Thread by @kamilkazani

With everything. Police, National Guard, FSO, FSB. Everything centralised & obedient to Moscow. This year they disbanded the last governors' bodyguard services and put National Guard. Like, even few dozens armed guys responsible directly to the governor is too much. Must be zero

Russia has few millions Siloviki: an internal army which is *far* larger than the normal army and is focused on keeping control. It's all responsible to the Kremlin. Its true size is difficult to estimate, partially because it also consists from the "private military companies"..

... that have no legal status in Russia. We talk of "private military companies" such as Wagner, Redut, etc. but this category just does not exist in the Russian law. Some of them just don't exist in a legal sense. Other have a status of "Private security company" on paper

Some of "private security companies" are largely BS: few mid-aged unarmed alcoholics guarding a supermarket. Others - are real armies equipped much better than the regular Russian army. Altogether there are few million people serving there

But there is no conceivable way to establish who of these millions are unarmed shop-guarding alcoholics and who are small well-equipped armies, studying official statistics. On paper there is no difference. Also formal association often doesn't mean anything

On paper you are in one structure, but in fact - in completely another (for a number of reasons). That's absolutely normal and thus it's very, very difficult to interpret the statistics correctly. Especially when a number of these structures do not exist on paper at all