The Russia Guy

Today’s guest is David Klion, a writer in Brooklyn whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, The Baffler, and many other publications. In mid-September, the website Coda published a story by David, titled “Russia, Hollywood’s Mirror,” where he examines Russia tropes in American movies over the past six centuries. Here’s the opening of the article: “If Russi...

Today's guest is Amie Ferris-Rotman, the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, and a veteran reporter on Russia, who’s previously worked for Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Vogue, The Atlantic, Politico, and Foreign Policy. She’s also covered Afghanistan, and she was awarded the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, where she developed and founded the “Saha...

Today's show features an interview with Sean Guillory, the scholar behind the popular Sean’s Russia Blog and the SRB Podcast, a weekly podcast on Eurasian politics, history, and culture. Sean is also the digital-scholarship curator in the Russian and East European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and he’s an occasional columnist at Jacobin Magazine, where he writes about Russia...

Kevin continues his interview series with professionals in the field of Russia expertise. Today's guest is Dr. Mark Galeotti, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague and the coordinator of its Center for European Security. Check out Dr. Galeotti's latest book: “The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia,” released this May by Yale University Presshttps: //www.amaz...

On today’s show, Kevin continues his series of interviews with journalists working on Russia. This episode features Carl Schreck, a senior correspondent for RFE/RL and a veteran reporter who’s worked in Moscow, from the States, and from Prague, where he’s based now. Carl and Kevin talked about what makes good news stories, how you break into this field, what it’s like to cut your teeth on Russia’s...

On today’s show, Kevin welcomes back Aric Toler to learn more about the August 31 assassination of Alexander Zakharchenko, the separatist leader of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, or DNR. What path led Zakharchenko to this grisly end, and who planted the bomb that killed him? An open-source intelligence expert at Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Ari...

On this episode of The Russia Guy, Kevin talks to freelance writer and Russia watcher Dustin Giebel, who was recently the target of a defamatory blog post by a #resistance freedom fighter named Jay McKenzie. The screed was posted on Medium and promoted by information-warfare darlings like lobbyist Molly McKew and former CIA agent John Sipher — two public figures Giebel has criticized in the past....

Kevin reads the full text of a new investigative report by Meduza’s Daniil Turovsky about how Russia’s war in Georgia sparked Moscow’s modern-day recruitment of criminal hackers. The story is timely not just because we’re currently marking the 10-year anniversary of the Russo-Georgian war, but also because we’re still living in a world dominated by news about Russian election interference, cyber-t...

On today’s show, Kevin talks to to Anastasia Karimova, a former activist and journalist in Russia. Today, she’s a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the United States. Anastasia’s personal history is fascinating in its own right, but it's especially interesting now, in the aftermath of the arrest of Maria Butina. Kevin asked Anastasia about fin...

Today Kevin will look at the criminal charges against Maria Butina, announced on July 16 by the Justice Department. What are the charges? What kind of dirt does the FBI have on this woman? What's Butina’s history in Russia? Why is she a foreign agent and not a “spy”?Read Meduza's deep dive on Butina: “Meet Maria Butina, the FBI’s Russian gun nut undeclared foreign agent” https://meduza.i...

On the evening of July 4, 2018, Russian Internet users realized that the search engine Yandex had been indexing a surprising array of information stored on Google Docs, including files containing passwords, credit card numbers, and corporate documents. Yandex’s press service says the company’s actions were perfectly legitimate, but within hours of Wednesday’s discovery the search engine stopped pr...

Today’s show addresses the recent events surrounding the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, better known as “Shaninka,” which just lost its state accreditation, following an inspection by Russia’s Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency (Rosobrnadzor). Inspectors claim that the school is in violation of several state education standards. The agency’s report says Shaninka’s und...

On today’s show, Kevin reviews the pension reform proposal slipped into Russia’s news agenda last week, just as the country’s attention turned to a certain soccer tournament. After summarizing the proposed reforms, Kevin gets some feedback about the plan from a very special guest, his eight-year-old daughter. So what are you going to learn about on today’s show? The Russian government wants to rai...

Howdy, folks! It’s Wednesday, June 13, and we’re hours away from the kickoff of the next FIFA World Cup, which is being hosted in Russia this year. The next month will turn much of the world’s attention to Russia, which means this is a good opportunity to shine a light on the country’s social issues. The last time a sporting event did this was the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, and back then many in...

This episode of The Russia Guy takes place a week after the staged murder of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who was dead to the world for almost 24 hours, from May 29 to May 30, until he was gloriously resurrected by Ukraine’s National Security Agency, which revealed that his killing had been a hoax apparently designed to obtain a hit list with the names of 47 prominent Ukrainian and Russian...

Kevin's guest in this episode is Nikita Kulachenkov, one of the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s full-time investigators. What are you going to learn about on today’s episode of the podcast? Kevin asked Nikita about Russia’s possible criminalization of appealing to foreign governments for sanctions against Russian citizens, and he asked him what impact this legislation could have on the Anti-Corr...

Today’s episode of The Russia Guy welcomes back Aric Toler from Bellingcat, which together with The Insider has just released a new report that contains some pretty amazing revelations about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine almost four years ago. All 298 people on board that plane were killed, and Bellingcat has led the way in open-source intelligence gathering when...

Kevin’s guest today is Keith Gessen, a novelist, journalist, literary translator, and assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Gessen has written about Russia for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, where he recently published a fascinating story, titled “The Quiet Americans Behind the U.S.-Russia Imbroglio,”...

On this episode of The Russia Guy, Kevin’s guest is David Filipov, a journalist who’s reported from Moscow, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and New England. David spent years with The Boston Globe, where he contributed to the newsroom that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for covering the Boston Marathon bombing. He also won the 2014 Edward R. Murrow Award for Continuing Covera...

Kevin’s guest today is Natalia Antonova, who as many listeners already know is a prolific writer, and a journalist who’s worked in Moscow, Kiev, and soon Washington, D.C., where she’s accepted a position at the Voice of America. Natalia was deputy editor at The Moscow News before it was liquidated in the collapse of RIA Novosti, and she’s been published all over the place, including The Washington...

In this episode, Kevin's guest is Emily Parker, a writer who's worked for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Previously, she was a member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. State Department, where she advised on Internet freedom, digital diplomacy, and open government. Today, Emily writes about tech and foreign affairs, and she works at a blockchain startup. So what ar...

The past three episodes of The Russia Guy have been devoted to the technical details surrounding Russian Internet censorship, but today’s show focuses on one of the organizers of Monday’s Internet freedom rally in Moscow. Kevin spoke to Mikhail Svetov, a member of the Russian Libertarian Party’s federal committee. So what are you going to learn on today’s episode? Mikhail told me how Monday’s Inte...

In this episode, Kevin discusses three stories: (1) the structure of Russia’s pension system and the ongoing problems with keeping it funded, (2) two reports by different media monitoring groups that study traffic on Telegram, and finally (3) why it is that the Russian authorities have failed to keep so many Russian Internet users from accessing Telegram. For more on these issues, see the followin...

Today’s podcast guest is Yasha Levine, an investigative journalist and the author of the new book “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet,” which offers a new look at the little-discussed genesis of the very thing that brings my voice to your ears: the Internet. What did Yasha and Kevin discuss? You guessed it: Russia’s block of Telegram. Some highlights:*The concepts of...

Russia has finally blocked Telegram! In this episode, Kevin spoke to Tjournal.ru 's chief editor, Nikita Likhachev, to learn more about this story. Some things Nikita discussed:*Technically speaking, how will Roskomnadzor block Telegram?*Will Russia order Google and Apple to remove Telegram from their app stores?*What will most Telegram users in Russia do? Will they bother with VPN technologi...