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.
Modern Russia is a propaganda state, but not in the same way as the Soviet Union. The Kremlin has squeezed out any independent media, but all the same, the coverage of the Queen’s funeral demonstrated how this is a post-modern propaganda state, in which competing ‘narrative entrepreneurs’ try to make their mark and please the
Russia is retreating at speed along the Kharkiv front, leaving behind burnt-out tanks and, even more tellingly, undamaged ones, too. There are television images of locals welcoming Ukrainian forces and accounts from eyewitnesses on the spot – but none of that has made it into Russian state media. As the Kremlin struggles to find some
It is a mark of the Queen’s standing that even Vladimir Putin, in the midst of an undeclared economic and political war between Russia and the West, sent King Charles III his ‘deepest condolences’ after Her Majesty’s death. The Russian leader noted that: ‘The most important events in the recent history of the United Kingdom
What do Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, the chairman of the BBC, Piers Morgan, and, er, me, have in common? The answer is that we’ve all been banned from Russia. For some of us, that’s a blow. For others, an irrelevance. But for all of us, it’s a strange accolade: somehow Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin thinks we’re significant,
In my travels when I was still persona grata in Russia, I never got the sense that their windows were unduly flimsy or inviting. Nonetheless, the tally of Russians and Russian-connected individuals who have met their end by jumping or falling out of windows is such that it has become a rather tacky and tasteless
Mikhail Gorbachev is dead at the age of 91, and in a way I feel orphaned. I became fascinated by what was still then the Soviet Union in its late years of sclerosis, when one moribund geriatric at the top of the system succeeded another (the dark joke at the time went as follows: a KGB guard
Addressing the vexed question of who is winning the war in Ukraine, six months on, is a task to challenge military strategists, geopolitical analysts – and semanticists, because so much depends on what ‘winning’ means. On one level, after all, one could suggest everyone is losing. That said, we cannot escape the fact that both
Car bombs used to be a fixture of gangland feuds in 1990s Russia but have since fallen out of fashion. This makes it all the more striking when, as happened on Saturday night, such a device rips through a car just outside Moscow, killing Darya Dugina, daughter of the controversial nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. She was
Another day, another Russian arms depot up in smoke. The latest attack, this time on an ammunition storage site near Mayskoye on the Crimean peninsula, highlights three particular aspects of this phase of the war, and the degree to which Kyiv is adapting quicker and more effectively than Moscow. The first is that the long-heralded
For most Russians, the brutal realities of Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’ have not really struck home. Ukraine’s attack on the Saki airbase near Novofedorivka in western Crimea on Tuesday begins to change all that, marking a new stage of the war, one with both dangers and opportunities for Kyiv. The Kremlin’s spin doctors tried
Could a general of the SBU, the security service of Ukraine, really have helped Russia take the city of Kherson? Could a colonel have tipped off the Russians as to where the Ukrainians had lain mines north of Crimea? The Ukrainian government certainly appears to believe that fifth columnists within the SBU have been Moscow’s
The ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine isn’t a war – there’s a law and a possible maximum sentence (though no one seems to have faced it yet) of 15 years in prison to stop you claiming it is in Russia. Yet Russia does seem to be inching towards a wartime economy, for all Vladimir Putin’s
Apparently, if Vladimir Putin had been a woman, everything would be just tickety-boo. Speaking to German TV, Boris Johnson has said that Putin is the ‘perfect example of toxic masculinity’ and that had he been a women – ‘which he obviously isn’t’, Boris felt the need to clarify – then ‘I really don’t think he would’ve embarked
When General Alexander Dvornikov was made overall commander of Russia’s forces in April, it looked as if the amateurishness and incoordination of the early stage of the Ukraine war might be being addressed. Now, though, Dvornikov is not around, and a new commander may shape a savage new phase of operations. In recent days, the
Vladimir Putin’s regime has a track record in building up public heroes whom it hopes to use, only to find the ungrateful wretches unwilling to play the roles it intends. The most recent is Natalia Poklonskaya, a woman whose trajectory from cartoon heroine to legal adviser has starkly illustrated the way Putin faces criticisms not
Putin has a penchant for history, but only insofar it flatters him and his views. Last year, he gifted the world a 5,000 essay that essentially pre-justified his invasion of Ukraine with amateurish fantasy history, and now he is comparing himself with Tsar Peter the Great. It is not a comparison that fits or flatters.
One might not think that J. R. R. Tolkien has much to do with the bitter war in Ukraine, but one would be wrong. A particular epithet, once used by Ukrainians specifically for the Russian soldiers who have shelled, looted and raped their way into their country has begun to be applied also to the
Suddenly, we are all diagnosticians. Clips of a puffy Putin slurring his words, his hands twitching or clutching a table for grim death, have led to all kinds of speculation about his health. It does seem probable that he is suffering from some ailments, to be sure. However, we need to be careful we do
It has been reported this week that Vladimir Putin is shifting responsibility for covert operations in Ukraine to a different intelligence agency. The Fifth Service of the Federal Security Service (FSB) has now reportedly been usurped by ‘military intelligence’ – still widely known by its old acronym of GRU, but actually called the GU, the
The Russians know how to put on a parade, and Victory Day is the showiest of the shows. It may have been a portent, though, that inclement weather conditions forced the cancellation of the aerial flypast. It quite literally might have rained on Vladimir Putin’s parade. This shouldn’t have happened. Typically, if there is any
