Mark Galeotti

There has never been any doubt that Ukraine was the focus of an intelligence war as much as a physical one. But the extent of Western assistance, as well as growing concern at some Ukrainian tactics, is only now becoming clear. On Monday, the Washington Post ran a lengthy examination of the level of CIA

America’s ATACMS long-range missiles were a potential ‘game changer’ to the war in Ukraine to some, a potential source of escalation to others. Now, with no real sense that either has proved true following Zelensky’s confirmation this week they were used for the first time, what does that tell us? The MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile

Such is the globalisation of the modern underworld, that the fate of a gangster you may never have heard of, in a country of which you may know little, may actually matter to you. I’d suggest this is true of the Kyrgyz godfather Kamchy Kolbayev, who was killed on Wednesday by a bullet in the

Admiral Viktor Sokolov, commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, appears to be Schrodinger’s admiral, alive according to Moscow, dead according to Kyiv, with no clarity as to who may be right. The real significance of the missile strike on his headquarters, though, is not so much whether it did kill him, but what it says

If a little tyrant theatre is your goal, then rumbling across the border in an armoured train decked out like a palace (if your palace was decorated in the 1970s) is hard to beat. As North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin met at the Vostochny spaceport, the Bond villain vibes were strong

Perfidious Albion is, we are told, at it again. In the course of a wide-ranging and often quite surreal speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Vladimir Putin accused Britain of being behind attempted nuclear terrorism, rhetorically asking whether the government was ‘trying to provoke us into retaliating against Ukrainian atomic power stations’ or

So much is still unclear about the fate of Wagner group head Yevgeny Prigozhin, from whether he really did die in the private jet that plummeted to the ground in Russia’s Tver region to what caused the crash. In today’s Russia, after all, ‘mechanical problems’ could be anything from maintenance issues to the difficulty in

When personal sanctions on Russian oligarchs and officials were imposed by the UK, US and EU after Putin’s invasion, the rationale was that this would undermine the Kremlin. In the main, this has failed – and there is still no coherent strategy to encourage those Russians willing to turn against the regime. Wider economic sanctions are slowly grinding away at the

Perfidious Albion is at it again. The Kremlin’s increasingly unhinged obsession with seeing a British hand behind its various upsets has now manifested itself in a claim that the UK is behind the establishment of a death squad operating in Africa. The claim, trumpeted across Russia’s state-run media, is that MI6 is behind a ‘punitive

The hacking of the Electoral Commission’s databases highlights the way that in the interconnected modern world, ‘warfare’ can be as much about undermining faith in a country’s institutions and disrupting its political processes as anything else. The Electoral Commission has admitted that ‘hostile actors’ penetrated their systems in August 2021, in a ‘complex cyberattack’ that

Sir Richard Moore, head of the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – follows the tradition of only giving one public address a year, so it is inevitably scrutinised carefully for signs and portents. His speech at the UK embassy in Prague, inviting Russians to spy for Britain, required no particular reading between the lines. After

Despite the inevitable and performative expressions of anger, regret and dismay following this week’s Nato summit, Moscow feels it has reason to be moderately content with its outcome. It has seen Ukraine frustrated in its failure to secure Nato membership – and fractures emerge between Kyiv and the West. Moscow’s contentment, however, may well be

When corrupt Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in 2014, his private estate at Mezhyhirya turned out to contain an ostrich farm, chandeliers worth thousands and and a two-kilo gold loaf of bread. When Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s St Petersburg estate was raided, investigators found cash, guns – and a bizarre collection of wigs.