Dennis Cosgrove used to ride the Moscow metro to Lubyanka Square and walk into the headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service, sometimes several times a week. He went to work active cases with Russian counterparts: kidnappings, financial crimes, corruption investigations that reached into Russian institutions themselves.
Cosgrove, a former FBI special agent and legal attaché in Moscow, describes those years in a RealClearDefense essay published June 17, 2026. His argument is that the cooperation he saw in the late 1990s is gone, and that its disappearance left a hole across the former Soviet space.
A system built on phone calls
From roughly the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, he writes, sustained practical cooperation between U.S. and Russian security services was both possible and actively pursued, within limits. Russian counterparts would call to propose a meeting. There were no elaborate taskings or rigid channels. Cases moved on “professional trust rather than formal agreement.”
He says he first met Vladimir Putin in 1998, just after Putin was appointed director of the Federal Security Service. In one case, a sensitive dispute over the arrest of a former Russian intelligence officer in the United States was settled within days through direct contact, without escalation.
It was never institutionalized, Cosgrove notes. It rested on personal relationships, informal understandings and a narrow window of political tolerance. He had seen the other extreme earlier, as a special agent investigating the theft of diamonds, gold and artwork from the Russian state. The FBI then had no legal attaché in Moscow or anywhere in the former Soviet Union, and cooperation was sporadic, case-dependent and often improvised.
What replaced it
As relations between Russia and the West soured in the early 2000s, the informal links did not hold. “Trust was not transferable,” he writes. Cooperation narrowed, then faded, and gave way to suspicion.
The damage reached beyond the two countries, in his account. Across the fifteen states that emerged from the Soviet Union, no coherent operational framework took the old arrangement’s place. Institutions weakened unevenly, borders stayed porous, and criminal networks adapted faster than governments did. While advising on border security across the OSCE region, he saw the gap first-hand. In parts of Central Asia, border disputes around enclaves periodically turned violent, and authorities on both sides often had no standing way to talk to one another. Coordination was improvised in moments of tension, when it was most likely to fail.
Some limited, often unacknowledged cooperation continues in response to acute risks, he says, though it is narrow, informal and fragile.
His proposal
Cosgrove suggests a small, technically focused forum made up mainly of practitioners: law enforcement officials, border security experts and investigators who have handled cross-border threats in the region. Western participation would be limited and aimed at technical support rather than leadership. It would not try to settle geopolitical disputes, only to keep a minimal level of working cooperation alive where interests still overlap.
Such a body could run at some distance from state-to-state relations, he argues, which formal institutions cannot. He admits skepticism is warranted, given deep mistrust and the resistance any plan involving Russian participation would meet. It would not end the war in Ukraine, he adds.
Cosgrove also worked as head of the Border Security and Management Unit at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna.
