Charles Hecker

Charles Hecker is an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He is the author of the 2024 book Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia,published in Europe by Hurst Publishers and in the US by Oxford University Press. Zero Sum is a comprehensive history of Western business in Russia told from the perspectives of dozens of Russian and Western executives, analysts, government officials and academics. Zero Sum was a book of the week selection in The New York Times Book Review and was selected as a Best Book of 2025 by Foreign Affairs Magazine.

Prior to writing Zero Sum, Charles was a partner at Control Risks, the international, specialist risk consultancy. For eight years, Charles was the managing partner of the firm’s Moscow office. He was later a co-head of Control Risks’ geopolitical risk consulting practice. In these roles, he advised numerous Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies on how to invest safely in Russia and around the world, and how to develop methodologies for geopolitical risk identification, assessment and mitigation.

Before working at Control Risks, Charles was a journalist in Russia for The Moscow Times and in Florida for The Miami Herald. Charles has a BA in Russian and Soviet Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA from the Russian Research Center (now the Davis Center) at Harvard University.

Charles is currently a member of the advisory boards at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Charles is an active contributor across a variety of media and is a regular conference speaker. His writing and commentary have appeared in The Spectator, The Moscow Times, Barrons, Fortune, History Today, the BBC, Times Radio, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Monocle Radio, among others.