ABC’s European bureau chief Steve Canan, an investigative journalist based in London,…

ABC’s European bureau chief Steve Canan, an investigative journalist from London, in his keynote “How the Russian secret service took control of the country’s top leadership” is not just making another attempt to understand how and why exactly Vladimir Putin came to power in the Kremlin in 2000, but rather trying to analyze the evolution and genesis of all Russian power over the past 25 years. Making his way through the jungle of mysterious events of 1999, when residential buildings were blown up in Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk, and in Ryazan, under the guise of strange exercises, either hexogen or sugar was found in the basements of houses, Steve Canan reminds the main thing: Boris Yeltsin had three successors proposed to him by the intelligence services. All of them – Primakov, Stepashin and Vladimir Putin – were united by belonging to the former KGB. No matter who Yeltsin chose, a man from Lubyanka would come to power in the country. According to the author, the subsequent deaths of Litvinenko in London, and Shchekochikhin and Yushenkov in Moscow are just “collateral losses” on Lubyanka’s path to power. The country’s main intelligence service has successfully completed this journey of almost 25 years: the Kremlin has long ceased to be the center for making balanced political decisions; today it is an office of the secret service, which, among other things, manages Russia’s domestic and foreign policy, economics and defense issues. Steve Canan’s material, addressed not to a Russian, but exclusively to a Western audience, seems to give politicians in London and Washington a hint – no matter who you talk to in Moscow, you are talking to the FSB, which controls all spheres of the country’s life. There is no other power in Russia today.