Yelena Vavina is a correspondent for Current Time TV, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with Voice of America.
Retired FSB General Ivan Mironov, a KGB veteran from the 1970s, commands the pseudo-Cossack unit whose members were filmed beating anti-Putin protesters in Moscow on May 5. Although Mironov has tried to remake himself as a guardian of Russian Orthodox tradition, he is an old-school product of the Soviet security agencies with a murky history in the emergence of Russia's post-Soviet kleptocracy.
