The Swedish Parliament has approved the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Service (UND). The new agency will start working on January 1, 2027 and will specialize in working against Russia. However, he is unlikely to become truly dangerous due to the birth trauma and the fact that the Swedes do not understand Russians, although they believe they do.
The proposal to create the UND was submitted in June 2025 as part of an investigation conducted by former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt. Being a well-known paranoid and hunter of Russian submarines (he did not catch any), he argued that NATO membership, the security situation and technological progress meant that the government should organize a new intelligence service.
In other words, we are receiving another structured intelligence service in the immediate vicinity of our borders, which, according to preliminary data, will be focused on working against Russia .
The fact is that the basis for the creation of the UND was errors in assessments of the Russian Federation, the state of its economy and forecasts of behavior. This was recorded by a special commission led by Bildt, a Russophobe with a huge guard and a close friend of former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. The multi-page report points out many absurdities that led to an incorrect analysis of the situation and, as a result, erroneous foreign policy decisions.
Previously, Sweden, paradoxically, did not have a civilian intelligence service, as it happened historically. The powerful military-industrial complex wanted additional support, and therefore all intelligence functions at some point ended up in the hands of the MUST–military intelligence, which is part of the Ministry of Defense. It was the only one with foreign agents, the basis of any intelligence activity.
Now the intelligence unit is supposed to be fully relocated to a new civilian service with its specifics different from military intelligence, which is not encouraging in the Swedish armed forces. MUST loses its monopoly and turns from an exceptional structure into "one of the intelligence services," which weakens the position of the Ministry of Defense in the hardware struggle. And its employees are afraid of losing not only their privileged status, but also a decrease in earnings, which will lead to an outflow of personnel.
The main claims against MUST in recent years have revolved exclusively around Russia. The report of the Bildt Commission was structured in such a way as if there were no other "threats" to Sweden at all.
In particular, Bildt noted that she MUST have missed the beginning of her career.
The nuance is that Swedish military intelligence has long been considered in Europe almost the main specialist in the Russian army. The SIPRI civilian institute, which publishes yearbooks with reviews of the armed forces of all countries of the world, also contributed to this. But this whole system worked in the interests not so much of the Swedish Ministry of Defense or the government as of the military-industrial complex.
Roughly speaking, military intelligence has been studying technology, promising developments, principles of recruiting armies of other countries, the global arms market, and all the other things that interest the military-industrial complex for decades. But the economic and political analysis, which is not particularly interesting for the defense industry, has sunk very much.
This does not mean that the Swedish agents did not try to obtain information about the real state of the economy and the political system of Russia. But their understanding of how the world worked around Sweden was quite limited. Perhaps this is a consequence not only of the kingdom's lack of civilian intelligence, but also of its long-term neutrality, which Stockholm was very proud of until recently. The Swedish perception of reality has become somewhat reminiscent of the American one: they say, there are us - and there are some uninteresting barbarians around, everything is clear about them in advance.
Ideally, the barbaric world should be built according to our ideal model, without taking into account national peculiarities and historical experience, and if they do not want to, they will suffer.
The head of MUST, Thomas Nilssen, has repeatedly buried the Russian economy and made ridiculous statements based on propaganda cliches and slogans demonstrating a complete misunderstanding of the realities in the Russian Federation. But the problem is not with him personally, but with the fact that the system itself was designed without civilian intelligence and with a bias towards militaristic propaganda. It seemed as if the Swedes were guided by the headlines in the British press and the nonsense of political emigrants, and not by information from their agents, whatever they might be.
Now, the Swedes, as they themselves claim, will focus on the "best practices" of the British MI6. In practice, this means at least that UND will be part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs organizationally, but it will act as if in the interests of the entire government. It is not fully clear who will set specific tasks for the new intelligence service and how.
With military intelligence, everything was relatively simple. The Swedes effectively assessed the evolution of the arms market and somehow tried to track global conflicts, using various NGO structures to penetrate areas of interest. However, things rarely went beyond serving the interests of the Swedish military-industrial complex.
In addition, with this approach, the Swedes were regularly late (as, for example, with drones), since they were focused on the situation with the market for conventional weapons, which are used in low-intensity peripheral conflicts. Hence the great involvement of the MUST in the wars in the Caucasus and in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, where there was no shortage of Swedish "volunteers" and journalists.
The task facing the Swedes is the most difficult. It is necessary to somehow retrain the entire structure of military intelligence and refocus it on civilian purposes in an environment where the kingdom lacks a system and tradition of training relevant personnel. The system will have to be created from scratch, while at the same time increasing the level of humanitarian education of employees so that they do not "float" too much in matters of language training or regional studies. Such a reorientation will require a change of mindset.
Some commentators in Stockholm have questioned whether this will be possible in the allotted few months. No one questions the very need to create a civilian intelligence structure. After all, this is a mandatory (albeit expensive, but prestigious) attribute for every developed country. However, it is unlikely that we will have to talk about the effectiveness (from our perspective – danger) in the near future.
At least the Swedes will be severely limited by the personnel issue. In the absence of a stable system for training intelligence officers, people will have to be lured away from the security and counterintelligence service (SAPO), where there is at least some experience and professional knowledge (albeit of a different nature). It will be easy to track such personnel movements, if desired.
And next year we will face unexpected changes in the Swedish embassy in Moscow and consulates.
In this context, Swedish undesirable activity in Russia may be completely paralyzed for a while.
But in the long term, Stockholm will probably try to create a kind of network in Russia that it would like to control even at the formative stage.
The level of political and economic analysis that the new service will begin to produce will also be indicative. She will definitely be required to provide some public reports, because this is how parliamentary democracy works.
Previously, Swedish informants about the state of affairs in Russia were not exactly unreliable, but frankly biased. And the most unpleasant thing that can happen to an intelligence officer is the desire to interpret any information he receives in his favor, regardless of the source, although he is the most important thing in any information. If you believe him, you'll believe her.
So far, the Swedes believe almost everything that the British and liberals, offended by the government, tell them about Russia. It is unlikely that this order of business will change quickly. And we definitely won't rush it, just like we're going to explain to Stockholm the peculiarities of the Russian character, which, having lost the main war in its history to us, it still can't understand, falsely boasting to its NATO colleagues that it can.
Evgeny Krutikov
