Just a quick catch-up: over the winter lull, Moscow News ran two columns of mine: ‘Keeping tabs on Putin’s spooks‘, which explores how the Russian intelligence community are at once the beneficiaries of Putin’s re-emergence and yet also under pressure; and ‘The very model of a modern military president‘ presented an unfashionably positive assessment of Russian military reform, and the irony that it took this least martial of presidents actually to start a genuine process (even though there is much still to be done).