team has been dismissed or charged, according to Proekt.media. The campaign began with the April 2024 arrest of Timur Ivanov, the longtime associate of former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and widened into successive waves that reached Rosgvardiya, the National Guard, and agencies as obscure as Oboronles, which supplies timber on military bases.
Shoigu was moved to another post in May 2024 and replaced by Andrei Belousov, a Kremlin economist with no security-service background. The stated purpose was to improve management of Russia's ballooning military spending. But the institution that coordinated the purge was not Belousov's ministry - it was the FSB. Unlike Shoigu, Belousov lacks the political standing to check the security services, leaving the FSB with a status approaching omnipotence within the Russian state.
The arrests have not been confined to the military. Officials have been detained across a wide array of ministries - Digital Development, Defense, Energy, Science and Education, Industry and Trade, Internal Affairs, Transport, Culture, Emergency Situations, and Development of the Far East and the Arctic - as well as the Moscow city government and federal agencies including the Penitentiary Service, the Deposit Insurance Agency, and the Customs Service. A representative case is Maxim Parshin, a deputy minister of digital development who oversaw the import-substitution program critical to the war effort and was on good terms with Belousov. Arrested in July 2023 and sentenced to nine years in prison on bribery charges, Parshin was widely read inside the bureaucracy as a warning that nobody was immune.
The mechanism is straightforward and self-reinforcing. When the security services can arrest a competent official at any ministry on charges that are rarely disclosed and tried behind closed doors, the rational response for every remaining official is to stop making decisions. Paperwork gets routed upward. Data gets softened or withheld. Responsibility gets diffused. The state does not collapse; it slows down, and then it slows down again.
The Information Blackout and the Economy That Cannot Be Measured
Parallel to the arrests has been a tightening grip on information itself. In August 2025, Roskomnadzor began blocking voice calls on Telegram and WhatsApp, officially as a crime-prevention measure; by October both messengers were fully restricted in southern regions, and by late November WhatsApp was being throttled nationwide. On February 10, 2026, the regulator intensified restrictions on Telegram itself, citing non-compliance with Russian law. During weeks in the spring of 2026, mobile internet shutdowns that had earlier affected Russian regions reached Moscow. VPN services have been blocked and ordered removed from digital marketplaces, and users are being pushed toward a Kremlin-controlled application.
The economic consequence is a statistics problem that has become a governance problem. In the first quarter of 2026, the Russian economy officially contracted - but by how much depends on which agency you ask. Rosstat reported a decline of 0.2 percent, the Economy Ministry put it at 0.3 percent, and the Central Bank estimated 0.5 percent. Such divergence in official figures is unusual even for Russia, and it has raised questions about the reliability of the data among government-linked analysts. The official growth forecast for 2026 has been reduced to 0.4 percent despite a substantial increase in government spending.
Household-level data point to deeper strain. Rosstat reported in February 2026 that Russians were spending 39 percent of their income on food, a 16-year high; the comparable figure in the United States is 13 percent. In 2025, Russia registered 173,000 new businesses, a 14-year low, while 233,000 were liquidated - closures running 26 percent ahead of openings, according to figures from the audit firm FinExpertiza.
The defense ministry itself has begun to acknowledge the fiscal pressure. At an expanded board meeting in December 2025, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov told President Putin that austerity measures had limited the growth of war-related spending:
"As a result of these measures in 2025, we have saved almost one trillion roubles. In total, the Defense Ministry's expenses in 2025 made up 7.3 percent of the GDP. In 2026, prioritization will allow us to stabilise them at the same level or even cut them."
Whether those savings reflect genuine efficiency or deferred procurement and underpaid suppliers is precisely the question that a paralyzed bureaucracy cannot answer honestly.
Why This Is Structural, Not Cyclical
The central analytical question is whether this repression is a cyclical wartime tightening that will ease when the fighting stops, or a structural rewiring of the Russian state. The evidence points decisively to structural change.
A cyclical repression has a defined target and a defined endpoint: you arrest the plotters, you secure the regime, you stand down. The counterterrorism model was cyclical in this sense - it was aimed at a specific set of actors and could, in principle, declare victory. The counterintelligence model cannot. Its target is "foreign influence," and because foreign agents are potentially everywhere, the campaign has no completion condition. The institutions built to run it - the investigative units, the special courts, the closed-door procedures, the foreign-agents registry - do not dismantle themselves. They become permanent features of the state.
Three pieces of evidence support the structural reading. First, the legal architecture has been made permanent: life sentences for treason, criminal liability after a single administrative offense, and a punitive 30 percent tax rate encoded into the tax code. Second, the institutional beneficiary is the FSB itself, which has used the campaign to expand its reach into ministries, private companies, and ordinary society - and no institution voluntarily surrenders that reach. Third, the behavioral change is already self-sustaining: officials who have seen colleagues disappear do not wait for the next arrest to start withholding information.
The transmission mechanism runs from fear to paralysis. Arrest an official on undisclosed charges, try the case behind closed doors, and you do not just punish that individual. You teach every observer the same lesson: the safest decision is no decision. The first-order effect is slower government. The second-order effect is worse decisions, because the information reaching the top has been pre-filtered by a bureaucracy that has learned to survive rather than to report. The third-order effect is that a war economy - which depends on rapid feedback between the front and the factories - loses the very information flows it needs to function.
The Counter-Argument: Paranoia Works
The strongest case against this reading is the simplest: the strategy has worked. Vladimir Putin's personal hold on power is more secure than at any point since the invasion. Organized opposition has been crushed or driven into exile. The elites have been disciplined - the defense ministry purge did not produce a backlash; it produced compliance. Russia's economy, far from collapsing, expanded through 2024 and into early 2025 on the back of war spending, and the state has continued to fund the war despite sanctions. From this perspective, paralysis is not a bug; it is the price of control, and it is a price the regime can afford as long as oil revenues and defense orders hold.
There is real evidence here. The Kremlin has shown that it can tolerate a great deal of inefficiency in exchange for loyalty. And the security services' omnipotence has delivered the one thing an autocracy values most: the absence of any visible challenger. A regime that cannot be overthrown from within has, by that measure, solved its core problem.
But this argument confuses regime survival with state capacity. A government can be unchallengeable and still be unable to do what it needs to do. The Soviet Union under late-stage stagnation faced no organized opposition either; it faced a state that could no longer process reality. The falsifying signal for the paralysis thesis is concrete: if Russia's full-year 2026 GDP growth meets or exceeds the official 0.4 percent target while defense procurement deliveries hit their stated targets without major new corruption scandals, the claim that fear is degrading state capacity would be substantially weakened. If, instead, growth contracts further in the second half of 2026 and the pace of defense-ministry corruption cases exceeds 2025's record, the structural-degeneration thesis is confirmed.
What to Watch
The outlook splits by time horizon. In the short term, the regime is stable: there is no organized opposition, the security services are loyal, and war spending continues to flow. In the medium term, the risk is decision quality - a state that cannot get accurate information from its own ministries will make mistakes in procurement, mobilization, and budgeting that accumulate faster than they can be corrected. In the long term, the question is whether an institution built for paranoia can ever be reined back in. The FSB's expansion into the economy and the civil service is not easily reversed, which means that even if the war ends, the surveillance state it built will not.
Base case: the regime muddles through, accepting growing inefficiency as the cost of control, with growth hovering near zero and corruption purges continuing at a high pace. Upside case: the Kremlin recognizes the paralysis and recentralizes decision-making in a small, trusted circle - which would improve speed but worsen the information problem. Downside case: a battlefield setback or fiscal shock exposes the gap between reported and actual capacity, triggering a new, more violent round of purges that further degrades the state.
The specific signals to watch: quarterly GDP prints from Rosstat versus the Economy Ministry and Central Bank - widening divergence signals data degradation; the pace of treason convictions in 2026 relative to 2025's record; whether the defense ministry's promised 2026 spending stabilization holds or is quietly abandoned; and whether internet restrictions expand from throttling to full blocking of the remaining messengers.
Russia has built a security state powerful enough to silence every critic and scare every official - and in doing so, it has built a state that can no longer hear itself think. The price of paranoia is not paid in the moment of arrest; it is paid later, in the decisions that never get made, the data that never gets reported, and the warnings that never reach the top. Putin's Russia may be unchallengeable from within. It is also becoming ungovernable.
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