The primary responsibilities are within the country and include counter-intelligence, internal and border security, counterterrorism, surveillance and investigating some other types of serious crimes and federal law violations.

Before the start of the First Chechen War's main military activities, the FSK was responsible for the covert operations against the separatists led by Dzhokhar Dudayev.

While the army lacked technical means of tracking the guerrilla groups, the FSB suffered from insufficient human intelligence due to its inability to build networks of agents and informants.

The inability of the federal forces to conduct efficient counterterrorist operations led to the government to transfer the responsibility of "maintaining order" in Chechnya from the FSB to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in July 2003.

[6] On 28 June 2004, in a speech to high-ranking FSB officers, Putin emphasized three major tasks of the agency: neutralizing foreign espionage, safeguarding the economic and financial security of the country, and combating organized crime.

Combined with some earlier reassignments – most notably those of FSB Deputy Directors Yury Zaostrovtsev and Vladimir Anisimov in 2004 and 2005 – the changes were widely believed to be linked to the Three Whales Corruption Scandal that had slowly unfolded since 2000.

Military analyst Vitaly Shlykov praised the effectiveness of Russia's security agencies, saying that the experience learned in Chechnya and Dagestan had been key to the success.

[23] With the start of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian counterintelligence has repeatedly asserted that the FSB suffered failures of operations security, including acts of insubordination and possible sabotage.

[31][32][33][34][35] Media outlets of Ukraine, its allies in the West, and Russian dissidents report that Vladimir Putin has blamed setbacks in the military operations on the FSB and the Fifth Service.

On 11 March 2022, investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov reported that Fifth Service head Sergey Beseda and his deputy, Anatoly Bolyukh were under house arrest due to Putin's discontent with intelligence failures regarding the invasion of Ukraine.

According to an article in the 11 April 2022 issue of The Washington Post:[43]Several current and former officials described the Russian security service as rife with corruption, beset by bureaucratic bloat and ultimately out of touch.

This means in practice that "movement is restricted, vehicles can be seized, phone calls can be monitored, areas are declared no-go zones, checkpoints introduced, and security is beefed up at key infrastructure sites.

[citation needed] In a high-profile case of foreign espionage, the FSB said in February 2012 that an engineer working at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia's main space center for military launches, had been sentenced to 13 years in prison on charges of state treason.

In August 2021, the FSB arrested plasma physics-expert Alexander Kuranov, chief designer of the Hypersonic Systems Research Center (NIPGS in Russian) in St. Petersburg.

[56][57] Other instances of prosecution are the cases of investigative journalist and ecologist Grigory Pasko,[58][59] Vladimir Petrenko, who described danger posed by military chemical warfare stockpiles, and Nikolay Shchur, chairman of the Snezhinskiy Ecological Fund.

[citation needed] Other arrested people include Viktor Orekhov, a former KGB officer who assisted Soviet dissidents, Vladimir Kazantsev, who disclosed illegal purchases of eavesdropping devices from foreign firms, and Vil Mirzayanov, who had written that Russia was working on a nerve-gas weapon.

[citation needed] Over the years, FSB and affiliated state security organizations have killed all presidents of the separatist Chechen Republic of Ichkeria including Dzhokhar Dudaev, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, Aslan Maskhadov, and Abdul-Khalim Saidullaev.

[62] According to some unofficial sources,[63][64][65][66][67] since 1999, the FSB has also been tasked with the intelligence-gathering on the territory of the CIS countries, wherein the SVR is legally forbidden from conducting espionage under the inter-government agreements.

[citation needed] The FSB is engaged in the development of Russia's export control strategy and examines drafts of international agreements related to the transfer of dual-use and military commodities and technologies.

In 2021, Ukrainian intelligence released information and recordings of 18th Center FSB officers based in Crimea as part of the "Gamaredon" hacking group.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have documented the unit's reconnaissance and noted the possibility of inserting malware to cause future damage in an attack.

[79] Litvinenko, along with a series of other authors such as Yury Felshtinsky, David Satter, Boris Kagarlitsky, Vladimir Pribylovsky, Mikhail Trepashkin, have claimed that the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities were a false flag attack coordinated by the FSB in order to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya and boost former FSB director and then prime minister Vladimir Putin's popularity in the lead-up to parliamentary elections and presidential transfer of power.

[92] In the mid-2000s, the pro-Kremlin Russian sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya claimed that the FSB played a dominant role in the country's political, economic and even cultural life.

According to the United Nations, in occupied Crimea, the FSB used torture with elements of sexual violence against pro-Ukrainian activists, forcing them to confess to crimes related to terrorism.

[99] In spite of various anti-corruption actions of the Russian government, FSB operatives and officials are routinely found in the center of various fraud, racket and corruption scandals.

[110][111] It was reported that during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, FSB officers carried out filtration activities in Mariupol, which were accompanied by searches, interrogations, forced deportations to Russia, beatings and torture.

[125] Ten days after the attack it was reported that Iran had also warned Russia that a major "terrorist operation" was being planned, based on information gathered from IS militants arrested after the 2024 Kerman bombings.

[134] Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov criticized Russian security services for their "catastrophic incompetence" and the FSB for being "busy with everything except its direct responsibilities – killing their political opponents, spying on citizens and prosecuting people who are against the war."

"[135] Novaya Gazeta Europe's chief editor, Kirill Martynov, criticized Putin for dismissing Western intelligence warnings and focusing resources on "LGBT extremists" and the war with Ukraine instead of guarding against "real threats".

[137] Since most of the best Russian troops were deployed in Ukraine, most of the men guarding the border in the Kursk Oblast were young, inexperienced conscripts from the FSB Border Service and lightly equipped army infantry units (all male citizens of Russia aged 18–30 are subject to conscription for 1 year of active duty military service),[138][139] who suffered heavy losses in combat with experienced Ukrainian troops.