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.
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
We’ve long known that computers can beat us at chess, so does it matter if they have started to beat us at more verbal and collaborative games such as Diplomacy? It certainly does, and suggests a future in which artificial intelligence may begin to play a growing role in the whole spectrum of international affairs,
Who needs Santa when you have Vladimir Putin? Just in time for Christmas, the Russian president has promised his military ‘everything it needs’ and an extra half a million men. On one level, this represents a further militarisation of the state – but at the same time, it is unattainable, and probably a misreading of
Feathers are flying and divisions are widening among Russia’s hawks as the degree to which the invasion of Ukraine was a mistake becomes more evident. It is a powerful reminder that the main threat to Vladimir Putin these days comes not from liberals – largely imprisoned or forced into exile – but from increasingly disgruntled
Fewer than one in 100 defendants in the Russian court system get acquitted. Even in the best of circumstances then, Ilya Yashin’s chances looked poor. As the last of Russia’s high-profile opposition politicians who remains alive and isn’t in prison or in exile, there never was any question as to whether he was going to
After a quiet swap in the United Arab Emirates, the American basketball star Brittney Griner is out of a Russian prison while the Russian arms dealer and presumed intelligence asset Viktor Bout is out of a US one. A little glimmer of humanity amidst Cold War 2.0, or a dangerous hostage exchange with Moscow getting
It is almost as if Vladimir Putin doesn’t mean it when he claims to be open to peace talks with Ukraine. Having originally said they have ‘no preconditions’ on peace talks with Ukraine, the Russians are now throwing obstacles in their way, as their bluff is called. As one US official told me, ‘we are
Saturday’s news of the sudden death of Belarusian foreign minister Vladimir Makei, as well as the rather terse nature of the official notice, has raised the inevitable storm of instant speculation, revolving around notional Russian plots. In the process it has illustrated both some of the shortcomings of ‘instant punditry’ and the continuing significance of
Perhaps it should not have been a surprise to see the camouflaged special forces of the SBU, the Ukrainian Security Service, fanning out over the usually serene grounds of Kyiv’s Holy Dormition Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery on Tuesday. After all, Vladimir Putin’s political alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church has ensured that his war with Ukraine
