Who's behind this
I'm Slava Solodkiy. Yes - a Russian-born Londoner wrote a civilian field guide to Britain's security. I've leaned into the irony rather than hidden from it: pretending otherwise would be both dishonest and worse strategy.
I came here as someone who chose this country rather than inherited it, and people who choose a country tend to hold a slightly-too-earnest attachment to keeping it free. I'm a pacifist, and I think the strongest defence is the kind that makes a society hard to frighten, hard to divide and hard to switch off - not louder, just harder to digest.
My day work is the boring-reliable end of technology: I've spent my career writing about and investing in financial technology, and more recently in dual-use, digital-identity and resilience systems - the infrastructure that still works when the map breaks. That is the lens I bring here, and the reason I think readiness is a civic question, not only a military one. If you want the longer context, here is how I ended up in Britain and what my family and I try to give back.
This site speaks only for me - not for the British government, the armed forces, or anyone whose name appears in it. And it will never tell you, or rule on, your own immigration or eligibility status: that is for the official pages, every time.
Independent project
This site is not an official UK government, MOD, NATO, service, police, procurement or immigration site. It is a public-source research companion that tries to make routes, sources and caveats easier to find.
Official pages decide eligibility, deadlines, procurement rules, service standards, nationality/residency requirements and security-clearance processes.
Not advice
- Not legal, immigration, procurement, security-clearance or investment advice.
- Not a guarantee that any reader, company or team is eligible for a route.
- Not a substitute for checking official sources, professional advisers or the relevant authority.
Safety boundary
The site uses public sources only and does not provide operational/tactical guidance, evasion guidance, weapons instruction or adversarial tradecraft. Lab pages are labelled as provocations, not policy or instructions.
Where a topic touches privacy, cyber, conflict, payments, mobilisation or defence capacity, the site stays at orientation level and points readers back to lawful, accountable, official routes.
How it stays honest
No ads, no sponsors, no selling your data. The book, Ready, Actually, is the anchor that funds the work; this site is the part that keeps the book from going stale - with live deadlines in the directory and a public change log.
Found an error, a dead link, or a route that has moved? That is exactly the kind of note worth sending - corrections make this more useful, not less. You can reach me through my personal site.