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Mark Galeotti

Mark Galeotti

The Guardian

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Why Timur Ivanov was arrested

The universal corruption of the Russian elite suits Vladimir Putin. When everyone has a skeleton in their closet, power rests with whoever decides...

28.04.2024 9

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Why is Russia jamming plane signals across Europe?

The ‘Baltic Beast’ is at it again. Mysterious – or not so mysterious – GPS signal disruption has become a growing problem for civilian air...

22.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

How likely is Putin to target the Paris Olympics?

One thing the French seem to be learning (or, given their history, re-learning) is that the Russians are always up for a scrap. A ministerial phone...

06.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

How Putin will rig the Russian election

Pity the poor political technologists, as Russia’s professionals in the dark arts of spin, propaganda, gerrymandering and outright ballot box...

16.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Campaign mode / Putin wants to talk about Russia’s future, not the war

Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the legislature) is rarely an exciting event, but it does provide an...

29.02.2024 3

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Putin holds the power to trigger nuclear war

Secret documents have been leaked that reveal Russian scenarios for war games involving simulated nuclear strikes. They shed light on Moscow’s...

29.02.2024 20

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Why Macron won’t send troops to Ukraine

French President Emmanuel Macron does enjoy a good grandstanding. Having once been keen to present himself as a possible bridge-builder with Moscow,...

27.02.2024 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

The fantastical myths that swirl around Vladimir Putin

If there is one man who is probably happiest that Vladimir Putin’s travel schedule has been so heavily curtailed of late, it is probably the Federal...

25.02.2024 8

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Two years on, the Ukraine war matters more than ever

There are inevitably voices in the West questioning the value of committing more than £5.5 billion a month in support of the war in Ukraine. It looks...

24.02.2024 40

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Expelling the Russian ambassador would be a mistake

Jacob Rees-Mogg spoke for many people horrified by Alexei Navalny’s death in a Russian prison last week when he suggested that the Russian...

23.02.2024 20

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

How the West can truly avenge Navalny’s death

With the Kremlin now claiming that it needs to hold on to the body of opposition leader Alexei Navalny for another fortnight for ‘tests’, there is...

20.02.2024 6

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

What Tucker Carlson gets wrong about Russia

‘I have seen the Future and it works,’ proclaimed leftist American journalist Lincoln Steffens after visiting Bolshevik Russia in 1919. By then,...

17.02.2024 20

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

How long will Nadezhdin dare to defy Putin?

Despite a little eleventh-hour drama, Boris Nadezhdin’s bid to become the only genuine opposition candidate in March’s Russian elections has been...

08.02.2024 8

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Zelensky’s rivalry with Zaluzhny spells bad news for Ukraine

Is he out or not? After a night of claim, counter-claim, rumour and speculation, it appears that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has decided...

30.01.2024 40

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Putin’s Kaliningrad visit wasn’t a threat to Nato

President visits part of his own country. Shock. Vladimir Putin’s visit yesterday to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, perched precariously on the...

26.01.2024 9

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Who shot down the plane carrying Ukrainian PoWs?

It will prove to be a terrible and tragic irony if it turns out that Kyiv shot down a Russian transport aircraft today that was transporting Ukrainian...

24.01.2024 6

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Why is Zelensky echoing Putin’s rhetoric?

Today is Ukraine’s Day of Unity which necessarily had to be marked with an expression of national pride. However, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s...

22.01.2024 6

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Russia / Despite three years in prison, Navalny still scares Putin

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...

20.01.2024 7

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Has Putin really revived Stalin’s infamous spy-catching unit?

Is Moscow reviving a notorious 1940s security agency? Or is the suggestion that the infamous SMERSH counterintelligence unit has been revived in...

10.01.2024 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Putin’s migrant conundrum

The Russian economy has become heavily dependent on migrant workers, largely from Central Asia. As the defence ministry tries to recruit them into the...

10.01.2024 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Russia’s egg shortage is panicking Putin’s regime

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...

07.01.2024 7

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Russia’s egg shortage will terrify Putin’s regime

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...

07.01.2024 7

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Why Putin didn’t mention the war in his New Year’s address

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...

01.01.2024 20

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Does Putin use body doubles?

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...

28.12.2023 9

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Crimea / Why Ukraine’s attack on the Novocherkassk warship matters

It was not quite in time for Christmas (which Ukraine now celebrates on 25 December, after switching this year from the Russian Orthodox Gregorian...

26.12.2023 4

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Vladimir Putin bores the nation

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,...

14.12.2023 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

An election campaign is still dangerous for Putin

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...

10.12.2023 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Cost of war / US Senate plays to Putin’s Ukraine strategy

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...

09.12.2023 5

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Cost of war / Sanctions against Russia haven’t failed

One of Russia’s toxic TV presenters recently cackled that Western sanctions ‘have only helped Russia wean itself off dependence on foreign imports...

25.11.2023 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Putin isn’t afraid of Cameron

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...

14.11.2023 8

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Is the West losing interest in Ukraine?

There’s a very different tone coming from Kyiv these days. Speaking to Time magazine, Volodymyr Zelensky had just returned from Washington after...

06.11.2023 30

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Why the Kremlin will fear this anti-Semitic mob in Dagestan

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...

30.10.2023 10

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Intelligence war / Ukraine’s sabotage tricks are causing concern in Washington

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...

29.10.2023 8

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

ATACMS missiles alone won’t change the game in Ukraine

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....

21.10.2023 20

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Putin has been blindsided by the Israel attack

Inevitably, some have tried to suggest the terrorist invasion of Israel was in some ways orchestrated by Moscow. ‘Russia is interested in igniting a...

12.10.2023 3

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Why a gangster’s death in Central Asia matters

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...

05.10.2023 6

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

By striking Crimea, Kyiv shows Putin that nowhere is safe

Admiral Viktor Sokolov, commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, appears to be Schrodinger’s admiral, alive according to Moscow, dead according to...

27.09.2023 4

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

The EU needs a coherent strategy on Russian sanctions

This week, the European Union opted to extend sanctions on some 1,800 Russian companies and individuals for another six months, but it also lifted...

16.09.2023 7

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Putin’s North Korea summit was pure theatre

If a little tyrant theatre is your goal, then rumbling across the border in an armoured train decked out like a palace (if your palace was decorated...

14.09.2023 6

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

Why Putin is pointing the finger at Britain

Perfidious Albion is, we are told, at it again. In the course of a wide-ranging and often quite surreal speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in...

12.09.2023 3

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

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