Luke Harding, a journalist with The Guardian and a prolific author of books, mostly Russia-related, but also about Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, published his latest saga, “Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West” as a sequel to his earlier text “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win” (2017), before the release of the Russia report by the Intelligence and Security Committee of the U.K. Parliament (ISC). The primary goal of Harding’s book is to highlight the obvious to the nearly 50 percent of Britons, according to a recent poll, who believe that Russia messed with British democracy, including Brexit, the Scottish referendum and the general elections. But the ISC report, just as Robert Mueller’s investigative report, which Harding called a “historical miss,” came as a disappointment to Harding after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in his response had refused to investigate the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 EU referendum for the lack of evidence.
