I’d heard rumours of this story a while time back: but nothing prepared me for the reality presented in The Guardian correspondent Shaun Walker’s new book, The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West. Drawing on copies of KGB files made by a dissident Soviet archivist who defected to Britain in 1992 that are now open to the public, Walker explains how the KGB used spies from its co-called ‘illegals’ programme – Soviet citizens who had spent years training to pose as genuine Westerners. These spies were initially deployed to inflitrate oppositional movements in Western… More
Month: April 2025
Jurist Interview
An interview pegged to my forthcoming modern history of Sri Lanka with Jurist, an online review for US law students and professionals, has just been published. Here it is (link and text): https://www.jurist.org/features/2025/04/25/a-crisis-of-governance-and-the-fluidity-of-ethnic-identity-understanding-modern-sri-lanka-interview-with-journalist-mark-salter/ A Crisis of Governance and the Fluidity of Ethnic Identity: Understanding Modern Sri Lanka — Interview with journalist Mark Salter Pitasanna Shanmugathas | University of Windsor Faculty of Law, CA April 25, 2025 10:16:01 pm Mark Salter, a journalist, analyst, and writer with over 25 years of professional experience in democratization, governance, and post-conflict peacebuilding, speaks to JURIST’s Senior Editor for Long-Form Content, Pitasanna Shanmugathas, about his… More
The Great Lenin Makeover
Even though I never made it to the original Lenin Museum in Tampere (wish I had), over the years I’ve heard plenty about the place. Following a major facelift the museum reopened recently. Renamed ‘Nootti’ – Finnish for a diplomatic note – the refashioned exhibits are said to reflect the seachange in relations between neghbours Finland and the Soviet Union that developed in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 all-out invasion of Ukraine. A recent piece by The Guardian’s Nordic correspondent notes that when the original museum first opened in 1946, it was intended to serve as symbol of… More
The Great Elk Migration
Starting on Swedish TV (SVT) this week, earlier than usual due to warmer April weather: a livestream of northern Sweden’s annual ‘Great Elk Migration’ (Den Stora Älgvandringen). What started in 2019 as a minority ’slow TV’ interest has since blossomed into a phenomenon with a mass fanbase. Thus during April this year millions of Swedes – and increasingly, people from all around the world – will be dropping everything for days at a time to follow these sturdy, quizzical-looking creatures on their annual springtime trek through northern Sweden. While much of the time on the livestream you’ll see peaceful… More
South Asian domestic worker’s suffering in Lebanon: another Gaza fallout
By the end of 2024 the Gazan conflict had also enveloped Lebanon, a country with a large number of migrant workers, many from South Asia. Following Israeli airstrikes in the country’s south, by November, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimated that approximately 25,000 migrant workers had been displaced from their homes and workplaces because of the conflict – in many cases bereft of shelter or identification, their employees having taken their passports from them. The day after the November Israeli airstrikes, one women highlighted in the report listed below sought shelter at multiple locations in Beirut but was… More