Talk:Operation Destabilise

GA review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Operation Destabilise/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: CommissarDoggo (talk · contribs) 17:08, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

Reviewer: SnowyRiver28 (talk · contribs) 12:36, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Nominator has sufficient authorship.

No issues with copyvio.

Source spot check completed on multiple claims, looks good.

Review

Lead

• Right off the bat, the infobox says the Operation is 2021-present, but the lead says it was an international investigation, suggesting it has been completed
  •  Done
• The results of the investigation up to that point were announced on 4 December 2024, revealing that: 84 people had been arrested in connection with the ring, including 71 in the UK; six individuals, both major money laundering networks and several companies were sanctioned, while a seventh linked individual was arrested for the facilitation of money laundering; and £20 million had been seized out of an estimated £700 million in drugs sales. Huge sentence, please trim and shorten.
  • Tentatively  Done, please let me know if you want further changes.
• To me, the lead seems rather short for the article and doesn't seem to summarise all the key information. I think it's missing a paragraph with detail on the nature of the investigation and process. See WP:LEAD
  • Leadmanship is a right pain in the nuts for me so I'll figure out what should and shouldn't be added to it now. I've hopefully sorted this now, but this wouldn't exactly be the first time I've done too much detail on a lead paragraph. As I said, not the greatest at writing leads, please let me know.

Investigation

• Around the same time frame, the NCA uncovered TGR Group. This sentence feels tacked onto the one about Smart. It could do with an explanation of what TGR Group is similar to the one about Smart.
  • It's not immediately obvious how this should be handled, and I must admit I struggled on it when I was writing this article, that's why I settled on explaining what each group is and does slightly later on in the article. I've jumbled things around a bit, please let me know if you'd like to see further changes, holding off on signing off on it until then.
• Ending the first paragraph on They didn't receive their first major breakthrough in this regard until the arrest of Fawad Saiedi and starting the next on He was stopped by... feels strange. I don't think these two sentences should be split across paragraphs but instead introduced together (likely in the second paragraph as that's where the detail is)
  •  Done
• He primarily worked alongside two individuals: Elena Chirkinyan, a joint-Russian and Armenian national who is reportedly his second in command, and who stated she had studied in both Moscow and Caterham School, a private school in Surrey, then at a university in London, where she studied business and economics;[1][2][3] and Andrejs Bradens, a Latvian national. Another big sentence, please break up.
  • I think  Done. Please lemme know if you want it to be broken up further.
• From late-2022 until mid-2023, the Russian government used SMART to fund espionage operations. Is this referring to the Smart company? If so, why is it capitalised here?
  •  Done That'll be a holdout from when sources differed on whether it was "SMART" or "Smart", as you can probably tell I eventually settled on Smart.
• Oksana is due to be sentenced on 30 May. Any update on this?
  • Yes, I hadn't noticed as normally my searches are directly related to the article title. I'm updating the article as I make my way down the list, but this is what immediately drew my eye.  Done
• Hirnyak claimed that they were taking items to Ukraine to support the war, Hirnyak claimed to be taking items to Ukraine for the war effort, Repeated phrase.
  •  Done Also clarified that there were not in fact multiple washing powder boxes stuffed to the gills with £1 million.

Aftermath

No issues here.

Comments

@CommissarDoggo:Great work with this article, I found it quite interesting and engaging to read. I've written my review above, please feel free to add any questions, comments or concerns under each of the dot points, otherwise use {{done}} or something similar to mark each off. I'll place this on hold for 7 days to allow you to fix the issues. SnowyRiver28 (talk) 13:16, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

@SnowyRiver28 I'll be going through (hopefully) all of them today, funnily enough a couple of the issues are the same stupid issues that I've had in other articles I've had GA reviewed so it's surprising I didn't catch them earlier! Thanks for the quick review. CommissarDoggo^Talk? 13:44, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

@CommissarDoggo Great, thanks! SnowyRiver28 (talk) 02:36, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.