Editor’s Note: International Security and Estonia 2026, the annual public yearbook of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service (EFIS – 10 February 2026; Director General Kaupo Rosin), portrays a Russia that is sustaining the war in Ukraine while building the capacity—and the tools—to support future conflicts. Its central assessment is that the war is being industrialized: ammunition output is rising, unmanned systems are being scaled, and non-kinetic levers—procurement networks, academic access, “peace” branding, and AI-shaped information environments—are being refined alongside the fighting. ComplexDiscovery is covering the yearbook because it is unusually specific about the mechanisms that translate geopolitics into organizational risk: sanctions-evasion logistics, influence pathways routed through institutions, and technology ecosystems that can harvest data or distort decision-making.

For security and governance leaders, the report’s value is its specificity. It does not just describe intent; it traces how tactics are operationalized, including multi-hop procurement chains, institutional influence networks, and technology ecosystems that can shape decision-making at scale. EFIS also avoids caricature. It cautions against seeing a master plan in every incident and judges that Russia is unlikely to attack Estonia or another NATO member in the coming year if deterrence and preparedness hold. The warning is therefore more actionable than alarmist: the infrastructure being built to wage today’s war also enables persistent gray-zone pressure tomorrow, testing the resilience of controls at the intersection of security, governance, and regulation.


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Ammunition, Drones, and Influence: Estonia’s 2026 Assessment of Russia’s Trajectory

ComplexDiscovery Staff

On 10 January, Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine reached its 1,417th day — exactly the same length as the Second World War on the Eastern Front between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In those four years, Estonia’s intelligence service estimates that Russia has exhausted most of its inherited Soviet-era military stockpiles and lost around one million soldiers killed or severely injured. Yet from Tallinn’s perspective, the war is not winding down. It is being industrialized.

That is the central finding of International Security and Estonia 2026, the annual public yearbook of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service (EFIS), dated 10 February 2026 and signed by Director General Kaupo Rosin. The report describes a Russia that is simultaneously sustaining the war in Ukraine, rebuilding ammunition stockpiles for potential future conflicts, standing up nearly 190 unmanned-systems battalions, and using AI, academic networks, and cultural initiatives as instruments of influence.


Callout: Three strategic risks highlighted by EFIS (2026)

  • Algorithmic Integrity: The analysis of systems like DeepSeek suggests that AI is being used as a tool for information sovereignty. Organizations relying on global AI models must account for geographic bias in automated decision-making and data synthesis.
  • Supply Chain Camouflage: The use of rebranded intermediaries and multi-hop logistics (as seen with Neptun Ko Ltd) shifts the burden of proof onto corporate compliance teams. Knowing your vendor now requires forensic-level depth into entity history.
  • The Industrialization of Gray-Zone Pressure: EFIS warns that the infrastructure built for war—drone production, state-backed apps like “Max,” and academic networks—is designed for persistence. For the private sector, this means security and governance are no longer set-and-forget policies but dynamic operational requirements.

The report’s bottom-line security assessment is measured. EFIS judges that Russia has no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or any other NATO member state in the coming year and expects to reach a similar conclusion the following year, provided deterrence and preparedness continue on their current trajectory. At the same time, the yearbook cautions against overstating Moscow’s reach, noting that “not every event reflects a cunning plan or the omnipotent hand of the Kremlin — often, it is simply a coincidence.”

Peace talks as a manipulation tool

The report’s opening chapter is blunt about Moscow’s diplomatic posture. Estonian analysts assess that Russia’s recent peace-talk rhetoric is a tactic to buy time, not a genuine pathway to settlement. Moscow’s objectives, they write, remain unchanged: to marginalize the United States and NATO and to reshape Europe’s security architecture according to the Kremlin’s vision.

In 2025, Russia’s official messaging reframed European states as more hostile than the United States — a shift the report attributes to Moscow’s ambition to exploit the new US administration to restore bilateral relations and pursue a settlement that would formalize Ukraine’s defeat. But EFIS concludes that Russia still regards Washington as its foremost global adversary.

The report details several practical steps Moscow is pursuing under the banner of normalization: restoring direct flights, reopening visa issuance, and ending sanctions. EFIS warns that these steps would simultaneously facilitate espionage, influence operations, and the movement of sanctioned goods.

One proposal described in the report is an international investment fund ostensibly created for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction but structured so that Russia and partners, including China, could share profits and direct media and educational campaigns aimed at erasing Russia’s image as an aggressor. The fund would be financed from frozen Russian assets, with Moscow seeking to retain control over how those assets are used.

Russia’s economy enters a downturn

While some analysts have speculated about an outright Russian economic collapse, EFIS does not forecast such an outcome. It does, however, describe an economy that has entered a clear downturn, with the defense sector expanding at the expense of a contracting civilian sphere.

The report notes that Russia’s 2025 budget deficit grew almost fivefold compared with the initial projection — driven by wartime spending that spiraled out of control and revenues that fell nearly 10 percent short of expectations. Tax increases were explicitly justified by military expenditures, contradicting President Putin’s early wartime assurances that the war would not be financed at other sectors’ expense.

Sanctions have had what EFIS describes as a clear and substantial impact. Financial-sector measures have cut Russia off from international capital markets, forcing the government to finance its deficit domestically at elevated borrowing costs. The current-account surplus fell from $77 billion in the second quarter of 2022 to $17 billion in the same period of 2025.

Oil production has declined year-on-year since the full-scale invasion began, a trend EFIS attributes to deteriorating resource bases in Western Siberia and sanctions restricting access to Western technology and equipment. Russian oil companies’ profit margins roughly halved in 2025, and the report concludes that an increase in crude production is unlikely in the coming years.

Sberbank CEO German Gref publicly stated that Russia had entered “technical stagnation” — a claim President Putin denied.. EFIS notes that disagreements among the ruling elite over economic policy have sharpened enough to spill into the public domain.

Ammunition production up seventeenfold

Perhaps the report’s most striking quantitative finding concerns Russia’s ammunition output. EFIS estimates that the military-industrial complex increased artillery ammunition production more than seventeenfold since 2021, reaching roughly seven million large-caliber shells, mortar rounds, and rockets in 2025.

The breakdown: 3.4 million howitzer rounds, 2.3 million mortar rounds, 0.8 million tank and infantry fighting vehicle rounds, and 0.5 million multiple-launch rocket system rounds. The procurement cost amounted to approximately one trillion rubles (about €10.6 billion) in 2025.

In addition, Russia imported an estimated five to seven million rounds from Iran and North Korea since 2023. Ukrainian assessments cited in the report indicate that North Korean ammunition accounted for roughly half of all Russian artillery expenditure on the Ukrainian front in the second half of 2025.

The report concludes that Russia is highly likely rebuilding part of its strategic artillery ammunition reserves even while fighting continues — in effect, preparing for its next war.

In the explosives supply chain, EFIS identifies a concentration risk: “mélange,” a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids critical to ammunition manufacturing, is produced at only one site—the Berezniki chemical plant owned by Uralchem. Concentrated nitric acid is produced at Berezniki and at EuroChem’s Novomoskovsk facility. Neither company is currently subject to EU sanctions. Their other major product line is nitrogen fertilizers.

Unmanned warfare at scale

Russia established a dedicated unmanned systems branch by presidential order in autumn 2025, with plans for approximately 190 battalions — mostly UAV units attached to Ground Forces, Airborne Forces, and Naval Infantry, plus attack-oriented unmanned surface vessel units in each fleet and the Caspian Flotilla.

The reform is backed by a national development project that aims to train one million UAV specialists and introduce drone-related coursework in 75 percent of Russian schools by 2030.

The report cites the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces as saying that unmanned aerial vehicles now account for up to 70 percent of equipment losses in the war. EFIS concludes that in any future conflict with Russia, allies must be prepared to face unmanned systems at strategic, operational, and tactical levels — on land, at sea, and in the air — and that NATO needs a breakthrough in counter-UAV defenses.

In Estonia’s immediate vicinity, a regiment of unmanned naval strike vehicles has already been formed in the Baltic Fleet, along with a UAV regiment under the Leningrad Military District.

Recruiting from prisons and vulnerable communities

To sustain frontline numbers, Russia has relied heavily on socially vulnerable recruits and former prisoners. The report states that between 150,000 and 200,000 convicted criminals were recruited from prisons to the front between 2022 and 2025. Official statistics show the prison population dropped from 465,000 at the start of 2022 to 266,000 by October 2023 before partially recovering to around 313,000 by early 2025.

Serious and particularly serious crimes rose by double digits each year: up 10 percent in 2023, 5 percent in 2024, and 10.4 percent in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period of the prior year.

EFIS describes a recruitment system in which regional governments must meet monthly and annual quotas set by the Ministry of Defense. As volunteers have dwindled, local administrations have resorted to physical force, deception, intimidation, and psychological pressure. The report warns that returning veterans suffering from trauma, addiction, and criminal backgrounds will pose domestic security challenges for Russia and potential cross-border threats, including the spread of organized crime, illegal weapons trafficking, and the return of foreign nationals who fought in the war.

Repression deepens at home

The yearbook describes a domestic environment in which repressive measures have continued to intensify. In 2025, Russia expanded legislation enabling the persecution of dissent, enacted a law prohibiting online searches for content classified as extremist, and rolled out a state-backed messaging application called Max. Cybersecurity specialists have warned the app may collect extensive data from a user’s device, including data from other applications.

EFIS reports that ideological indoctrination of young people has extended even to very young children. Patriotic education lessons titled “Conversations About Important Things,” already mandatory in schools since autumn 2022, were expanded under a pilot program to 100 kindergartens across 22 regions in autumn 2025. Schools and universities have introduced dedicated posts responsible for propaganda and ideological education. The Yunarmiya youth movement and the military-patriotic game Zarnitsa involve hundreds of thousands of children.

Russia has also severed its remaining links with Western education systems: the Prosecutor General’s Office declared the activities of the International Baccalaureate and the British Council undesirable, and the country is gradually withdrawing from the Bologna higher education system.

In autumn 2026, State Duma elections will coincide with local elections. EFIS assesses that the Kremlin is likely to rely even more heavily on administrative control, pressure, and coercive measures to secure the desired results, as the deteriorating economic situation complicates campaign management.

Moldova: a $150 million intervention that failed

The report provides a detailed case study of Russia’s attempt to topple Moldova’s pro-Western government through its September 2025 parliamentary elections. EFIS states that the Kremlin spent approximately $150 million on the campaign, which was devised and directed from the Russian Presidential Administration.

The toolkit ranged from propaganda and disinformation to voter bribery, cyberattacks, bomb threats, manipulation of the Moldovan diaspora vote, and the recruitment of roughly 150 men who received tactical and military training at a facility in Serbia near the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their tasks included staging violent provocations and likely carrying out direct attacks on key sites. Clergy from the Moldovan Orthodox Church were trained in Russia to disseminate disinformation on social media.

The campaign failed. Moldova’s law-enforcement agencies identified and blocked illicit financial flows from Russia, shut down organizations acting as Kremlin proxies, and detained individuals serving Russian interests. However, EFIS assesses that Russia will almost certainly make a renewed attempt, having already begun analyzing lessons learned and developing new tools and agents.

Influence through academia and a Russian “peace prize”

The report traces how the Kremlin has reframed the Baltic Sea region as the “Baltic–Scandinavian macro-region” and used Russian universities and research institutes to create BSM-focused laboratories designed to rebuild access to policymakers. The Presidential Administration’s Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation approves topics, vets researchers, and receives both analyses and reports of foreign contacts directly. Security services are also plugged into the network.

EFIS names eight Russian institutions involved, including MGIMO, the Primakov Institute, Saint Petersburg State University, and the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. Their guidance is direct: the most effective countermeasure is to avoid all collaboration with Russian and Belarusian academic networks, because their outputs feed into political-warfare planning.

A separate chapter dissects the Leo Tolstoy International Peace Prize, created in December 2021 by SVR Director Sergey Naryshkin, presidential adviser Vladimir Medinsky, and State Duma committee chair Leonid Slutsky. The prize’s first award went to the African Union in 2024; the second to the presidents of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan in 2025. Funding came from Russian companies with African and Central Asian business interests, including Uralchem, Uralkali, and Acron, with additional support sought from Kirill Dmitriev of the Russian Direct Investment Fund.

EFIS calls the prize “nothing more than another active measure by the Kremlin,” orchestrated with the involvement of special services and intended to flatter foreign elites and promote a narrative of Russia as a peace-building power.

African students sent to die in Ukraine

In one of the report’s most disturbing disclosures, EFIS describes how the Russian Ministry of Defense has used deceptive “job offers” to lure African students from Russian universities to occupied Ukrainian territory, where they were pressed into frontline service. Students studying in Belgorod were taken to Russian-occupied areas under the pretext of employment. After signing what they believed were work contracts, they were sent to military training and then to the front.

In one case detailed in the report, an African embassy protested and demanded the students’ return. None survived. Only their remains were handed over for repatriation. Hundreds of citizens from Zambia, Tanzania, Guinea, Cameroon, Eritrea, Nigeria, and other states have been dispatched to the war in Ukraine.

The report also describes Russian authorities exploiting African nationals’ vulnerability by detaining those working without proper permits and offering them a choice between deportation and military service. At least 35,000 African students were enrolled at Russian universities in 2025.

The South Caucasus: a US-brokered breakthrough

A chapter new to this year’s report covers the August 2025 meeting at the White House, where, with US mediation, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev initialed the text of a peace agreement. The report is careful to note that the two countries have not yet signed a peace treaty — initialing confirms agreement on the text but precedes ratification. Nonetheless, EFIS frames the event as a potentially historic development that could mark the beginning of Russia’s ejection from the entire South Caucasus, a region Moscow has considered unequivocally its own since the early 19th century.

The report notes that Washington also secured framework agreements for a west-to-east strategic transit corridor running through the South Caucasus and across the Caspian Sea, which would give the West access to Central Asia while bypassing both Russia and Iran.

EFIS assesses that Russia will almost certainly launch a major influence campaign against Armenia in 2026, aiming to interfere in parliamentary elections, remove Pashinyan from power, and install a government that appears nationalist but is in substance under Moscow’s control.

GRU-run procurement networks

The report devotes a chapter to Russian military intelligence’s role in sanctions evasion, centering on Neptun Ko Ltd, a Moscow-based import-export company founded in 1996. EFIS identifies at least ten GRU officers among Neptun Ko’s current or former senior personnel, naming them individually in the report. The company’s director general since 2008, Aleksandr Matrosov, is identified as a GRU officer.

During the first year of the full-scale war, Matrosov obtained more than €500,000 worth of semiconductors and other components for Russia’s military-industrial complex through the Chinese supplier Ardis Trading, according to an invoice reproduced in the report. Neptun Ko has since rebranded its website as the Egyptian company N.E.S.T., removing all references to Russia, though Russian registries confirm its continued Moscow registration.

EFIS describes a procurement chain in which goods are routed through Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia, with brand labels sometimes physically replaced during transit through China before being restored upon arrival in Russia. The report estimates that roughly one hundred GRU officers now spend their working days handling product codes, price quotes, and logistics chains — a sharp departure from traditional espionage.

North Korea: spying on allies, exploiting workers

North Korean diplomats have expanded intelligence collection not only in Europe but also in Russia and China, according to the report. Some embassies have created “science and technology attaché” posts whose occupants collect scientific articles and purchase products through procurement networks. EFIS provides a detailed list of Pyongyang’s intelligence interests, ranging from anti-fouling paint for warships to nuclear power plant construction plans, rare-earth metals technology, and AI.

The report also describes North Korea’s overseas labor diaspora — estimated by the United Nations at more than 100,000 workers, primarily in Russia and China — as generating nearly half a billion euros annually for the regime. IT professionals are required to surrender nearly 90 percent of their earnings to the government.

EFIS warns that North Korean IT workers increasingly operate under falsified identities and front companies, citing one case in which a Western firm unknowingly hired a North Korean national who exploited their position to infiltrate IT systems and download confidential information. When the company moved to terminate the employment, the individual attempted extortion.

DeepSeek and AI as an information weapon

The report devotes significant attention to China’s DeepSeek AI system. Estonian analysts tested DeepSeek on topics central to their national security and found a clear pattern: the further back in time a question was set, the more neutral the response; the closer to the present and to sensitive issues — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Baltic sovereignty, criticism of China — the more evasive, filtered and propagandistic the answers became, often incorporating Chinese government talking points even when the question did not mention China.

When asked about Russia’s attack on Ukraine, DeepSeek’s response consisted of approximately 80 percent of China’s official positions, with few specifics about the attack itself. When pressed about atrocities in Bucha, it declined to attribute responsibility to Russia. Asked whether Estonia’s foreign ministry had ever criticized China, the system described mutually beneficial bilateral relations without mentioning any criticism. English and Chinese-language responses sometimes diverged.

EFIS concludes that DeepSeek’s censored information space presents a threat extending beyond China’s domestic sensitivities, as it omits information vital to Estonia’s security and promotes Chinese state propaganda. The report frames DeepSeek’s global adoption as serving a dual purpose: advancing China’s “new industrial revolution” by training its AI on foreign users’ queries, and embedding a China-led distorted worldview in the Western information landscape.

AI risks and classified information protection

The report’s final chapters turn to AI governance and classified information. EFIS warns of five primary AI risks — data leaks, faulty training, cyberattacks, misinformation, and manipulation — and recommends that organizations anchor AI-use rules in existing information-management and cybersecurity policies. It cites specific incidents, including Samsung employees inadvertently entering trade secrets into a chatbot and patient data left unsecured on a cloud server.

In a notable exercise in institutional self-criticism, EFIS argues that Estonia’s own framework for protecting classified information is overly rigid and legislatively driven, offering institutions limited flexibility. The report calls for protection measures to be determined on a risk basis at the points where information is created and processed, with continuous reassessment rather than static classification schemes.

China–Russia cooperation deepens

The report describes an increasingly aligned China–Russia relationship driven by a shared view that current geopolitical upheaval allows them to reshape the global balance of power. Russia is adapting to the asymmetry by calibrating its political agenda to China’s initiatives — pairing the Greater Eurasian Partnership with the Belt and Road Initiative, the Northern Sea Route with the Maritime Silk Road, and its proposed Eurasian security architecture with China’s Global Security Initiative.

Military research and development cooperation has intensified due to the Western technology embargo, spanning satellite communications, stealth technology, AI, robotics, and cognitive warfare. China–Russia trade decreased by nearly 9 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2025 due to sanctions pressure, but both countries have introduced payment schemes to circumvent restrictions.

EFIS notes that both sides recognize the risk that the other might strike a deal with the United States at their expense, and that numerous closed-door consultations have been held since early 2025 at China’s initiative to coordinate positions.

What this means for security, governance, and investigations

The yearbook’s most consequential details are the ones that translate into operational risk. EFIS’s account of sanctions-evasion procurement networks, rebranded intermediaries, and multi-hop logistics chains underscores how compliance exposure can sit inside ordinary workflows: vendor onboarding, component sourcing, shipping routes, and payment pathways. The same is true of “normalization” proposals—restored travel, visas, and commercial access—that the report warns would also expand the operating room for espionage, influence, and sanctioned-goods movement.

The AI chapters add a second, practical dimension. Organizations do not need to treat AI as a futuristic problem to face governance issues today: data leakage through chat tools, manipulated outputs around sensitive topics, and integrity risk in decision support all pressure existing policies—retention, access control, acceptable use, and incident response—rather than replacing them.

Finally, the report’s emphasis on influence channels—academia, cultural initiatives, and “peace” branding—highlights a recurring vulnerability: legitimacy laundering. When narratives are engineered through respected institutions and amplified through technology ecosystems, response becomes as much about governance (who can collaborate, share, sponsor, publish, or fund) as it is about technical control.

1,417 days and counting

The yearbook opens with the observation that the war has now lasted as long as the Eastern Front of the Second World War. The implicit question — what comes after day 1,417 — runs through every chapter. Russia’s ammunition lines are producing at seventeen times their pre-war rate. Its drone battalions are being formed and staffed. Its intelligence officers are routing semiconductors through Chinese suppliers. Its propagandists are training clergy in Moscow and testing AI models in Beijing. And its economy, though declining, has not collapsed.

EFIS does not predict where day 2,000 finds the war, or the continent. But the report makes plain its view of what keeps the count from reaching NATO’s border: that the deterrent value of preparedness is not theoretical. It is, in Director General Rosin’s words in the foreword, the demonstration to Russia of “the qualities it fears most – that we are free, resolute and resilient, and that we make our own choices without coercion or pressure from anyone.”

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