Key Reflections
* The Russian security services have a paranoia that Russian emigres will return and embarrass the Vladimir Putin regime. This is a fear grounded in the role of the emigres in the 1917 Russian Revolution.
* Putin came to power in 2000 with a reputation of brutality from the Second Chechen War. It was always clear that he would enforce media censorship and intimidation of journalists.
* In the Russian army, the level of accepted casualties is far higher than in other nations. Losing soldiers and officers does not negatively impact the morale of the Kremlin.
* Putin rules by fear, and much of his public support is based on this. Around 20 percent of people are openly against Russia’s war in Ukraine, another 20 percent support it, and the rest are silenced by fear.
* The Russian political regime is insecure about the fragility of the state. This stems from the historical memory of the collapse of the USSR and the complicated relationship between the Communist Party and the KGB.
* Putin has managed to secure control over the Russian Orthodox Church and uses it as a tool of soft power to exercise influence abroad.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
AS: Andrei Soldatov
SG: Welcome to the NATO DEEP Dive podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel, and in this episode, I speak with Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and co-author of The Compatriots.
I discuss with Andrei his career, what is currently unfolding inside Russia, Vladimir Putin’s wider agenda, and the state of the war in Ukraine.
Andrei Soldatov, a warm welcome to NATO DEEP Dive.
AS: Thank you for having me.
SG: It’s our pleasure. Let’s start with some of the research that you’ve done. You wrote this book, The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Emigres and Agents Abroad. What was the motivation for writing that?
AS: It’s always been a very interesting topic for me, Russian emigration, given the history of Russia in the 20th century. But I have some personal motivation behind it. Before The Compatriots, my co-author Irina Borogan and I, we did two books, the New Nobility, about the Russian security service, the FSB, which was, of course, about how the Kremlin used the Russian security services to control its population in Russia. The second book was The Red Web, which was about online operations. So, it was also about how to control people online, and the book was not only about offensive operations, but also about the system of online censorship and surveillance. So, it came to me and really, quite naturally, that we need to write a book about the Russian security services abroad. What do we do to control people—who are the Russian people—who are beyond Russian borders. And then, during our research, it became clear to us that the whole point about Russian political immigration was much more serious and much more important for the Russian security services, which is quite ironic.
We used to think that Russian emigration didn’t play a really crucial role in, say, the collapse of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. People who emigrated and fled the Soviet Union played some role, but it was not crucial. It was not how it was perceived in the Kremlin. It is actually quite interesting that dealing with the threat posed by political emigres, was a defining moment for the modus operandi of Russian intelligence and security services. And there has always been paranoia about this threat, mostly, as far as I get it, from my conversations with people inside, based on the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917. So, that very primitive and basic idea, shared by many people in the security services, that this revolution was organised by emigres, by Vladimir Lenin and his friends, and they got back to the country when they were given a chance, and they destroyed the mighty Russian Empire.
So, the thinking inside of the Russian and Soviet security services has always been like that. That look, ‘What if another group of Russian emigres come back to the country, they might destroy the present political regime, easily.’ And of course, it’s very ahistorical, I would say, even anti-historical because the First World War destroyed not one (Russian) Empire, but several empires, right. And emigres didn’t play a crucial role in toppling this regime, it was the war, which destroyed these empires. But it is how things are seen in Moscow, especially by people in the security services. So, they invested a lot in dealing with this threat, developing methods, and mechanisms and ideas, which then were used outside of the country, but also inside the country. And unfortunately, it’s still the case.
So, we still see that the Kremlin and the security services are obsessed with the threat posed by political immigration. And finally, I had this very personal thing because I was born in the mid-1970s, and by 1991, I was 15/16 years old, and it was such an optimistic time for everybody in Russia. We all believed that all these things from the time of the Cold War, like immigration, forced emigration, that people cannot get back, were all in the past already. And the 1990s was actually the only period of time in Russian history where we didn’t have any political emigres. And that’s why we had many hopes about how things might develop for Russians living abroad. And the new concept was born of Global Russians, that we don’t need any more any political or any kind of emigration, people might travel to Russia, out of Russia, they can always come back, we’re just looking for opportunities, it doesn’t need to be such an emotional and dramatic issue for the Russians, and Putin destroyed the whole thing. He just destroyed the idea of Global Russians and what we see now is a direct come back to what we had 50/70 years ago. So, that’s why we decided to write this book.
SG: Well, those are obviously very important reasons for why you wrote the book. And you said a couple of things that I found very interesting. You spoke about the optimism that there was in the 1990s. And you then added how Putin destroyed that optimism. If we go back to when Vladimir Putin first became president of Russia. What were your initial thoughts about that? Did you envisage the way it would turn out as we see now with Vladimir Putin.
AS: It was a very sad day for many people in Moscow, including me, to be honest. I remember very vividly this moment, when Boris Yeltsin, on the first 31st of December, came on television and said, ‘I’m tired and I retire, and Vladimir Putin is the guy who will be my successor.’ It was a horrible moment, because I have friends, my friends, colleagues, journalists who covered the wars in Chechnya. And we all knew, already by 2000, that Vladimir Putin was extremely brutal. The way he conducted his war in Chechnya, the Second Chechen War, was horrible, it was extremely brutal, and the climate in the country completely changed, because of the war and the way it was promoted on Russian television and in Russian propaganda media.
And even for personal reasons, I felt that it would be a disaster, because it was immediately clear that Vladimir Putin decided, well, he wanted to sell this war to the Russian population. And to sell this war to the Russians, he needed to explain why the First Chechen War was lost by the Russian army. And his way to explain this defeat was to blame journalists. So, basically, his message was that We would have won, but journalists, Russian and foreign journalists, undermined the Russian military effort in Chechnya and that is why we lost, but this time, it will be different.’ So, for me as a journalist who was writing about terrorist attacks and the activities of the Russian security services, it was a clear sign that it would be really difficult to keep doing what I was doing, because the Kremlin and Putin wanted to introduce censorship, and he was applying more and more pressure on Russian media. That was absolutely clear from day one.
SG: Well, let’s tie some of this together. You talked about Putin’s disastrous campaigns in Chechnya. You talked about his sort of declaration of war on journalism and how journalists were reporting events. You, as a journalist, were covering the Moscow theatre hostage crisis back in 2002, in which Chechen militants took many hundreds of people hostage. It ended very controversially, because a lot of the people that died during the attempted rescue operation, they died because of toxic substances that were pumped into the theatre system. Was that an indication early on about how the state under Vladimir Putin would deal with security challenges?
AS: Very much so. Yes, it was immediately proclaimed on Russian television that Putin could not repeat the mistakes made by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in dealing with these kinds of situations. And back in the 1990s, we had several huge hostage taking crises, including the one when the whole hospital with women was taken hostage and it was a horrible event. But back then, Boris Yeltsin decided that the lives of these people, that’s what mattered. And he decided to talk to terrorists, to release his people, and to save them. The message of Vladimir Putin was completely different. He said, basically, that the most important thing is not the lives of its people, but political stability of the country. So, if you have the political stability of the country destroyed or undermined, it would be a much bigger disaster, and to avoid this kind of scenario, we need to do everything we can. And that was the logic behind the operation launched by the Russian security services when they decided to storm the theatre instead of negotiating with the people inside. And that is why this disastrous operation when more than 130 people died, nevertheless, was proclaimed a victory.
And it was also a moment when Vladimir Putin made it very clear that he would not tolerate any critical reporting by journalists. He attacked many media and journalists in person, including me. That was the very first time I got into trouble with the FSB, and they opened a criminal investigation against me, and I was interrogated many times in Lefortovo Prison. So, it was a very unpleasant experience, because you never know whether you will be let out of the prison or not. And that was his message, the follow up, to all of us, that the things which really matter to him, which have something to do with national security or political stability, there is no room for any kind of criticism or debate. And it should be all tightly controlled by the Kremlin and the Russian security services.
SG: So, that, in many ways, is illustrating the beginning of the challenges that you face head on with Putin’s regime? How did it evolve to the point where you became considered an enemy of the state? What was the process? When did you realise that you could no longer stay in Russia? And kind of connected to that question, have you been worried about your own safety and security since you left Russia?
AS: Oh, it took a long period of time. Even in 2002, I still thought that there were people inside of the Russian security services, that were really good people and good professionals. And actually, I had some contacts inside who were really good people, for instance, people who were in charge of dealing with explosive devices. And it was a very risky business for these people—some of them died, because they tried to save people’s lives. And I knew these people. And I remember, during my very first interrogation at Lefortovo, I argued with the officer saying, ‘You need to not investigate me, but we all need to do everything we can to prevent these kinds of attacks—the taking of the theatre—from happening.’ And I had this foolish idea that we were on the same page to some extent, because the people who were put in charge of fighting terrorism, and it is such a big thing and such a big evil. But gradually, I understood that no, the situation had completely changed.
Two years later, in 2004, there was another huge attack, a hostage taking operation—a hostage taking crisis in Beslan, when the school was taken hostage, and even more people died: kids. And the way the Russian security services dealt with this crisis was horrible. Lots of kids died, there was complete chaos and confusion. But the most important thing was that the Russian security services didn’t want to admit that they made mistakes. And when many Russian journalists and foreign journalists raised these questions and reported mistakes were made, the reaction was extremely aggressive. And that was the moment I started thinking that maybe it would not be really possible anymore to write about the activities of the Russian security services.
Nevertheless, we kept doing this for a number of years. But by 2008/2009, the problem was that it became clear that there is huge pressure on Russian media. Well, the thing you saw was that many editors became extremely cautious and hesitant at having investigative journalists, in their newspapers, and then in their media, they understood that they might get into a lot of trouble. And these journalists posed a risk for the very existence of his media. So, in 2008, at the end of 2008, I was fired from a newspaper, along with my colleague, and that was the very last job I could actually have in Russia as a journalist. And still we thought that it was still possible to do journalism. And what actually happened was that a friend of mine, an American journalist, came to me and said, ‘Look, why not write a book about the Russian security services?’ And I said, ‘I was just fired from Russian media, why would a Russian publisher publish my book?’ And she said, ‘No, no, no, you need to approach American publishers, try maybe it’s worth it.’
And thanks to some fortunate events, and coincidences, and some friends. Well, finally, I found a way to get our proposal to our publisher, and he agreed, and that’s how our first book was published. And after that, it was a very strange moment—I would say period—of my existence as a journalist in Russia. I was writing books in English, for an American publisher, to get them published in the United States. While asking Russian publishers to buy the licence for the book and to get them translated into Russian, to get back to my Russian audience. The feeling was very bizarre, I felt like I was in some sort of virtual emigration. So, you still consider yourself a Russian journalist, but you write in a foreign language, and this is the only way you can get your story published in your country. It’s a very unconventional way of doing this. But it worked for us until 2020. And in 2020, we were told, very clearly, that we had only two weeks to pack, and we needed to leave the country. And that’s what we did.
SG: Are you worried that living abroad you could be targeted? I’m thinking about the cases of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergio and Yulia Skripal; we know how far the hands of the Russian state can go. Is it something you think about?
AS: Yes, unfortunately, it is something I need to take into consideration. Also, because once the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started, I was almost immediately put on the wanted list of the Russian authorities, which resulted in several things. My assets in Russia were seized, it was not a lot of money, but still, it was quite unfortunate. The other thing was that I was told that I cannot travel to certain countries. And it was really unfortunate because these countries, we are talking about Central Asia, Georgia, Armenia, Serbia, these are the countries where you can now see lots of Russian recent emigrants. And they settled in these counters, mostly because you don’t need to have a visa to get into these countries. But it is also a reason why it’s so risky to come to this country if you are on the Russian wanted list, because many of these countries are still on friendly terms with the Russian security services, so you can be easily extradited or kidnapped. So, it is a real risk, unfortunately, for me and for my colleagues, because now we have a long list of Russian journalists on the wanted list of the Russian authorities.
SG: That’s very concerning, and very troubling indeed. You mentioned the aspect about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How is the war going for Russia? Where do you see it heading? And how long can Russia continue to fight this when it is continuously losing soldiers?
AS: The biggest problem now we have—we used to have—a wrong perception of the Russian army. On the one hand, it is true that the Russian army is not very professional, not very competent, they lost a lot of soldiers and officers, trained officers, which is not easy to replace. On the other hand, I would say a unique quality of the Russian army is that they can sustain more casualties than the armies of, say, Western Europe or the United States. The level of acceptance of casualties is much higher. If you lose, say, in the British army or the French army, so many soldiers it would be a disaster for the army and people would be asking questions that would affect the morale of the army and all of that. Whereas in the Russian Army the situation is completely different. And it’s been like that for many years, if not decades. The level of accepted casualties was extremely high during the Second World War, and the idea was everything was justified because we just needed to win the war no matter what. The costs never actually mattered.
In Chechnya, it was always a disaster. It was a disaster during the First Chechen War, it was a disaster during the Second Chechen War, but the army just didn’t pay any attention to that. And it goes not only to soldiers, but also to generals. I vividly remember when the war in Georgia started, in the summer of 2008. As a general who was in charge of the 58 army of Russia, as a main fighting force, he was immediately, almost immediately, wounded because he was on the very first tank of the column of Russian tanks, heading to the war. And I remember, back then I was having conversations with Russian officers asking them, ‘Do you think that it’s normal, that you have a general sitting on the very first tank with no protection, it doesn’t make any sense to me and I’m not a military officer, but still, it’s seems to be stupid.’ But they said, ‘No, it’s fine. It was just a sign that he was extremely brave.’ So, they accepted this level of incompetence, as a sign of his courage, which is an astonishing thing in the 21st century. But nevertheless, this is something we need to take into consideration. So, unfortunately even now while they are losing so many men, nevertheless, it doesn’t affect the army as deeply as we all hoped. And unfortunately, I think it means that this war might last much longer than any of us expected.
SG: Well, I think that tallies with what a lot of others that have been looking at the war in great detail have to say. Does some Putin have public support in Russia for this war, or is there just an increasing amount of apathy towards it?
AS: First of all, Vladimir Putin is really good at spreading fear. He knows how to do that. He is really a world expert in doing this. The way he is doing this is targeting every strata of Russian society. It’s not only about journalists, it’s not only about activists, it’s not only about opposition politicians. It’s also about the army. It is about the security services, and it is about the ministries. I think it makes things really difficult because even as we see now more and more attacks of drones on Moscow, nevertheless, Russian bureaucracy is so scared of Putin that they remain loyal to him. And we see that; the most interesting example for me was when drones attacked Moscow city. One of the buildings they attacked was the so-called tower of ministries, because this tower houses three Russian ministries, including the Ministry of Digital Development, which is, in part, in charge of the Russian import substitution programme, which is a great, big thing for the Kremlin, because this is the way they are trying to substitute for the Western equipment, which became unavailable because of sanctions. So, it is a crucial, key ministry for the Russian military effort, in short. And I know people who work in this ministry, and they told me that yes, of course, it was very scary when we got these attacks of drones, literally at the windows of the offices, but we also remember that just two weeks before that, the Deputy Minister of this very ministry was arrested and sent to jail. And if you waive the risk of being hit by Ukrainian drones or being arrested by the FSB…lots of Russian officials think that the risk of being arrested was much higher. So, fear plays a crucial role in this public support for Putin. So, it’s all just about trust. The real picture is that you have 20% of the population against the war, but they’re really afraid of doing anything about it. There are 20% who are really pro-war for many, many reasons. So, the rest are either frightened, scared, or just passive. And they just support Putin, because they support matter what they are doing.
SG: Speaking about fear, the mercenary leader and ex-convict Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner Group is now dead under mysterious circumstances. It seemed very unsurprising when he seemed to threaten the Kremlin, and then there seemed to be some resolution, then he dies. Did he actually believe that he would be forgiven for his actions? How do you explain everything that has happened in this very weird world of the Wagner Group and the Kremlin?
AS: What we need to remember about Prigozhin, and he was a very interesting character, is that he was not part of Russian bureaucracy. He was not a military commander. He had this criminal mindset. And also, he had a very personal relationship with Putin dating back to their years spent together in the 1990s in St. Petersburg, and again, that involved a lot of criminal activities. And when you are talking to people who have some understanding of the criminal world, especially in Russia, these people always believe that some sort of deal is always possible. You just need to understand what is the deal. So, he had his deal with Putin for many years. When the war started, Prigozhin found a way to update his deal. And he became more prominent and more public, more ambitious. He then was put under some pressure from the Ministry of Defence, which he found very unfair because it was unfair in regard to the deal he had with Putin. So, what actually he tried to achieve with his mutiny was not to topple Putin…he wanted to renegotiate his deal. And I think his biggest mistake was that finally, he went into a room with Putin after his mutiny failed, and Putin made him believe that Prigozhin got a new deal. Maybe it was not such a good deal, but still it was a deal. And part of this deal was that Prigozhin would be safe. And I think that was his mistake.
SG: Big mistake in fact. So, one thing you’d mentioned to me before, when we had met previously, was that very often when Vladimir Putin give statements, he’s seen on camera. You were telling me that actually very often that is not even in Moscow, but elsewhere, that he’s recreated the same visuals from Moscow in other parts of Russia. Did I understand that correctly, and why is he doing that?
AS: Yes, exactly. He built replicas of his office in Sochi and then two other places. So, his idea is always keep the pretence that he’s in Moscow, in the Kremlin, working hard. And I think it has a lot to do with the idea of keeping things under control. And he believes that he needs to project this, and always have this message to the Russian people that he’s there, he’s in control, and he cannot be challenged. So, for him, it’s extremely important. And I think sometimes we do not understand that, but it is important to keep in mind that a lot of people in the Russian security services including Putin, they share his interest and belief that the Russian state actually is extremely fragile. So they’re always talking about how they’re strong and how they’re challenging the United States and the West and all of that, but at the same time, deep inside, if you ask them, they will tell you that actually it’s very fragile, and it might be destroyed with something, which might start with something really, really small.
And this kind of paranoia and the idea of fragility of the Russian political regime, again, you can trace it back to 1917…until 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union, because the KGB never explained itself, why the Soviet Union collapsed and why the Russian Empire collapsed, because it’s very uncomfortable to think about 1991. Just think about it for a minute. You had a big country, the Soviet Union, which was a formidable power, a global power, right? And this country, this regime had the KGB, which was probably the biggest, if not the most numerous security service in the world. And it was also the most intelligent organisation, at least, that’s how people at the KGB considered the KGB. And all of a sudden, in three days in August 1991, it just all collapsed. The uncomfortable truth about this collapse is that the KGB did nothing to save the political regime of the Communist Party, for one particular reason: because the Communist Party controlled the KGB, and the KGB wanted to get rid of this control. They just didn’t see that without this control, the whole country would collapse. But they cannot tell this truth to themselves. So instead, they invent all kinds of conspiracy theories. And part of this conspiratorial thinking is that they believe that the Russian state, Russian regime has been always extremely fragile. And that is why Putin is so aggressive in his reaction to every threat, even if it’s very minor, if we are talking about some students or some girls protesting in Moscow’s streets, nevertheless, the idea is we do not know what might start the next revolution. So, it’s better to suppress any kind of unsanctioned activities because it might start a new revolution.
SG: Speaking about suppression, so the Kremlin has built a system known as SORM which Russian intelligence compels all the country’s internet providers to install this, I guess you could call them, black boxes. Could you expand on what this all entails? Because I know you’ve written about it.
AS: Yes, it’s a very totalitarian approach to surveillance. Basically, it means that every internet service provider in the country is required by law to install these devices, which provides backdoor access to the local departments of the FSB. It is a very sophisticated system these days. And the problem is that now we have the occupied territories of Ukraine, and now we have the Russian Internet service providers in these territories. And that means that right now, as we speak, Russian engineers are installing these various systems, but now in the occupied territories of Ukraine, while actually putting Ukrainian civilians under control of the Russian online surveillance system. It is, again, it is quite sophisticated, it’s developed locally. And, unfortunately, we already see, and we have seen for years how this system was used to target activists and just people who speak their mind on social media about what was going on.
SG: We’ve been talking a lot about the methods, the tools, the hard power that the Russian state uses. IF we look at a form of soft power, as well, the role of the Russian Orthodox Church, and how it helps Putin serve as a form of intelligence, as a form of recruitment. Could you explain how that works?
AS: It is a very sad story, to be honest, for me as a Russian because back in the 1990s and even in the 1980s, we believed in several things. We believed, for instance, that beyond Soviet borders, that it was with Russian emigration—for some reason, we believe that all of them are aristocrats who fled the Revolution and the Civil War—and there was this church, which was not compromised by cooperation with the KGB. And that is why we had two churches, actually, there was a White Church, as we call it, the church as the Russian Orthodox Church, beyond Russian borders, and the Red Church inside of the Soviet Union. And we called it the right choice for these reasons because it was infiltrated and penetrated by the KGB. Putin, when he came to power in 2000, immediately understood the role of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad. He immediately started working on a plan of how to put this church under control of the Kremlin. And to be honest, I was shocked and surprised how easy it was for him. I thought it was a very strange thing. Like, think about it. This church, the White Church, was built by descendants of the first wave of Russian emigration, so the people who fled communists and Cheka and the KGB. And of course, they would say no to the approaches made by Vladimir Putin, who is a former KGB officer. That was my thinking.
But unfortunately, the reality was absolutely different. The church abroad decided to join forces with the church in Moscow, so these two churches, the Red and the White Churches, are now the same thing. And the main reason for that is, it’s not corruption as we might think, or coercion. No, not that. It is that they share the same, I would say, worldview, which you can take to the 19th century The problem with people, with the descendants of the first wave of emigration, people who are close to the church abroad is that many of them share a very nostalgic understanding of the Imperial Russian past. And Putin, he is the same guy with the same idea. He is seen by them as a new Tsar who is rebuilding the mighty Russian Empire. And they just decided not to pay any attention to the fact that he is a former KGB man because he is, for them, an imperialist, someone who is rebuilding the Russian Empire.
So unfortunately, when the war started, first in 2014, and now in 2020, many people who are close to the church decided to support the war. So, we can say, yes, it’s all orchestrated from Moscow, but unfortunately, it’s only part of the explanation. And I spoke with many priests, and they were really shocked that they couldn’t speak about the war because the people who are in the church would leave the church. So, they’re afraid of speaking about the war. But it doesn’t mean that the Russian security services and intelligence agency didn’t and do not explore the church—quite the opposite. We just discovered a document that actually the Russian church was establishing some rules of cooperation with the Russian intelligence and security services, and that this cooperation includes not only providing, say, ideological ammunition, but also helping in operations.
SG: That’s very interesting and very concerning, and as you said, very sad as well. A final question, Andrei. So, as you know, one of my books is coming out on Ayman al-Zawahiri, and we’d spoken about this in the past, because in the 1990s, al-Zawahiri was actually arrested and detained in Dagestan and was then actually released. It seemed that members of al-Qaeda actually bribed local Russian authorities to release him, and the Russian authorities didn’t know who he actually was. Were there a lot of people connected to al-Qaeda that were travelling through Russia in the 1990s? Was this all about Chechnya? Or was this a bigger dynamic?
AS: It was a very important and interesting story. And I remember that I did an investigation about this, because I always asked myself a question, why, after the war in Afghanistan ended and when the regime of Najibullah collapsed, why all these Islamists, international jihadists, when they had a choice where to go either to Bosnia or to Chechnya, they decided to go to Bosnia and not to Russia, to fight in Chechnya. I would think it would be quite natural for them to come to Chechnya to fight the same enemy they had fought in the 1980s in Afghanistan, but it never happened. And I think the main reason was that in Bosnia, the local war leaders were not extremely powerful. So, they were happy to have international jihadists come and take over. But it was never the case in Chechnya. In Chechnya, the local resistance, the local militancy was much stronger than any visitors or any global jihadists. Yes, in Chechnya, there were several famous fighters coming from abroad, but they were never in control of the movement.
But of course, the Russian security services didn’t pay attention to this distinction. They always pretended that in Chechnya, they had another front against al-Qaeda. But this kind of assumption was made by the Russian security services for purely political reasons. It was right after 9/11, they wanted to secure support from the United States. And at some point, maybe you remember that it was a very hilarious story: the press office of the FSB had a press conference, and they claimed that they had just discovered a CD-ROM with training exercises for a Boeing 747. So, the idea was to try to convince the Americans that actually terrorists were trained in Chechnya, and that is why we need to join forces and to fight in Chechnya together. Of course, it was all false, and they just made up the story, but nevertheless, that was the idea of the Russian security services. Then, later on—and again, it’s all about politics, it’s not about reality— the FSB made another point that they discovered a document in Chechnya, a letter, a kind of certificate, with two sides: al-Qaeda and the CIA training school. They started pretending that actually all these jihadists who came to Chechnya were trained by both al-Qaeda and the CIA. So, we all understand the reasons for that—purely political reasons. But it was a moment when lots of people just understood what we’re dealing with, that these people just couldn’t be trusted.
SG: Well on that, very wise and important words, I think we can conclude this very riveting discussion, Andrei. Let me thank you again for spending time on the NATO DEEP Dive podcast. But most importantly, please take care of yourself. Please stay safe.
AS: Thank you, Sajjan. Thank you.
SG: Thank you for listening to this episode of NATO DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP). My producers are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.