The challenges of mapping Russian corporate actors
Russian corporate structures can be incredibly complex, making it difficult to present a clear picture to readers. Visualisations can help – as can identifying the main story that the visualisations need to tell. This approach can be usefully extended to other actors, like private military companies (PMCs).
Welcome back! I hope you managed to take a few days off this summer.
In recent months, I have spent a great deal of time exploring Russian corporate structures for clients. These can be incredibly confusing, as anyone who has spent any time looking at them can testify.
Russian companies are, in general, more likely than their Western counterparts to employ complex structures, with multiple shell and holding companies. Information about ownership is often not publicly disclosed, even for major Russian firms, meaning it has to be scraped together from media reporting, interviews, and various forms of official disclosures. Offshore holding companies with even more limited disclosure requirements may be involved. Related companies can have very similar names that are conflated in the public domain. The same entities may own shares directly in a company, but also exercise control through other entities that are subordinate to it. And, of course, the whole picture may change over time. The logic and contradictions of the Russian business world can be a delight to explore!
Sometimes complicated corporate structures can have a political explanation, such as concealing elite wealth, but just as often it is a response to Russian economic realities — an effort to minimise tax obligations, for example, or to reduce the risks of asset seizure (think: not having all your eggs in one basket). The result, however, is that even legal and relatively simple businesses can end up looking like money laundering operations.
One of the challenges that this creates is that it makes it hard to tell a clear story that explains how different entities and actors relate to one another. Even when these problems of information availability are overcome, it can be difficult to convey findings in a way that is accessible.
Visualisations can help. Below is a stylised and anonymised example from a recent project, which had many of these elements. Note that even this requires simplification, because many of the entities listed also had their own shell structures.
Purely textual presentation of this information would require a great deal of space and be difficult to follow. A visualisation, however, is much easier to understand, allowing the supporting text to focus on highlighting key points. This approach works when dealing with smaller actors or limited scenarios, where being comprehensive might be possible, necessary, or both.
Problems, however, arise when dealing with larger corporations or a wide array of actors. Take just one example, Rostec: This consists of a dozen or more holding companies and more than 700 enterprises in both the military and the civilian sector. And that only includes those that are known — the true picture is likely even more complicated. Visualising all the available information is likely to produce confusion rather than clarity, and to obscure the story you want to tell.
To resolve this problem, it can help to think about the story the visualisation is intended to tell. In the case below (again anonymised), the intended message was that notionally independent actors are connected to one another and were involved at different levels in a case of corporate raiding (reiderstvo). And what really mattered to the story — which was obscured by the inclusion of all institutions — was the personal relationships between actors.
What was initially a highly complex and unstructured map of people and institutions became a much clearer picture when a basic structure was applied and organisations were either removed or relegated to a secondary role.
My client work spans domestic politics, foreign policy, and the economy. So what is the relevance of this for the focus of this newsletter, i.e. security? Well, the same approach can be usefully applied to a topic like PMCs. For example, in the case of the African Corps, it is arguably the institutional story — and its relationship to the Ministry of Defence — that matters more than the people. Individuals, such as Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov, play a role, but they are subordinate to the structures. In this case, a graphic like the first one might work best. On the other hand, the story of Yevgeniy Prigozhin is obscured by institutional actors: He operated a complex network of shell companies designed to muddy the waters. The true picture is only revealed by considering personal relations, such as when an individual from one Prigozhin entity suddenly appears in a new, notionally unconnected one. In this case, organisational analysis needs to be subordinated to relationship mapping and social network analysis — and an illustration like the second will help tell a much better story.
I think this is something that a great many academic texts would benefit from considering. Topics can often be incredibly complex, with a proliferation of actors making it hard to follow the story. Making use of select visualisations would help convey key takeaways and ease the cognitive burden on readers – particularly those who might be new to a topic.
In the news
Quite a lot to cover this week because of my short break!
💣 Terrorism & insurgency
The Investigative Committee for Kabardino-Balkaria accused a resident of Nalchik of recruiting for the Islamic State (IS). It was not clear if the man was arrested or placed on the wanted list.
A Yekaterinburg district court sentenced 11 people to between two and six years for membership of the Union of Slavic Forces of Rus (USSR), which rejects the legitimacy of the modern Russian Federation.
Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Aleksandr Bortnikov claimed that the perpetrators of the June 2024 attacks in Dagestan were adherents of Salafism. He also claimed that international terrorist organisations were behind the attacks and other efforts to destabilise Russia, without specifying which ones.
A group of prisoners from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan who were being held in Volgograd prison colony No.19 took 12 people hostage. The prisoners reportedly pledged allegiance to IS, and they forced one of the hostages to record a video asking President Vladimir Putin to provide them with a car and weapons and release their leaders from detention facilities. The total number of casualties in the incident was later clarified as totalling 13: Although the reporting was not particularly clear, this appeared to consist of four prisoners, five prison guards, and four hostage takers. It is the second hostage-taking incident linked to Islamic extremists in Russia’s prison system this year. Security service personnel interviewed by Caucasian Knot pointed to low pay, low staffing, corruption and violations of security procedures afflicting Russia’s prisons.
The Southern District Military Court heard a case against two men accused of participating in the invasion of Dagestan, an operation in 1999 that was led by Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab and provided the pretext for the Second Chechen War. The two men, Toymaskhan Adzhinyazov and Kaytarb Nasyrov, deny the charges. It is unclear when a verdict can be expected in the case.
The FSB reported on the detention of six people in Ingushetia on suspicion of planning an attack on law enforcement personnel and a church in Sunzha. The suspects were detained in Nazran and Kantyshevo; the authorities claimed the men were part of an international terrorist organisation. A local court subsequently arrested three of the men.
Chechen mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Ilyas Yakubov was added to Rosfinmonitoring’s list of terrorists and extremists. Yakubov was detained in Moscow in October 2023 on charges of justifying terrorism.
The Southern District Military Court sentenced a Stavropol convict to 12 years for joining a terrorist organisation while serving time in Stavropol Kray colony No.11.
🪖 Private military companies (PMCs)
In a statement of breathtaking hypocrisy, Dmitriy Polyanskiy, Russia’s chargé d’affaires at the UN Security Council, criticised the US PMC Amentum for its activities in Libya, Somalia, and Benin. Polyanskiy claimed Russia has “consistently advocated the need of a synchronized, balanced, gradual and step-by-step withdrawal of all non-Libyan armed groups and military units without exception” and said the Sanctions Committee should consider measures against Amentum.
Russia also lodged a formal diplomatic complaint with the US embassy in Moscow in protest at US journalists and volunteer fighters accompanying Ukraine’s invasion of Russia. The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed it had evidence of a US PMC operating on Russian territory, without naming a specific group. Russia’s complaints in this case had more validity, except for the small matter of its own lack of respect for that particular border.
Piotr Kucharski, a man from Hertfordshire in the UK, plead guilty to membership of the Wagner Group, although both Kucharski and prosecutors accepted he wasn’t really. Kucharski had told people he was, made threats, and expressed support for Wagner; prosecutors accepted there was no evidence that Kucharski had any actual connection to the group, but pursued prosecution because his actions still constituted an offence. Kucharski will be sentenced on 1 November. Thankfully for him, stupidity isn’t formally considered an aggravating circumstance.
Ivan Rossomakhin, a former Wagner fighter from Kirov Oblast, was released from prison to fight again in Ukraine. He was first recruited to Wagner in 2022, when he was serving a 14-year sentence for murder. In April 2024, he was sentenced to another 22 years for raping and murdering an 85-year-old woman; the sentence was increased to 23 years in appeal, but he spent just over a week in a prison colony before he was released again.
A court in Perm sentenced former Wagner fighter Grigoriy Starikov to life imprisonment for murdering three people in June 2023. Starikov’s prior service fighting for Russia in Ukraine was considered a mitigating circumstance, as has become traditional in the prosecution of former Wagner fighters.
The Bear Brigade PMC announced via its Telegram channel that it was withdrawing 100 fighters from Burkina Faso and redeploying them to defend Kursk. Bear Brigade’s original deployment to the West African country comprised 300 people and has responsibility for guarding senior regime officials. Viktor Yermolayev, the group’s commander, confirmed the withdrawal in comments to Le Monde.
🚔 State-linked security services
Analysts from OVD-Info claim that the security services pressure the relatives of one in nine people being persecuted in political cases. Remarkably, Chechnya only occupied third place, behind Moscow and Crimea; Ingushetia was in seventh place.
President Putin visited Chechnya for the first time since 2011. His trip included visits to the grave of Akhmat Kadyrov — the father of current ruler Ramzan and the focal point of the regime’s cult of personality — and the Russian University of Spetsnaz in Gudermes, which is used to prepare volunteers to fight in Ukraine.
Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov was appointed deputy head of the Coordination Council for the Security of Border Territories. Defence Minister Andrey Belousov heads the Council.
🚨 Everything else
Adam Kadyrov, the son of Chechen leader Ramzan, received the Order of Kadyrov, the republic’s highest order. It is the latest of many given to Adam in recent months (check out the profile of Adam for more on his background).