RESEARCH REPORT GANGSTERS AT WAR - Russia’s use of organized crime as

After stepping back from the presidency to the position of prime minister in order to observe the letter, if not the spirit, of term limits, all the while clearly still running the country, when Putin announced he would be returning to the INTRODUCTION: THIS MEANS wAR 5 A protest rally marks the fifth anniversary of the anti-Putin Bolotnaya Protests. [...] The Kutaisi clan, for example, was targeted in 2013 by coordinated arrests in Italy, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Lithuania and Portugal, followed in 2023 by further arrests in the US, where it had been forced to move as a result of the previous crackdown.19 The groups that survived and prospered tend to be the ones operating not on the street but further up the supply chain, offering the. [...] Nonetheless, the primary role of Cyprus within the global Russian criminal economy remains as a node for the illegal flow of capital in and out of the country, and increasingly this means catering to the state, not simply the gangsters. [...] Influence and information operations In May 2024, blood-red hands were stamped onto the wall of the Righteous outside the Shoah memorial in Paris, in an act of vandalism reminiscent of a similar campaign of anti-Semitic vandalism the year before, when the Star of David was spray-painted onto buildings in and around the capital.138 Political and racist graffiti is hardly unusual in France, but the. [...] The state is able to set the broad parameters of the relationship and the limits of ‘acceptable criminality’, beyond which it will crack down with performative severity, but it lacks the will and the resources to do more.