President Vladimir Putin has reunified Russia’s spy agencies for the first time since the abolition of the KGB marked the end of the Cold War. Twelve years after the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin broke the back of the Soviet Union’s all-powerful KGB - splitting its domestic and foreign security functions into separate agencies - Mr Putin, a long-term KGB officer, signed a decree reuniting them under one directorate.
The decree, signed on Sunday, gives Nikolai Patrushev, director of the counter-espionage service the FSB, the status of a cabinet minister and cuts the number of his deputies. He will also control Russia’s spies abroad, which had been run by an organisation called the SVR. It puts the Kremlin guard, the Federal Guards Service, under FSB control. Two other Soviet-era KGB agencies - the border guards and government communication and information agency - were reabsorbed by the FSB last year. The changes, which come amid efforts to streamline the government, should make the agency more efficient by speeding up decision-making and clarifying the powers and responsibilities of officials and departments, said Yevgeny Lovyrev, the FSB deputy director. FSB departments will be disbanded and replaced by units called services, whose leaders will have more authority than before, he said. Mr Putin, who has packed his government with FSB officials, took "practically all the suggestions of the FSB leadership into account" in framing the decree, Mr Lovyrev said. |