Vadim Nikitin

Vadim Nikitin investigates financial crime in the former USSR.

From The Blog
4 March 2022

I spent three days this week trying to get out of Russia with my three-year-old son, who was visiting his grandparents in Murmansk for the first time (in retrospect perhaps not the best time to have made such a trip). There were no flights out, but also no spare tickets on any bus going to Helsinki; the train was still running (for Russian and Finnish citizens only) though everyone expects it to stop any day. At Finland Station payments to Russian Railways with Western cards were not working. I had to beg the lady to hold the tickets in the face of a long angry queue as I ran to a nearby Sberbank to withdraw cash.

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