James Kinnear was born in Great Britain and has researched the topic of Soviet and Russian military hardware since his first visit to the Soviet Union as a young teenager.

He subsequently lived and worked in the post-Soviet Russian Federation and the other states of the former Soviet Union throughout the entire period of post-Soviet stability , the two decades between the Soviet Union being considered a military threat and the Russian Federation finding itself again categorized as such again in recent history.

James has written hundreds of articles on Soviet and Russian technology. He is a formal contributor to IHS Jane's defence yearbooks and has published books on Soviet military technology with Barbarossa, Darlington, Osprey and Tankograd.