Around half of the FSKN’s staff was classified as law-enforcement personnel. This included a number of special assignment units subordinated to the FSKN Department for Special Operations and Protection’s 5th Operations and Combat Division. The major tasks of these units was to provide armed support during operations against organized drug crime as well as to offer protection to senior FSKN officers (Nikolsky 2014). These units have also been active in major conflict situations both inside Russia and internationally. In the North Caucasus and in Chechnya they fought alongside military personnel to stop the trading of drugs by insurgent groups. They also participated in joint operations with US military personnel and Afghan counternarcotics forces to raid and close down drug laboratories near the Pakistani border (Renz 2011: 60, 69). Like the MChS, the FSKN was tasked to deal with what are often referred to as ‘new’ security challenges, which transcend national boundaries and whose solutions require multilateral cooperation rather than rivalry between nation states. This understanding was one of the factors leading to the creation of the FSKN in 2004 and its statute emphasized cooperation and exchange of information with international organizations and foreign partners as one of its central tasks (Presidential Decree 976, 2004).
As the vast majority of opiates enter Russia from Afghanistan via the Central Asian states, multilateral cooperation with the former Soviet states in Central Asia, also within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, was the central focus of the FSKN’s international cooperation. However, it also signed agreements with many other states, including the US, China, neighbouring Nordic countries and a number of countries in South-East Asia and Latin America (Renz 2011: 66–7). Especially in the early years of the service’s existence, FSKN officers visited foreign counterparts, for example in the US, the UK and in Sweden, to familiarize themselves with their experience in counter-supply and counter-demand work. As part of a NATO–Russia Council project for counternarcotics training in cooperation with the UN Office for Drugs and Crime, FSKN instructors contributed to the training of drug-enforcement officers in Central Asia, including in Afghanistan (Renz 2011: 68). Throughout its existence, the service was embroiled in a number of scandals and corruption charges and its effectiveness in stemming the trade and abuse of drugs in the country was generally evaluated as low. However, its dissolution in 2016 came as a surprise to many as it had been assumed that, as the main agency in charge of international cooperation in the fight against drugs, such a step could only be counterproductive (Nikolsky 2013b). The FSKN’s successor will continue to exist as a separate service, albeit under the umbrella of the MVD. The extent to which Russia’s engagement in multilateral counternarcotics cooperation will develop under the new set-up is a question for the future.
The FSNG is Russia’s youngest force structure and was established in April 2016. It was created on the basis of the MVD interior troops, the MVD’s riot police OMON and rapid reaction units SOBR, MVD security personnel guarding sensitive government and corporate facilities, and the Okhrana company, which provides guard services to private customers (Nikolsky 2016; Presidential Decree 157, 2016). The new service is a sizeable outfit and with the combined numerical strength of its component parts, it has been estimated to comprise between 320,000 and 430,000 personnel with the 170,000–200,000-strong former interior troops making up its largest element (Kramnik and Bogdanov 2016; Nikolsky 2016). Soldiers that previously served in the interior troops retained their military rank and the service’s director announced shortly after its creation that the approximately 30,000 OMON and SOBR troops would transfer from law enforcement to the status of military personnel by 2018 (I. Petrov 2016).
According to the presidential decree announcing the creation of the FSNG, the new service’s remit is to ensure the security of the state and society as well as to protect human rights and the freedom of citizens. Further, its tasks include cooperation with the Interior Ministry in protecting public order during emergency situations and contributing to the fight against terrorism and extremism, territorial defence and border protection, the guarding of important government facilities and overseeing the licensing of private security firms and control of civilian firearms (Presidential Decree 157, 2016; Federal law 226-FZ, 2016). According to Putin, the FSNG will continue to fulfil the same tasks that were previously assigned to the interior troops, OMON and SOBR forces under the auspices of the MVD (Putin 2016a). As the Russian security experts Ilia Kramnik and Konstantin Bogdanov cautioned, however, it remains an open question whether new and additional tasks could potentially be assigned to the service in the future. In particular, they noted that if the FSNG was to be given investigative powers in support of its work in the sphere of terrorism and extremism, the country would gain not only a new force structure, but an entire new intelligence agency (2016).
Although the announcement of the FSNG in April 2016 came as a surprise at the time, the possibility of establishing a National Guard, not least because of the need to substantially reform the interior troops, had been discussed since the early 1990s (Renz 2012a: 211–12). Still, questions were raised about the timing of the decision to implement this idea in 2016. As Kramnik and Bogdanov argued, the existence of a National Guard as part of a country’s security sector as such is nothing unusual. In some ways, the US National Guard’s dual function as both a military reserve and interior force for use in disaster management and public order maintenance during mass unrest is not wholly dissimilar from that of the FSNG. However, they also noted that National Guards are often a feature in non-democratic states, especially in situations when the incumbent regime is driven by actual or perceived threats to its authority. In their words, ‘such structures are difficult to incorporate into the country’s existing state structures, because they are set up as a guard against internal conspiracies or coups’ (Kramnik and Bogdanov 2016).
When the creation of the FSNG was announced, the majority of analysts, including pro-Kremlin observers in Russia, agreed that the decision was taken not only to improve the efficiency of the interior troops that had to date been left largely unreformed, but also in order to ensure regime stability and to quell potential public disorder in view of the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections (Nikolsky 2016). Russian experts writing in The Moscow Times expressed concerns that civil society would be the main target of the FSNG’s activities. They suspected the new service had been set up because it was subordinated directly to the president and, having removed ‘the unnecessary link – that of minister – between the commander-in-chief and the head of the National Guards’, its troops could now be deployed with impunity (The Moscow Times 2016). As Mark Galeotti noted (2006), the National Guards ‘have little actual role in fighting crime or terrorism’ and the removal of OMON and SOBR from the investigative element of the MVD is likely to decrease their crime-fighting abilities, rather than strengthen them. Based on this observation, he concluded that the creation of the FSNG was above all the result of the Putin regime’s serious fear of potential public unrest.