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 over 25 books on Russia. His latest, Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, is out now.
Today is Ukraine’s Day of Unity which necessarily had to be marked with an expression of national pride. However, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to issue a decree ‘On the Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’ represented not simply that, but an open political challenge to Moscow, and one which strangely echoed Putin’s
The March presidential elections in Russia will, of course, be a stage-managed farce, but that doesn’t mean that real politics has been entirely extinguished. It offers a narrow window of opportunity for the opposition to try and connect with the Russian people – so the Kremlin is doing its best to muzzle them. On the
Is Moscow reviving a notorious 1940s security agency? Or is the suggestion that the infamous SMERSH counterintelligence unit has been revived in Russia simply a way to troll the West? Worse yet, could it be that the country is facing the threat of a neo-Stalinist revival? A recent video circulated on Russian social media shows
The Russian economy has become heavily dependent on migrant workers, largely from Central Asia. As the defence ministry tries to recruit them into the army, and certain extremists call for them to be sent home, the Kremlin is having to tread a fine line between economic pragmatism, nationalism and the immediate needs of the war.
The fall of the house of the Romanovs in 1917 may have been a long time coming, but arguably it was finally triggered by bread prices. It would be ironic if another Russian autocrat fell to food, which may help explain why the Kremlin has been moving so decisively to address Russia’s egg crisis, after
With ‘don’t mention the war!’ the order of the day, it felt as if Vladimir Putin’s message to his people this year was haunted by the ghost of Basil Fawlty. The New Year’s message is a Soviet and then Russian tradition dating back to the 1970s. It is watched widely across the country, sometimes with
It has become something of a fad to try to identify and quantify the body doubles of Vladimir Putin. There are even outlandish claims that the man himself is dead and has been replaced by one. But why the fascination? It is hardly unusual for autocrats to have doubles – as a shield against assassination or
It was not quite in time for Christmas (which Ukraine now celebrates on 25 December, after switching this year from the Russian Orthodox Julian calendar), but Kyiv will still be celebrating today’s apparently successful Storm Shadow missile attack on a landing ship in a Crimean port. There are no seasonal ceasefires on either side in
From time to time, the tsar must listen to the complaints of his subjects. Having dodged this duty last year, Vladimir Putin has an election looming, so held a press conference. While he punished his viewers in the process with a performance of stupefying boredom, nonetheless today’s event gave us a sense of his election
It was elaborately staged precisely to try and look unstaged. After a medals ceremony at the Kremlin for Heroes of the Fatherland day, Vladimir Putin joined an oh-so-unchoreographed gaggle of participants. One, Lt Colonel Artem Zhoga, appealed for him to stand for re-election. Although Putin admitted he had had second thoughts, he accepted ‘that there
The news this week that Republicans in the US Senate had voted together to block a supplemental funding bill that included provision for $61 billion for Ukraine was greeted with predictable dismay in Kyiv and glee in Moscow. Ostensibly this was a bid to force the White House into prioritising more spending on securing the
One of Russia’s toxic TV presenters recently cackled that Western sanctions ‘have only helped Russia wean itself off dependence on foreign imports and given a boost to our own producers’. At a time when Russia’s third quarter growth has actually exceeded expectations, hitting 5.5 per cent, it is worth noting what sanctions can and cannot
Considering the obsession Russia has with Britain as the source of all its woes, it is perhaps surprising how David Cameron’s return to politics is being taken. Or rather, how little Moscow thinks it matters. After all, there is a flatteringly pervasive sense that while the United States is the main threat to Russia, Britain
There’s a very different tone coming from Kyiv these days. Speaking to Time magazine, Volodymyr Zelensky had just returned from Washington after failing to make another impassioned public address on Capitol Hill, and not even managing to get on Oprah. The Ukrainian president sounded angry. The constant struggle to maintain international support seems to be taking
As the war in Gaza continues to have global repercussions, a mob in the southern Russian city of Makhachkala stormed their local airport, after news spread that a flight from Tel Aviv was due to land. Beyond the heightened passions of Muslims around the world, this incident also demonstrates the particular challenges for multi-ethnic Russia.
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
Inevitably, some have tried to suggest the terrorist invasion of Israel was in some ways orchestrated by Moscow. ‘Russia is interested in igniting a war in the Middle East so that a new source of pain and suffering will weaken world unity,’ said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the aftermath of the attack. But if Russia
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
