The Russians are known to reach out, after dissidents living abroad, though.

Some recent examples are a daylight shooting of a former Chechen Rebel commander in Berlin [1], Shapoval's death by carbomb in Kiyv [2], and of course, Litvinenko's Polonium poisoning in London [3]. Glukhovsky is wise in not announcing where he is.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53091298

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksym_Shapoval

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...

All true enough, but the Kremlin has bigger fish to fry than an indie games dev posting on Instagram.

He's an author, not a game dev. The game devs licensed his IP. All of this is explained in the article.

You might also be surprised to learn that Andrei Tarkovsky, director of the film Stalker (1979), didn't personally learn C++ and program S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007). Neither did Arkady and Boris Strugatsky who wrote the novel Roadside Picnic (1971) that all of these works, including Metro, are inspired by.

These are not very recent and quite a few of the attacks went wrong with surviving victims and caught perpetrators.

The Russian omnipresent assassination machine is as much a myth as its invincible military.

That said, the West keeps playing as if there's no hostile power trying to infiltrate everything it can, 30-50yo Russian males with unexplained biography gaps or no background checks at all still allowed to travel freely, establish businesses with sketchy financials and so on.

Apart from the fact that Russia is not the only hostile power trying to infiltrate Western organizations, I find the premise incredibly sexist, as if men are presumably more likely to be foreign agents than women.

I'm not sure we'll ever get any clear data on this but I don't think this is a very outlandish claim.

Data from numerous defectors is clear enough, Russian secret services don't normally employ female officers for client-facing work.

The had a gay couple though to murder scripal. As if the sex or gender mattered regarding this topic. Cheap discussion subversion by tankies running out of arguments.

That's a hoax, they were both identified as straight married men as far as we can tell. They also both fall into the "army officer recruited after few years of active duty" GRU pattern.

They got a prostitute the night before their botched Salisbury trip, rather than shag each other. The whole gay bit came from their Russian TV ruse appearance.

if by 'client facing' you mean assassination then perhaps.

but plenty of not-men out there doing SVR work. Anna Chapman comes to mind, or the little lady who was making friends with the NRA and all of those GOP politicians...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegals_Program

Chapman and Butina are by no means intelligence officers, they were assets with minimal training.

I'll grant you illegals in general, those are typically married couples.

You'll find that all of Russian secret services are extremely sexist. GRU only recruits from commanding officers in active duty, and these are almost 100% male. FSB does use women, mostly for honeypot purposes.

And yes, I agree that Chinese nationals are to be treated with way more suspicion as well. Anyone with relatives in China can be pushed to do whatever CCP needs. Also everyone with official links to the CCP should be under 24/7 monitoring, something something "covert police stations" and Confucius Institute.

Where's that huge list of Russians that have mysteriously fallen to their death?

If I was Russian I'd never go above the 1st floor of any building, it would be ingrained in my culture.

Sometimes I think authoritarianism in the US can get pretty bad but then I read what goes on over there and I realize it's not even close.

It’s much easier to just avoid anything even distantly related to politics. And that’s what actually ingrained in culture of most Russians.