Methodology

Purpose: Make the construction of every claim on this site fully transparent so that users can assess reliability, reproduce the reasoning path, and cite the resulting knowledge units with confidence.

This page is the primary E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) statement for the resource. It complements the About page and the Sources section.

1. Governing Principle: Data Beauty

All content is produced under the Data Beauty principle: knowledge that is visually scannable, cognitively clear, fully citable, and usable in analysis or decision-making. Decorative design is secondary. The primary test of any page is whether a journalist, analyst or citizen can locate a specific claim, see its sources, understand its relational context, and export a citable snippet in under 60 seconds.

2. Analytical Scope

The knowledge base is constrained by the canonical global systemic picture defined in the project brief:

• Seven entity / process categories must be reconstructible: central figures & power structures; organised crime (OPG / vory-v-zakone and modern networks); power and “grey” instruments; international criminal and black markets / routes; authoritarian partner regimes; key processes (vertical of power, patronage, Uber Krysha, mobilisation state, etc.); historical trajectory.
• Three analytical theses are supported (not asserted as judicial facts): (1) internal transformation into a kleptocracy / mafia-state under an “Uber Krysha” arrangement; (2) documented connections and instrumentalisation of international criminal networks and black markets (without claiming a single hierarchical global syndicate); (3) systematic patronage of selected authoritarian regimes.

A person-centric subset alone is insufficient for understanding systemic processes. Content prioritisation therefore favours structural mechanisms, under-emphasised routes and processes, and historical continuities over high-visibility individual scandals already exhaustively covered in mainstream outlets.

3. Source Hierarchy and Evaluation Criteria

Claims are admitted only when they map to open, citable sources. The hierarchy used for evaluation is:

When a claim rests primarily on Tier-3 interpretation rather than Tier-1/2 documentation, the text explicitly marks it (“assessment by [author/organisation]”, “secondary analysis”). Preference is given to material that illuminates structural links that are less frequently synthesised in one place.

Full annotated bibliography and evaluation notes live on the Sources pages. See also Source Evaluation Criteria.

4. Inclusion and Exclusion Rules

Included

• Documented relationships and patterns that appear as secondary consensus across multiple independent high-quality sources.
• Structural mechanisms, routes, processes and historical trajectories required to reconstruct the seven-category picture.
• Entities (persons, organisations, networks, regimes, market routes, processes, historical institutions) that play a clear role in one or more of the three theses.

Excluded or de-prioritised

• Original investigative claims that lack published primary or high-quality secondary support.
• Private individuals who are not already public figures in published sources.
• High-volume repetition of the most-circulated individual scandals when structural material is still missing.
• Advocacy language, calls to action, or partisan framing.
• Any content that would raise legal risk (doxxing, incitement, unverified personal data).

5. Construction of Knowledge Units

Every major factual assertion is intended to be decomposable into a citable knowledge unit (claim + sources + date/context + limitations). Knowledge Units are collected on dedicated pages and can be referenced independently. The same unit may appear in a mechanism page, an entity card and a relationship list; the underlying sources remain identical.

6. Limitations of the Evidence Base (Epistemic Humility)

• Primary Russian state financial and internal security archives are largely inaccessible.
• Quantitative estimates of wealth, black-cash volumes and illicit financial flows are frequently contested and often rely on indirect methods.
• Many security-service / criminal-network relationships are documented through secondary reporting, third-country court cases or testimony of varying reliability.
• Absence of an entity or relationship on the site does not imply non-existence; it may reflect source limitations or deliberate research prioritisation.
• The difference between judicial findings and expert secondary consensus is always respected and signalled.

Where sources conflict, the text notes the divergence rather than forcing a single narrative.

7. Verification and Sourcing Standards

• All claims are traceable to specific published sources with persistent identifiers.
• Verification against open sources is mandatory. All claims are checked against academic literature, judicial filings and primary records.
• Significant factual corrections are integrated as new peer-reviewed research and official documentation emerge.

8. Terminology Control

All core analytical terms follow the controlled Glossary. New terms are not introduced into public content without a working definition and glossary entry. Partisan or emotionally charged labels are avoided unless they appear inside a direct quotation from a named source.

9. Related Pages

• About the Project
• Sources & Bibliography
• Source Evaluation Criteria
• How to Cite
• Glossary