While the Russians arent good at formal combat.....see Afghanistan.....they are masters at fighting in the darkness of special ops. Their agents know their targets and make sure their targets get what is coming to them. Once family members of terrorists begin showing up dead in various poses, the bad guys get the message and back off.
If only we could learn that lesson.
I would say that is more true of the old USSR than modern Russia. Even when the USSR was at the brink of collapse, you never heard of terrorists ever being able to attack civilians inside the country the way they do now. Perhaps Russia needs to go back to fighting terrorists the dirty way again. God knows we certainly need to do the same thing.
The Afghan war was more special ops than "formal combat". Black ops is what the Russians/Soviets are good at. They once were darned good at formal combat, ask the Germans. Compared to our Spec Ops folks, Spetnaz bites the big one.