Mark Galeotti heads the consultancy Mayak Intelligence and is honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the author of some 30 books on Russia. His latest, Forged in War: a military history of Russia from its beginnings to today, is out now.
On Christmas Day 1991, in his last act as president, Mikhail Gorbachev signed away the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A 74-year experiment that began with the ‘Great October Revolution’ of 1917 (although the USSR was formally constituted in 1922) was over. Or was it? Thirty years on, Stalin regularly tops the
Is Putin preparing to invade Ukraine? It certainly looks that way, with western intelligence agencies estimating this week that around 100,000 troops are now massing at the country’s eastern border. To some, this build-up is proof enough that the Kremlin plans to invade. This week the US president Joe Biden even made significant diplomatic concessions
With Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s borders, the Black Sea is looking choppy. While that may seem to have little significance for us, in an age of globalised supply chains, international security commitments and Britain’s ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific,’ that matters more than we might think. However, there is also an opportunity for the UK.
You should be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it, so the old cliché goes. In diplomacy at the moment, it seems you should be careful of the threats you prepare for, because you may end up producing them. There is a growing trend in the West towards treating Russia and China
Hail the tsar! Georgy Romanov, great-grandson of Grand Duke Kirill, cousin to Nicholas II, the ill-fated final Emperor of Russia, is Grand Duke and Sovereign Heir to the throne — at least according to some. He has just wed Italian consultant and author Rebecca Bettarini in the first royal wedding in St Petersburg for over
Although he has been vaccinated, Vladimir Putin is self-isolating for at least a week after ‘dozens’ in his entourage came down with Covid. He is apparently showing no signs of being infected. And perhaps no wonder, as even by the standards of his usual presidential protection, since the start of the pandemic Putin has been shielded
The Tokyo Olympics are over and fifth place in the medals table went to the ‘ROC’, the Russian Olympic Committee. Rather than being punished for its state-run doping programme, Russia has turned it into a perverse triumph, illustrating the weakness of sanctions as a way of trying to shape international behaviour. Of course, Moscow denied
You might not think that Geoff Norcott, the self-proclaimed conservative comedian, has something to contribute to western relations with Russia, but you’d be wrong. And it’s a shame that President Biden doesn’t seem to have read Where Did I Go Right? (Norcott’s account of his estrangement from his leftist roots), because time and time again,
As US and British forces pull out of Afghanistan, further victims of the ‘grave of empires’, Russia is experiencing a mix of satisfaction, exasperation and trepidation. It has its own bitter memories of the country, after all. In 1979, as a friendly regime was falling back in the face of a mounting Islamic fundamentalist insurgency, Soviet
When you have already forced a plane down with spurious claims of a bomb threat, just to arrest one dissident journalist, where do you go from there? For the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, a man looking to punish the European Union after it imposed sanctions on Belarus, it seems that exploiting would-be migrants and asylum
When Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel unilaterally proposed a European Union summit with Vladimir Putin, they managed to open deep fault lines in the continent over the EU’s Russia policy. Soon afterwards, Macron and Merkel were forced into an embarrassing reversal, largely by the countries of Central Europe, and had to cancel the proposed summit.
When military personnel talk of ‘theatres’ they mean a zone of conflict. Moscow seems to take the term increasingly literally, though, regarding spin as an essential tool of martial statecraft. This was especially visible in yesterday’s claims that its Border Guard ships fired warning shots and Black Sea Fleet Su-24 bombers dropped OFAB-250 fragmentation bombs
While the EU agonises about whether to boycott Belarusian potash or state-owned oil companies, there is one very easy measure that would not only be a powerful symbolic rebuke but also limit the regime’s campaign to spy on, harass, intimidate and harm the opposition outside the country’s borders. Kick out the KGB. It is a
Alexei Navalny seems to undergoing a metamorphosis. Yesterday, we saw him attending another trial by video, looking gaunt after 24 days of hunger strike. But if anything, the more attenuated his frame, the more his moral certainty shone through it. An appeals hearing for a separate charge of insulting a Second World War veteran gave
After weeks building up forces in Crimea and close to the Ukrainian border — over 100,000, all told — Moscow is now saying it plans to pull most of them back to barracks. Is this a climb-down, mission accomplished, or mind games? Of course, we’ll have to see what actually happens. We’ve seen footage of
What does Putin want? It’s more straightforward than you might think: usually the answer is ‘what he says’. It’s worth remembering this when thinking about what Putin had to say in his latest state of the nation address this week, in which he warned other countries against crossing a ‘red line’ with Russia. There is, of
It’s not easy to frame sanctions, these days. They occupy that huge, hazy diplomatic no man’s land between sternly-worded but essentially vacuous expressions of concern – grave concern, if you really want to pretend you’re serious – and sending a gunboat. When it comes to trying to make an impression on Vladimir Putin, who has
Russian heavy armour is on the move, and Moscow is making no move to hide it. Is this the prelude to a new upsurge in fighting in south-eastern Ukraine, or especially brutal sabre-rattling? The problem is that we don’t know – and this challenges our usual responses. The war in the Donbas – neither civil
If we are to believe the gossip, Vladimir Putin draws up death lists the way ordinary people jot down their shopping. And bang on schedule, as Joe Biden makes a point of labelling him a ‘killer,’ not one but two death lists materialise from parts unknown. This weekend the Daily Mirror — not, it has
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been poisoned and then sentenced to two and a half years in prison. But never mind, the European Union is on the case and has decided to impose sanctions. Just not that many. There are apparently just four officials on the list: Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee,
