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.
So, one granite-faced general has been replaced by another.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
When what seems to have been a Ukrainian S-300 air defence missile accidentally hit the village of Przewodów in Poland, killing two farm workers, it became at once a litmus test of national attitudes and a reminder of the wider dangers of the war in Ukraine. At first, confusion about what had happened allowed everyone
First came the claims that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was admitted to hospital in Bali on arriving for the G20 summit. No, we were then told by spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – it was ‘the ultimate fake’. Then local accounts emerged, saying that he popped in ‘for a check-up’. But does any of it matter?
Almost everyone has known that the city of Kherson, stranded on the right bank of the Dnipro River, was all but indefensible. Now it looks as if the one man who, like Canute was setting himself against the tide, has finally acknowledged that: Vladimir Putin has let his generals withdraw. This could conceivably be some
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This week: Mark Galeotti tells us why Ukraine has become a weapons testing ground (00:53), Katja Hoyer discusses Germany’s extreme monarchists (09:12), and Tanya Gold reads her Notes on … espressos (15:24). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.
Will they stay or will they go? The southern Ukrainian city of Kherson has become the current focus of the toughest fighting in the war, and what was once seen as Moscow’s potential gateway to Odessa and the rest of the Black Sea coast is now looking like Kyiv’s access towards occupied Crimea. However, it
The war in Ukraine has become a testing ground for new technology, an opportunity to develop weapons and find different ways of fighting. Nations that are supposedly neutral have been sending weapons to the front line to find out just how they work in the heat of battle. This is a relatively new trend in
Russia is peddling implausible tales of Ukrainian ‘dirty bombs’. Kyiv and the West are embarked on a campaign to counter this propaganda, and again the talk is of the risk of Moscow using weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine. And that’s the point. First of all, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu broke months of relative
Martial law can arrive with a bang: tanks on the streets, Swan Lake on the TV. It can also creep up on a country in the guise of a presidential edict with the title ‘The Decree On Measures taken in the Constituent Entities of the Russian Federation in Connection with the Decree of the President
There is a common misconception that the leaders of nuclear states have a ‘red button’ that can unleash Armageddon. As Vladimir Putin continues to hint at the use of non-strategic (‘tactical’) nuclear weapons in Ukraine, there is some comfort in the knowledge that it is not so easy. Ironically, launching the kind of strategic nuclear
The Crimean Bridge bombing was an unwelcome gift to both Vladimir Putin – who had celebrated his 70th birthday the day before – and the new overall commander of the ‘Special Military Operation,’ General Sergei Surovikin. Today, they returned the favour with a missile bombardment of Kyiv and other major cities of the like not
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On this week’s podcast: As Liz Truss returns from Conservative Party Conference with her wings clipped, has she failed in her revolutionary aims for the party? James Forsyth discusses this in the cover piece for The Spectator, and is joined by former cabinet minister and New Labour architect Peter Mandelson to discuss (01:08). Also this week:
