The Russian soldier in Manama
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The Russian soldier in Manama is a brief encounter John Kiriakou recounted on the DeProgram programme in August 2025, at the close of a discussion about Chechnya prompted by a viewer's question about the disappearance of its leader from public view.

The conversation it arose in

The host had raised a claim from John Keegan's history of warfare that the Chechens are the most ferocious fighters on earth, "completely indomitable, totally insane", and described the republic as a miniature North Korea inside the Russian Federation. Kiriakou's contribution was a piece of first-hand corroboration rather than an argument.

The encounter

Kiriakou's recollection of the place is not immediate. "You know, I met a Russian soldier once. Where was I? Was it in Baghdad? Anyway, no, it wasn't in Baghdad. It was in Manama in Bahrain."

The substance is a single sentence: "And he told me that the Chechens were the only people on earth that he was afraid of."

Kiriakou does not date the meeting, name the man or give his unit, and offers no assessment of his own about Chechen fighters.

Manama

The city is one Kiriakou knows well. He was posted to the American embassy in Bahrain in his late twenties, serving as its economic officer and its human rights officer, and has said he was twenty-nine when he arrived.

It is the same posting that produced his account of finding a listening device in his bedroom ceiling, and of the intelligence chief General Ian Henderson, whose name he says even the heir presumptive would not speak aloud.

See also

- Bahrain Posting (1994,1996)
- The Bug In The Bedroom
- Ian Henderson
- John Kiriakou
