‘Jack Ryan’ Season 3 Episode 7 Recap: “Moscow Rules”

Petr Kovac: six feet under, but still calling the shots. The deceased Sokol plotter was playing Russian nesting dolls chess, where kings and rooks and bishops are hidden inside other kings and rooks and bishops. The low-yield nuclear attack in the Czech Republic? Even if it hadn’t been thwarted by Jack Ryan at the last second, it was not the endgame of Petr and his accomplices. As Jack and Luca learn while doing spy shit in Moscow, Petr’s connections reach deep into the Russian military and the GRU, its foreign intelligence arm. With the political cover provided by Alexei Petrov’s installation as defense minister, Petr’s plot extends to the mobilization of military assets, a move designed to exert his will internally, externally, posthumously. As Elizabeth Wright tells President Charles Bachler (David Bedella) in the Oval Office, Petr’s hardliner faction intended to destabilize Eastern Europe and goad the US into a conflict with Russia. But his larger plan – and here’s where Crossbow surfaces again – is the staging of a coup. And now Jack, Greer, Mike, and Czech President Alena Kovac are right in the middle of the big takeover.

President Bachler’s military representatives are rattling their sabers and talking up DEFCON 3. At the US Embassy in Moscow, the diplomatic contingent is preparing to be kicked out of the country. And at the Kremlin, Petrov is pushing for an increased military response from Russian President Surikov (Mikhail Safronov), who instead shrewdly opts for a performative stalemate. Surikov reserves a few choice words for his upstart defense minister, whose hubris is running unchecked. And an emboldened Petrov is also dumb enough to abduct Luca. His goons don’t properly search the spymaster, and the recording device hidden in his cigarette pack  – spy shit! – captures the defense minister confessing to the assassination of his predecessor, Dmitri Popov (Michael Gor). It’s the hard intel Jack and Greer can use to strengthen Wright’s position at the White House, and the proof President Kovac needs to convince Popov’s widow Natalya (Selma Alispahic) that her husband’s murder was an inside job.

As the former chief of the CIA’s Moscow station, Greer has a laundry list of contacts and informants in the city, and he leans on a former Spetznatz officer named Litishenko (Gordon Kennedy) for information about Petr and Luca’s old unit, the ones tasked with exterminating the Russian nuclear scientists at Matoksa. But Litishenko turns on the veteran CIA man, and Greer has to isolate his knife hand while directing the guy’s body right over a third floor bannister. Reached for comment where he lies broken and bleeding at the bottom of the stairwell, Litishenko says a naval captain named Antonov ordered him to take out Greer. In the ensuing search of the officer’s house, Jack and Luca discover files detailing every US vessel in the Baltic Sea. Meanwhile, Antonov himself is seen boarding a state-of-the-art Russian naval destroyer, with authorization to put out to sea straight from the desk of Alexei Petrov. Antonov, who was also part of Petr and Luca’s old Spetznatz unit, is now part of Sokol, and the plot for a military coup of Russia.

Alena Kovac can’t quite believe Petrov’s hubris, either, but she’s more than happy to use it to her advantage. After calling him to set up a meeting, she turns to Mike November, who asks how she’ll play it. “I’ll distract him with his own magnificence; it won’t be hard.” And while Petrov is assailing her with open-ended threats – tacky mobster tactics like “Your house might catch fire” – Kovac runs cover for Mike, who makes contact with Natalya, the elegant widow of Petrov’s defense minister predecessor and a political animal in her own right. Later, Mike delivers Natalya to a clandestine meet with Kovac and Greer, who play for her the Petrov recording. Outraged that her husband had to die for Petrov and Petr’s dastardly plot, she agrees to broker a back channel meeting between Kovac and Russian President Surikov.

In the White House situation room, options for a military response are gaining ground. Very little of the coup portion of Petr’s plot has emerged from Russia, and President Bachler is asking Wright for an update, something actionable from her CIA assets in Moscow. Since they’re in a SCIF, or sensitive compartmentalized information facility, Wright has to step out of the situation room and pull her phone from its locker, where it reveals a list of missed calls from Jack. He brings her up to speed on the fomenting coup and Antonov’s maneuvers with the Russian naval destroyer, and says he’s going to hitch a ride to the Baltic to see what’s what. It’s intelligence that feels actionable, and by now Wright trusts Jack implicitly. But the situation room is also what they call a tough room. She has trouble selling her trust in the work of Jack and Greer to Bachler, who demands that she uncover a secondary source of intel not based wholly on trust. And all the while, the boats and planes and troops of the US and Russia continue to move around on maps like rooks and pawns in a larger game.    

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges