Russia is often presented in the West as an impenetrable fortress, made up of layered lies and concealment that block any real understanding of the political dynamics at play there. Yet it is one of the most documented spaces in the contemporary world, thanks to the relentless investigative journalism pursued by reporters. Indeed, journalistic inquiry has acquired in this country a distinctive status: that of a genuine form of opposition.
Roman Badanine and Mikhaïl Roubine are two leading figures in this field. In September 2026, they publish with Les Arènes the French edition of their work The Tsar in Person. Spanning eight hundred pages, this historical tome, unrivaled in the French language, offers an overview of Vladimir Putin’s reign, illuminated by deep dives into the decades of the USSR’s final decline and its collapse.
The two authors marshal materials accumulated over decades of investigations into the Russian political and economic elites during their years at the country’s main political outlets, and even within the Kremlin pool—a roster of journalists accredited by the administration to cover presidential or parliamentary news.
These investigations naturally drew the ire of the Russian state toward these authors and the media they created, including the investigative site Proekt, which were labeled as “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations.” Roman Badanine and Mikhaïl Roubine now continue their work from the United States, where the FSB has never ceased to threaten them.
We spoke with Roman Badanine about the methods used in this book to pierce the secrets of the Russian state and the future of investigative journalism under Vladimir Putin.
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You have just published a substantial work devoted to the quarter of a century of Vladimir Putin’s rule since his first election. What professional and political trajectory led you to undertake this project?
Mikhaïl Rubine and I have collaborated on a number of journalistic projects for much of our careers. As for me, my path began a little before our collaboration: precisely at the moment Vladimir Putin himself did. I entered journalism not long after the wave of apartment bombings that struck Russian residential buildings in August–September 1999—a tragedy that left nearly 300 dead and still today contains many shadows we return to repeatedly in a chapter of our book.
Before that date, I was pursuing an academic career—or at least I entertained that illusion. Over the decades, I led Moscow’s serious editorial desks, including Gazeta.ru, one of the country’s leading online media. I was responsible for political news and therefore did fairly conventional journalism. It wasn’t until the end of my stint at Gazeta.ru, around 2009–2010, that the center of gravity of my professional interests began to tilt toward investigative journalism. This shift came quite naturally once I recognized a fundamental fact: beyond my own concerns, investigative work had become the most important branch of journalism in Russia. More than that, I understood that all that remained of Russian journalism would soon be reduced to investigation, as the ordinary practice of “standard” journalism became impossible, even absurd. What sense would we find in writing about the Federation of Russia’s “ordinary affairs” while knowing full well that we were participating in a kind of staged show, a game of deceit?
Did a particular episode contribute to this realization?
In fact, the trigger was probably Sergei Kolesnikov’s revelations, who had been a shareholder of a company named Petromed and, in that capacity, had managed Putin’s off-the-books “portfolio.” In 2010, Kolesnikov left the country, revealing in an open letter the details of the construction of the president’s secret palace on the Gelendzhik coast, funded by Russian oligarchs.
At that moment, I felt I was naturally drifting toward questions of this kind. From then on, I set about creating an investigative department, sometimes from scratch, in each media I worked for: at Forbes, Dozhd, RBK… Naturally, all this ended as it had to end. In 2017, I went to Stanford with the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship. At that time, I had just released the first episode of a documentary entitled The Petersbourgeois, which focused on Ilia Traber, a figure who is much talked about today, one of the organized crime barons of the northern capital, ultimately questioned by the FSB this year for a criminal matter and then released after renouncing his shares in several companies. This 2017 film led to a criminal case against us: from then on, it became clear to me that if I ever returned to Russia, it would never be to stay permanently. One day I would have to choose: to flee or to end up in prison. That is precisely what happened. I stayed two years in the United States because of this criminal case. When I managed to return to Moscow, I launched the investigative media Proekt. But in 2021, the regime pressed back, continuing to instrumentalize our revelations about Ilia Traber. When our offices were illegally raided in 2021, we had no choice but to go into exile. So five years later, Mikhaïl and I continue to investigate from the United States what is happening inside the country. For now, this system still works, even as it continually raises new difficulties.
Does Russian journalism employ specific investigative methods? If so, how do they differ from those practiced elsewhere?
I’ll start with an anecdote: in 2017, upon my arrival at Stanford, I spent long hours speaking with my American colleagues. At one point, one of them asked a question that seemed natural to him but made me burst out laughing: “And FOIA, then?” He was referring to the Freedom of Information Act, by which public bodies are required to disclose information at the request of journalists, at least in areas not involving national security or classified documents. It’s a daily working tool for journalists here: if they want information, they are fully entitled to request it, and the administration cannot simply refuse. It can lie, if you like, or conceal certain things, but not veto. For me, that question carried something comic, given how obvious it is that most tools used around the world do not work in Russia.
So, what remains for us? First, the telephone. It remains, despite everything, an essential journalistic tool – even if, to tell the truth, many are beginning to forget its existence. Talking to people, from all walks of life, about all sorts of things, remains a reliable value. Indeed, we strive to maintain some contact with our sources, even if their number, sincerity, and level of information have evolved significantly in recent years due to repression and the ongoing war. Nevertheless, these years of work have enabled us to keep our contacts, and we relied heavily on their testimonies to write our book.
Furthermore, Russia is unique – among other things – in that leaks (the English word “leaks”) carry considerable weight there. Personal data leaks have been phenomenal. It is one of the essential characteristics of our era. For a while, for example, access to Rosreestr, the Russian property registry, was possible. One could know at any moment who owned what, without breaking the law. Of course, journalists took full advantage of it and continue to do so — at one point, we ourselves mined this entire database. But investigative journalists now exploit all possible leaks, which have become commonplace in a country where the state enjoys collecting and centralizing as much information as possible, at the risk of these data ending up in undesired hands — through negligence or greed of those responsible. I must admit, however, that I no longer feel entirely “modern” enough to handle these data with the requisite know-how. There are people on my team far more competent than I am at working with these sources. And there will likely be even more in the years to come, as these data have become the most valuable resource, the new gold mine for investigative journalists. Knowing how to exploit them, render them technically tractable, systematize them, synthesize them, and simplify them through automation and artificial intelligence is both an essential part of our work today and a practice likely to reshape the profession.
Finally, there is a third method, the one known in traditional journalism as door-stepping, where the journalist himself is a direct witness to events. On our side, we use it less, simply because we do not produce on-the-ground reports, not least because our status in Russia (as “foreign agents” and an “undesirable organization”), our exile, and the overall atmosphere of fear that now prevails in Russia make this approach hardly practicable.
Your book contains several dozen sources. How did so many people agree to discuss with exiled journalists or under the regime’s threat, in the climate of fear you describe?
We indeed calculated that the sources mobilized in this book should exceed two hundred. But how to complete the tally? This book builds on our previous investigations, which themselves relied on countless interviews. We do not even remember the details of all those conversations. Some of these investigations took place in another reality, in another Russia that no longer exists today: the one where one could still meet people, discuss with them more or less peacefully.
A key fact to emphasize here: among these two hundred sources we counted, only about 5% are named. It seems to me this says a lot about present-day Russia. As journalists, the fact that a person agrees to speak with us and be named is a gift from the heavens, a rare opportunity. These statements made under anonymity are, at once, more plausible, but also more honest toward readers. At the same time, we fully understand that the risks involved are incomparable to those faced by sources in Western countries. We are fully aware of the climate of fear that exists in Russia and must often refrain from naming sources. Most of the time, we do not even ask the question. It could instantly destroy the trust that exists between us and our sources. The question “Sir, would you be willing to publish, in your name, this information you entrust to us?” would be enough to break the trust.
These investigative conditions do not, of course, absolve anyone from verifying what is reported to us by some means. This is precisely where data leaks, among other things, prove their usefulness.
Investigative journalism thus has new horizons ahead, even when it concerns a space as closed as Putin’s Russia?
Whatever the difficulties of the period we are living through, journalism will never die. And this is for the simple reason that it satisfies one of human beings’ fundamental passions: curiosity. It is thanks to this curiosity that we survive. And indeed at Proekt, we survive, keeping our heads above water despite repression and the pressures of the global market on nonprofit journalism. Our focus has not changed: we write about subjects that others will not write about. This does not mean we are smarter than everyone else, but that we have chosen to tackle topics that other media are likely to avoid—lacking time, resources, or interest in these questions. That is where we pour all our energy, into topics that are, unsurprisingly, the most difficult.
Today, Proekt is pursuing two directions. First, documentary films: we see, through many signals, that this is the most accessible and promising segment worldwide. Telling stories through imagery clearly has a future. Hollywood now houses several production companies whose business models rely exclusively on “fact-based” works, true stories. We recall the film Spotlight, produced by Participant Media, which had been created precisely to tell “true stories,” and today this is a broader trend. Documentary seems thus the most effective mode of information transmission.
Moreover, we identify another trend, supported by various data and observations: people place a great deal of importance on knowing “the end of the story” in unresolved cases or on understanding how things actually happened when a veil of mystery hangs over certain events, certain individuals, certain institutions. Once again, this trend justifies a drift toward history, which remains the key to explaining many contemporary phenomena. All the more so because the most active portion of the population—for Russia in particular, though the truth would hold for any space—consists of people forty and under, who either forget or have forgotten many events and struggle to connect certain dots. This is the case even within my own team: most of our collaborators are under forty, people who began their journalism careers well after Putin’s ascent to power.
We largely view our mission as a form of making sense of the most important topics against the backdrop of this historical continuity. That is why we are increasingly turning toward documentary films and historical investigations. I can also reveal that the next project is colossal: a multi-episode documentary that will focus on the FSB.
You develop in your book an original, even provocative thesis: Putin’s near-total absence of ideology. In a context where Western commentators strive to pierce the mysteries of “Putinism” as an ideology, this assertion is sure to surprise.
Of course, Vladimir Putin has opinions, like everyone else. And, as with any human being, these opinions evolve or regress over the course of his life. What holds for any person holds for Putin, and we do not dispute that in the least. However, when we compare two realities, his public, official statements, and his concrete practice on the ground, we discover a yawning gap, and it is precisely this gap that concerns us.
Of course, when it comes to “theoretical references,” it is possible that Vladimir Putin knows all the texts that are usually cited: those by Ivan Ilyin, Alexander Dugin, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And so what? We too have read these books. We know their contents in one way or another. Our work does not consist of reasoning from his speeches, or parsing his statements to disentangle ideologemes. Philosophers and political scientists can handle that if they wish—even if, in my view, there is not much to take from these sources. For our part, we tend to focus on the facts. And when we look at these facts, we find a total lack of correspondence between what Putin says and what he implements.
So your thesis would be closer to the Russian “kleptocracy” theory, which suggests that the regime’s discourse is merely decor, a staged performance, serving only to mask a pursuit of personal enrichment?
Personal enrichment is one thing, but one should not downplay the desire to stay in power. Or to preserve one’s own integrity.
The regime created by Vladimir Putin rests on a genuine spiral of lies. And in Putin’s Russia, this is never an ordinary lie, the one we occasionally utter, but a large-scale lie, on the scale of the Russian state. It is a lie that has cost and continues to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. And, if there is truly a “spiral,” it is because from the very first lie committed, the first conceded hypocrisy, Putin is inevitably driven to commit a second to conceal the first, then a third, and so on. It is the same phenomenon found in violence. Take the Beslan school siege in 2004, which cost more than 300 lives, including 180 children. To conceal a lie of this magnitude, to mask the reality of how the operation was conducted, one must commit further crimes, always horrific. This is also how the war in Ukraine can be understood, to some extent, as Putin’s method of whitewashing his own past. A way of saying: “I was said to be many things—a Chekist or a bandit—but now I will be seen as the unifier of Russian lands, a victorious warlord.” That is where Putin’s obstinacy leads, his inability to answer for his past acts, to confess guilt, and to show a trace of remorse.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, does your book offer an interpretation of the invasion’s trigger, how the decision was made, and the army as a social structure of today’s Russia?
Not seeking to dodge the topic, we have chosen to say, in a way, the minimum. This is a war that is still ongoing and, moreover, does not seem poised to end soon. Yet we discuss in our book facts that are proven, verifiable, knowable. Moreover, the war continues to raise numerous questions, but also very intense emotions. That is why we chose to maintain, so to speak, a certain dryness of tone, which does not amount to a distance from this war.
Indeed, we revisit the start of the invasion, the conditions under which that decision was made, while outlining the underlying logic of this choice. Vladimir Putin’s approach to war has always been more or less the same. For him, it begins with boosting his approval ratings, however cynical and absurd that may seem in a country where electoral outcomes are entirely rigged by the regime. Furthermore, we do not deny that the Russian president has his own geopolitical convictions. We devote several pages to his personal relationship with Ukraine, which has never been straightforward.
Another originality of your approach lies in the deliberate emphasis on the 1980s–1990s. In this sense, you propose a kind of median chronology, aiming to look beyond the start of the large-scale invasion, and even beyond the famous year 2012, which inaugurated Putin’s third term and represented a turning point for the regime, without drifting into considerations about Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible.
To understand the current dynamics, indeed, one must take a certain step back into the past, and I even believe we have not gone back far enough—due to lack of resources, time, and access to archives. Even if we were in Russia today, that would not change the situation.
For example, a certain mystery still surrounds Vladimir Putin’s activities within the KGB during the 1970s–1980s. What dissidence cases, as they were called then, did he handle? We think we know that he managed such dossiers, but for now we know little more than by logical deduction and a handful of documents. If we could learn more about this period, it would illuminate many things. As for the 1990s, they are a better-known but still understudied period, despite what they reveal about Putin himself and the broader history of contemporary Russia.
It should also be noted that this knowledge does not concern only the Putinist elite. We are all products of what happened in the final years of the Soviet Union and, even more so, of those famous 1990s that followed its definitive collapse. We are all, to some extent, products of the Yeltsin era. All of us, starting with us—the journalists. This is why we study and continuously return to this period. Ultimately, we believe this part of history could be far more essential for understanding Russia’s present situation than the burning news of the war in Ukraine.
Conversely, your book sheds light on many current events, as it features most of the characters who daily shape today’s Russian politics. Could you give an example of a recent episode to which your work would add clarity?
The most obvious example is Alisher Usmanov, who has just been freed from European financial sanctions targeting him—or at least, under the rather unlikely pressure from France. Here there is every reason to speak of a memoryless company. If you want to understand exactly who this person is that France decided to spare from sanctions, you simply need to consult the last part of our book. There you discover, for instance, how Usmanov benefited from the embezzlement surrounding the Sochi Winter Olympics and how he acquired media groups, later removing their leadership and installing censorship devices at the Kremlin’s request.
That is what books are for, starting with history books: they serve as a remedy against forgetting. There are phenomena and trajectories that deserve not to be forgotten, to be kept in mind, or to be recalled with every major new event. Of course, people have other concerns, and these concerns do not necessarily include a “recall of prior episodes” of Russian politics. But with these history books—more or less recent—readers will at least have the factual means to find the explanations they might seek. Preserving a kind of collective memory of the political: that is, in a sense, how we view our mission.
In a space like France, with presidential elections approaching that will largely shape the country’s relations with Russia and Ukraine, how could your work find a place in political debates?
Not being a French citizen and not voting in France makes it somewhat difficult to judge with complete pertinence, but one thing is certain: one of the ideas that emerges from our book is that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, has always known how to test people, often quite discreetly. He has practiced this throughout his career and his personal life. We recount in a chapter the story of Prince Albert II of Monaco and the Roc-Anguel estate in the French Alps, which Putin would have proposed to have built in exchange for Monaco’s vote in favor of Russia for the Sochi Games. Through Albert II, it was the entire Western world that the Russian president was trying to test. He was essentially asking: “Are you as corrupt as we are in Russia?” And he got his answer: perhaps not exactly in the same way, but yes, Europeans are just as corruptible as Russians. In other words, the same methods can work everywhere.
This attitude of Vladimir Putin, these methods, these practices, if French politicians—whatever their opinions—could grasp them, if journalists could also relay these realities, I would deem a substantial part of my work done. I do not know how this might influence elections; again, that is not my business. What matters to me is that people see how much dictators’ influence extends beyond their own national sphere. The case is evident with the Russian president, but it applies to any dictator, no matter the scale, even in a small African country. In his time, Ugandan president Idi Amin Dada did not merely mistreat his own people; he also heavily influenced the outside world. He too started a war—and not just one. He too corrupted citizens and officials in other lands. Thus, every dictator should be seen as a global phenomenon, even if his own population remains the primary and main victim. On this point, the lesson Putin offers is, of course, the most instructive of all, and the way he might want to test Europe or the leaders of the various countries that make it up deserves, I think, to have a rightful place in current political debate.