Battlefield 3 The Russian is a decent piece of writing but has some flaws that really detracted from the enjoyment. First off, the book is aimed squarely at Battlefield 3 players as a way to 
expand appreciation of the game’s universe, yet the author felt the need to define every bit of military jargon. So for example, squarely in the middle of someone’s thoughts would be LZ followed by (landing zone). Well, duh! We’re military shooter fans, we don’t need you to explain all of this. We know that abseiling is rappeling, the HVT is high value target, etc. Doing so smack dab in the middle of the narrative is really irritating. A glossary, if you were so compelled to define all of this stuff, would have been fine, though mostly gone unused by the book’s target audience.
Now, while that really hacked up the reading experience, there’s more to the book than just that. There is some mild character development, mostly seen in Dima Mayakovsky, the eponymous subject of Battlefield 3 The Russian. He is the only character in the book that I felt any kind of connection to, perhaps aside from his sidekick Kroll. Almost every other single character felt cardboard and unreal. Dima, while not an overly unique character in the realm of military fiction, was certainly a character that was easy to relate to.
He is, of course, that classic washed up [entire almost any government agency] Spetsnatz agent who once held grand potential but opted out and has now, once again, been drawn back into the thick of things only to find himself getting burned by his superiors. He gets things done, but in his own way and he doesn’t play by anyone else’s rules. It’s like there are no longer any unique characters in both the real world, or fiction.
Dima takes crew and heads off after Kaffarov, a Russian weapons dealer, yep, they’re still selling off that amassed armament from the cold war after 25 years including, in Battlefield 3 The Russian, some suitcase nukes. So the book follows Dima’s crew who are chasing Kaffaroc and the nukes. Of course, it’s in Tehran and of course, the US invaded and of course there’s a shadowy, ominous unknown freelancer in play as well.
