Mark Galeotti

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

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

Vladimir Putin clearly wants us to worry that he is crazy enough to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. This fear was intensified this week when images surfaced that some – possibly in error – believed showed a train operated by the secretive nuclear security forces moving towards Ukraine. Despite this, many believe the

Sergei Melikov, head of the Dagestan Republic within the Russian Federation, is hardly a dissident. As Colonel General Melikov, he was deputy head of the National Guard, the main militarised internal security force, and he has been a loyal agent of Moscow’s all his life. Nonetheless, he has become a no-doubt-temporary phenomenon on social media

While the Ukrainians are fighting a conventional war on their own territory, Russia and the West are engaged in an unconventional one fought by economic pressure, political subterfuge and dirty tricks. The apparent sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines seems just the latest example. Both of these lines linking Russia to Germany have sprung

Vladimir Putin’s latest escalation over Ukraine not only demonstrates that even he doesn’t think he’s winning the war but what happens when a leader knows he has to do ‘something’ but doesn’t quite know what. Momentum was, after all, no longer on his side. He seems to have hoped that over a hard winter, either

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

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