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.
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
So what did everyone learn from the massive trove of more than a hundred top secret US documents a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman apparently put on a gaming server to wow some fellow God-fearing gun enthusiasts? Both little and a lot. Despite some clumsy cut-and-paste editing of casualty figures, as well as some carefully-worded claims
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
Those who live by hate often die by hate, too. Maxim Fomin, better known as Vladlen Tatarsky, was one of the ultra-nationalist social media ‘milbloggers’ who emerged largely off the back of Russia’s war on Ukraine. On Sunday evening, he was addressing a gathering at a cafe in St Petersburg when he was killed by a
It’s a crude but inescapable fact of history that many states had their origins in better-organised bandit gangs. It’s a depressing feature of the present that some states seem determined to slide back into bandit status. While Putin’s Russia retains the institutions of modern statehood, he and his clique of cronies and yes-men have no
If I were to have to pick the figure in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle who scares me the most, it would have to be Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council and the closest thing there is in the Russian system to a national security adviser. Patrushev’s profile has grown steadily as both cause
It’s a long time since Dmitry Medvedev was last considered a potential liberal hope for Russia. Most recently, after all, he has threatened to bomb any country that seeks to apply the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) recent arrest warrant on Vladimir Putin and separately read a working group of the Military Industrial Commission a 1941
After his arrival in Moscow on Monday, President Xi Jinping said that China is ready, along with Russia, ‘to stand guard over the world order based on international law’. This statement came closer than ever before to articulating his view that a normative struggle is going on between a western-dominated order, and one more suited
As Wagner mercenaries are being deliberately expended by the regular military as cannon-fodder in the battle for Bakhmut, their backer, Evgeny Prigozhin, is learning a hard lesson in Kremlin politics: it doesn’t matter how useful you were yesterday, what matters is how useful you may be tomorrow. Last year, the Russians were desperately short of
They might not be the quick knock-out blow their champions misleadingly claimed they’d be, but sanctions are having a serious effect on the long-term viability of the Russian economy. However, we should never underestimate the Russians’ capacity to find rough and ready workarounds. Back in Soviet times, I was regaled with stories of Lada cars
There’s an uncomfortable fact about covert operations in the information-saturated modern world. Like personal WhatsApp messages, they always leak – the only questions are how long it takes, who leaks, and what the consequences will be. With reports coming from both Washington and Berlin that Ukrainians may have been behind the spectacular bombings of the
Vladimir Putin has sold his Ukrainian war to the Russian people by trying to find the sweet spot between existential threat and reassuring distance: the Russian president portrays the conflict as a struggle to preserve the nation from a hostile West and its Ukrainian proxy, but one fought safely outside its borders. Increasingly, Kyiv seems
Many have weighed in on how Vladimir Putin’s reign will end. Now it is the turn of Volodymyr Zelensky, asserting that he will be killed by his own. But is this wishful thinking, prediction or trolling? The Ukrainian president was speaking in a documentary, when he said that There will definitely be a moment when
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman behind Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries, is hardly a man to keep a low profile. He is at his loudest and most vitriolic, though, either when he feels he has the upper hand over his (many) enemies or when he is on the ropes. He’s pretty outspoken these days, and no one
France’s President Macron has raised hackles time and again with his interventions on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. For all his grandstanding bombast though, he has often raised the policy dilemmas that the West really ought to be discussing. Most recently, he warned, while returning from the Munich Security Conference, that active efforts to topple Vladimir
Does Vladimir Putin face a challenge, not from cuddly, West-looking liberals, but from even sharper-toothed nationalists? Certainly this is suddenly the message coming from loyalists. Oleg Matveychev, a parliamentarian and spin doctor, who also has a widely-read blog, has made waves by claiming in an online video that ‘2023 will be very dangerous,’ because of
Ukraine’s top soldier, General Valery Zaluzhny, has said that if he is to launch a successful counter-offensive, the West will have to provide him with another 300 tanks. This is, of course, a negotiating position. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government has been very effective in managing western allies: cajoling, demanding and guilting them into providing more
Ukraine’s top soldier, General Valery Zaluzhny, has said that if he is to launch a successful counter-offensive, the West will have to provide him with another 300 tanks. This is, of course, a negotiating position. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government has been very effective in managing western allies: cajoling, demanding and guilting them into providing more
There was nothing subtle about it, as cranes lifted truck-based Pantsir-S1 air defence systems onto the roofs of the sprawling Defence Ministry building on Frunzenskaya Embankment and another structure in the Taganka neighbourhood, south-east of the Kremlin. As a former president and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church both warned of the risks of
So, one granite-faced general has been replaced by another. The announcement that, after just three months in post, General Sergei Surovikin is being succeeded as overall commander of Russia’s war in Ukraine by Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov may sound like appointing a new captain for a hull-breached Titanic. But it is significant
