Russia's espionage activity is soaring to Cold War levels, but its spy game can be pretty 'unreliable'

To improve its security and control of growing proxies, Russia has begun to employ spies without military experience and train them in multiple locations to better hide their identities, according to the London-based Royal United Services Institute. This new strategy is still a work in progress, as authors of this report found, and Russia generally deems remote handling "unreliable." This weaknesses in Russian intelligence can cause a slew of issues related to proxies getting caught and security breaches.