Russia is Turning into a Secret Police?

The documents, which the author has reviewed, depict a new world of cooperation between the two entities and show how much more aggressive Putin’s security forces have become since the collapse of the Soviet Union. One example of this is the Amezit project, which was developed by a contractor to Russian military and intelligence agencies, NTC Vulkan. Amezit is a tool that gives an operator the ability to take control of all kinds of cyber traffic in a region, from mobile networks to social media, and create an information blackout. It is not just about suppressing independent information but defining the narrative. A subsection of the project, PRR, allows the operator to spread disinformation on social media. The documents show that the military commissioned the development of Amezit, and this kind of mindset was adopted by the military six years before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The leaked files also suggest that the Russian army abandoned Soviet-era limitations on offensive weapons only being used in a time of war. The borders between war and peace in Russia are non-existent, and this makes the present-day army’s mindset much closer to that of the secret police. The Vulkan files also raise difficult questions about how much the software engineers who helped build these systems knew about their purpose. Vulkan was licensed by the FSB, and personnel were fully briefed about the need to protect secrecy and to ensure they remembered what was at stake. Vulkan’s programmers were direct products of a peculiar Soviet system for creating engineers who were expected to behave as technical servants of the state’s military-industrial complex. For decades, Soviet engineers were schooled intensively in technical skills, but the breadth of their education was narrow. They were taught to work on projects without questioning the bigger picture. Putin and his military and security services exploited this resource, and Russian IT engineers made for enthusiastic recruits.

Unlike during the cold war, the new generation of engineers are not blinkered specialists trained to work with outdated Soviet technologies. They are well versed in western technology and globally connected. Some of Vulkan’s engineers have left Russia and found jobs in international companies such as Siemens and Amazon. This raises difficult questions about whether these ex-Vulkan employees are a security risk, and if it is safe or ethical to employ Russian engineers with a background in information security, which in Moscow often means working for a company such as Vulkan.