President Malakhov

President Malakhov is the Putin-esque leader of the Russian Confederation. Full of testosterone and a thirst for public displays of his own manliness, he is an important figure in the books—responsible for disrupting the Swarm’s latency period and “waking them up” with the singularity weapons his government was experimenting with. He always looms as an everpresent and menacing threat throughout books 1 and 2, but does not actually appear until the middle of book 3. He’s allowed the Swarm to take over most of his government, making humanity—or The Adanasi—the seventh house of the Concordat of Seven, though he retains his own freedom from the virus.

Isaacson pushes him off a ten story drop-off at the singularity production facility, supposedly killing him, but he reappears in the epilogue of book 3 where it’s revealed that he and Avery were scheming the whole time to defeat the Swarm permanently, at any cost.