fluent in speech and writing — Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, English
nothing from a session reaches my texts, my talks or social media
a survey, or interviews across the participants, before the agenda
from a decision note to a report, slides and automations that keep running
Four problems I have the material for
Every session stands on acts and on documented cases. I fit the format after a conversation.
What your HR department does not know about staff from the East
Two layers. The hard one: whose passport will stop working and what happens then, who will suddenly not travel, what extraterritorial repression means for an employee’s family abroad, how to read a sudden request for unpaid leave. The soft one: who these people are and which phase of adaptation they are in — described as a process, never as a national character.
What disappears first: the transfer, the access, the person
War reaches a company in a fixed order: first the transfers stop going out, then access and licences lapse, and last the people leave. What of that can be anticipated and prepared for, what the state does not compensate after a hybrid incident, and at which address the bill finally lands. On documented cases of Western companies in Russia, Ukrainian ones under fire and Polish ones exposed to the side effects — and on what I saw myself from inside an engineering team in the spring of 2022.
The digital cage — the state and its own technology sector
Deferment from conscription and the loans granted under decree 83 — and separately, on a different legal basis, the deferment from mobilisation, which is the one that works as an instrument for holding people in place. What that means for the retention of the team you relocated, and for the people who stayed. Behind it, the architecture of control over the network — because that is what sets what your team can and cannot do from where it sits.
How post-Soviet fraud infrastructure is actually organised
The corporate form and where it comes from, the division of roles, recruitment, the register of language the caller uses. What the “Russian call centre” narrative gets wrong, and why the flag means little in this industry. No attribution and no technique — the structure and the context that a report on a campaign does not carry. The state’s own list of what it had to ban in 2025 is the most precise inventory of this industry’s tools that exists in Russian law: somebody else’s SIM card, a foreign messenger, an unmarked call, a cash withdrawal at an ATM.
The stack of control over the network
This is not a wall but five layers — each of them raises the cost of exit. Control has moved from the cable to the pocket. Click a layer to see what it is built from and what it touches in a company that has people or money there.
Before I walk into the room
A conversation with whoever is commissioning the session, a short survey or two or three interviews across the participants. The agenda comes out of what those produce — an off-the-shelf session is cheaper to prepare and worse in its effects.
90 minutes or half a day, in the group’s language, on site or remote. Every thread starts from a document and ends on a specific person, or a specific line in your budget.
We agree the scope before the session: from a two-page note to a report, slides for internal use, or a working automation that tracks the subject after I leave. Always with a list of sources to read on your own.
What I do not do
- I am not a lawyer. Sanctions compliance, contracts and disputes are a law firm’s work — I describe the context, I do not give a legal opinion
- I do not screen counterparties or individuals. Due diligence and verification belong to business-intelligence and investigative firms
- I do not advise on entering a market or exiting an asset. I can show how it is arranged. A transaction decision carries legal and financial weight, not analytical weight
- I do not forecast the course of the war, when it will end, or the rouble rate
- I do not do attribution of cyberattacks or analysis of APT groups
Asked such a question I will point to someone better placed and go back to what I can document. A company that buys a forecast buys guesswork in good packaging.
Organisational advisory and process design I run under a separate brand — Agile Expat. Here I work only on Russia and Eastern Europe.