Look at Ukraine, and how Russia flooded it with possibly 10,000+ of its spies.
You read stories of ones who were caught, and you cannot make it it up. Their main recruitment target are idiots in places of high power.
KGB recruited more agents than real spies. They had many more people doing lobbying, covert propaganda, and subversion, than peeking into Western secrets.
They really valued their high profile spies, but their influence agents — "pomogaikas" were near disposable. Finding idiots in places of power was always easier than finding smart, ideologically motivated betrayers fit for espionage assignents.
Then these recruits aren't real assets, are they. Sounds like the FSB just engineered some money laundering from the Russian tax payer to the Ukrainian civil service.
A bit related, few weeks into invasion a propagandist on Russian state TV was lamenting about Ukrainians being supposedly much more "nazistically" brainwashed than Russia expected them to, and as an example he told "I have a friend in Harkiv, he had been pretty pro-Russian, he sat just 6 days in the basement hiding from the bombings, and after that he completely turned around, voluntarily joined Ukrainian territorial defense force and is now running around with machine gun against us".
You read stories of ones who were caught, and you cannot make it it up. Their main recruitment target are idiots in places of high power.
KGB recruited more agents than real spies. They had many more people doing lobbying, covert propaganda, and subversion, than peeking into Western secrets.
They really valued their high profile spies, but their influence agents — "pomogaikas" were near disposable. Finding idiots in places of power was always easier than finding smart, ideologically motivated betrayers fit for espionage assignents.