While security agencies in developed countries have undergone institutional reforms and become more flexible and modernized over the past 30 years, security agencies in Russia, following brief reform period in the early 1990s, have almost completely returned to the Soviet model, which loses in competition with the Western intelligence, helping Ukraine during the war, write the experts of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
Outdated techniques of intelligence gathering exclusively through a network of agents, reluctance to work with open sources and a focus on counterintelligence measures rather than operational intelligence provoked miscalculations by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) on the eve of the invasion and are holding Russia's offensive potential back at the current stage of the conflict.