The "Russian Mobsters" - criminals? Or undercover operations?

[TygrBright]

They've been operating with near-impunity in America and many other industrialized nations, building vast networks of semi-legal, illicit, and outright criminal enterprises, laundering oceans of cash and shifting money around in a gigantic shell game.

Are they just greedy criminal shitweasels who happen to be Russian, who (perhaps) left Russia because it offered insufficient scope for their criminal ambitions and/or too high a risk level?

Maybe some of them.

And maybe some of them have been building an alternative cash flow economy for Putin over the past three decades, to provide a backstop when fiscal sanctions are applied.

I wonder.

suspiciously,
Bright