Mark Galeotti

As Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is once again in court, facing charges that could extend his time in prison by 30 or more years, he is showing that he is not giving up his uneven but unyielding challenge to the Putin regime. When Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021 after recovering from a

Lately Vladimir Putin has been strikingly unwilling to subject himself to any serious debate about his war in Ukraine. On Tuesday, he came the closest yet, spending more than two hours talking to war correspondents working for either the state media or nationalist social media channels. It was hardly an inquisition, but there were some

The Ukrainian counter-offensive has duly started and, needless to say, there is a rush to judgement. It is going to play out over the coming weeks, even months, though, and at present we are still working off partial and often deceptive information. But, while there is relatively little one can say about the events unfolding

According to Moscow, Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive has begun, and has begun badly for Kyiv. Of course, we need to treat the Russian account with all necessary scepticism, but the evidence is that the droney, phony war stage of this campaign season is ending and the real fighting is beginning. The unverified Russian claim is that

Has Ukraine’s much-heralded counter-offensive already begun? At the end of last month, defence minister Oleksy Reznikov promised that ‘as soon as there is God’s will, the weather and a decision by the commanders, we will do it’. The past few weeks have seen an upsurge in what the military describe as shaping operations, preparing the

After months of flat denials, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence has admitted that Kyiv is carrying out a campaign of sabotage and assassination inside Russia. But why change the official line now? Even if this is a good cop/bad cop routine, it still risks embarrassing the president, raising questions as to how far he

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman behind the Wagner mercenary army, likes accusing his political enemies of ‘treason’ for not backing him as much as he’d like. Now, though, he appears to have committed that very crime himself – with the revelation that US intelligence reports suggested he tried to cut a deal with HUR, Ukrainian military

Earlier this month, an unarmed Polish aircraft monitoring potential human smuggling and illegal fishing on the Black Sea almost ditched into the sea when a Russian Su-35 fighter engaged it over international waters. It was a reminder that while attention is inevitably focused on the land battles anticipated when Kyiv launches its spring counter-offensive, this

It may be having trouble on the battlefield, but the Russian army does know how to stage a parade. Behind the goose-stepping ranks, massed bands, and rumbling missile launchers, though, was a clear sense of the practical and political costs of the war in Ukraine. Although parades from Crimea in the south to Pskov in

Russia is gearing up for its annual festival of state-sponsored militarist kitsch that are the 9 May Victory Day celebrations, albeit in rather more limited form thanks to security concerns surrounding the ongoing war. Amongst all this, it is all too easy to forget that not everyone is consumed with nationalist pageantry. Instead, what is

The Russian government has claimed that ‘two unmanned aerial vehicles were aimed at the Kremlin. As a result of timely actions taken by the military and special services with the use of radar warfare systems, the vehicles were put out of action.’ There were, it continues, ‘no victims and material damage’, although it is considering

With the break-neck pace with which it tends to respond to measures coming from the Kremlin, this month Russia’s parliament rushed through a new measure intended to make it harder for draftees and mobilised reservists to dodge military service. In the process, it highlighted the country’s slide into techno-authoritarianism. Until now, the law demanded that

There is no doubt that the West supports Ukraine’s fight for its sovereignty and survival. There is equally no doubt that, for all the fulsome rhetoric, this support is both conditional and limited by a desire to prevent the war from escalating. This was amply demonstrated by recent revelations about Washington’s relationship with Kyrylo Budanov,

The news that Russian spy ships appear to be mapping British and other underwater cables and pipelines in the North Sea sounds very Cold War. But in fact it reflects the realities of modern conflict, and also the ways Moscow is playing psychological games with the West. In November, The Admiral Vladimirsky, an Akademik Krylov-class ship

Crimea matters to Russians – whether they adore or abhor Vladimir Putin – in a way none of the other claimed or occupied Ukrainian territories do, and as such the peninsula’s fate will probably be central to any eventual resolution of the current war. That some Ukrainian sources are now talking about a military reconquest