First of all, you need to ask for an appointment well in advance. Security agents call your head office to make sure you are who you say you are.

If your credentials check out, an appointment is made, and a guard escorts you to the top floor of the building. Another guard calls you in, tests your equipment and ask you to leave behind your mobile phone. You are taken through further checks and invited to sit in a corridor and admire works of art on the wall as you wait.

Then, just a few minutes behind schedule, one of the most fortified men in the Caucasus region arrives for his interview.