In Moscow’s Shadows

ColGen Vitaly Shulika Today (25 May 2026) it has emerged that since 22 May, former Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs and Police Colonel General Vitaly Shulika has been appointed Deputy Minister of Defence, replacing Oleg Savelyev, who had served in that…

(Tsalikov and Shoigu in happier times – for them – in 2022, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Sergey_Shoigu_%282022-03-01%29_07.png?

Yesterday’s resignation of Andrii Yermak, Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, strong right hand and eminence grise, is clearly a seismic shock to Ukrainian politics.

On 19 August 2025, the 24th anniversary of the 1991 August Coup, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda ran an article New Twist in the GKChP case: Kryuchkov was in collusion with Yeltsin, planning to make him president of the USSR (Новый поворот в деле ГКЧП:…

Out in the UK (hardback/audiobook/ebook) on 7 August

The fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad surprised the whole world and Russia was no exception [Omar Sanadiki/AP] This is a summary of the discussion at the latest of the current series of online Strategic Competition Seminar Series (SCSS) webinars he…

While my own In Moscow’s Shadows podcast is still going strong, of late I seem to have been featuring on a lot of other people’s, so here is a quick rundown of some (which all too often also seem to be videos…).

Various reports I have written over the years under the auspices of my consultancy Mayak Intelligence are now being posted on its site, here.