Shaun Walker
speaker
137 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 8 Jul
Shaun Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They meet grandparents they didn't know they had, or at least they thought they were living somewhere in remote Canada rather than in Siberia. They're taken to the Bolshoi Theatre. They have these long discussions with their parents about what on earth has just happened. And they're given Russian passports with new names. They can't even pronounce their names properly.
And yeah, it was meeting the two of them. It was actually back in 2016 when I wrote a story about them and their battle to have their Canadian citizenship restored. That was the sort of first impulse for me, this crazy twisted family story that sort of set me on this path of getting obsessed with the illegals over the years.
I spoke with Elena a couple of times a few years ago. We haven't been in touch a lot recently. I think context has changed a bit since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I used to go to Russia very regularly. I'm now on a blacklist, so I can't visit.
But yeah, I mean, they were essentially, I mean, what's fascinating about them, so with earlier illegals who achieved an awful lot, they were often, as we discussed, sent to the gulag shop. Some of them were disgraced because they were caught. And despite having, you know, given years of their lives to this program, what you see with Andre and Jelena is sort of the opposite.
I mean, they definitely did a very impressive job to integrate so well and live many years undercover. But because of this defector, for 10 years, the FBI knew exactly what they were doing. So essentially, their value as espionage agents was pretty much zero. But that's slightly glossed over, or rather fully glossed over when it comes to the sort of modern Russian telling of their story.
And of course, now under Putin, there is a really big focus on finding patriotic stories on nationalist myth-making. And the illegals are perfect for this. These people who sacrificed everything. They lived abroad for years. They gave everything for the motherland. And that's now their position in Russian society. So they came back. They were given a very nice apartment.
They were both given quite lucrative jobs in state controlled companies. They met with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and sang songs together. And then, you know, they're introduced on chat shows as legendary spies and they will give the talking points. Well, more Andrei actually. Andrei will often be on chat shows too.
giving the talking points of the day about Russia's war in Ukraine or how the evil West is trying to bring down Moscow. So they fit quite nicely into this system. What they say to each other in their quieter moments in the evenings, I don't know.
So I think it was very difficult for them, particularly, I think, Alex, the younger son. They had both found ways to live outside Russia, but they were struggling with getting visas. You know, I know Alex had been applying to various schools in Europe and then had not been able to get visas. And I think with their parents, it was not an easy conversation.
But they somehow felt they'd had a loving childhood. They felt their parents had been very good to them in many ways. And they tried to find a way, I think, to sidestep this big deception. And I guess there are ways in which With all of these families, and it was the same talking to Peter Herman, the guy whose father tried to recruit him.
In many ways, the dilemmas these kids face and these families face are similar to a lot of families. There might be a secret affair or a secret past history that parents don't want to talk about. You have the dilemmas of immigrant parents coming to a new country and, you know, they want their children to integrate, but they also don't want to lose them to the new culture.
And illegals had all these same dilemmas, but they were just heightened 10 times over by this kind of extraordinary secret that they had a second life as Soviet citizens.
What I'd love to say, it was a phenomenal journalistic scoop that infuriated Vladimir Putin. But it was basically early on in the full-scale war, in the summer of 2022, I think the Brits must have put sanctions on a certain number of Russians. And as the Russians love to do, they put reciprocal sanctions on whoever's sanctioning them. If you sanction me, I'm going to sanction you back.
So they released a list of about 50... British journalists, politicians, analysts, all kinds of people. My claim to fame is I was number one on the list. But there was also every other journalist for The Guardian who'd reported from Ukraine pretty much was on this list.
And yeah, and actually most of the people, what was frustrating about it, most of the people on this list were not people who were ever going to Russia. So they get to sort of very proudly put on their biographies that, you know, I've been banned by the Kremlin. Whereas, yeah, I mean, I was I was last there a few months before the war started, the full scale war started.
I was continuing to go back. I'm obviously, you know, it's it's really quite sad and depressing to see what's happened to the country. But I would it doesn't feel a good feeling to not be able to go after I spent so many years reporting from there.
Thank you very much for having me.
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