Mark Galeotti
speaker
200 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Jul
Mark Galeotti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's a usual dilemma of long versus short term.
In the long term, clearly the overall casualty figures are crucial because when it comes down to it, that slowly grinds down Russia's capacity to fight the war wherein it wants to fight it, in other words, on a territorial basis, with Putin clearly still being determined that he's going to get that last 20 or so percent of Donetsk region so that he can claim, ah, we have taken all of the Donbass region.
However, in the short term, it's Crimea.
Crimea, no question, is really the current potential flashpoint.
Because what we are seeing is clearly a campaign to essentially not prepare the ground necessarily for a military assault on Crimea, but instead they're just simply making it untenable to hold on to it.
At what point do we start to see, for example, a huge outflow of just ordinary people from Crimea who are saying, well, you know what?
I actually like to have running water and electricity and food and fuel oil, and therefore we are going to get the hell out of a dodge.
At what point does, in a way, this become not the crowning triumph, as it was obviously once framed, of Putin's foreign policy, but instead a very, very dangerous weakness?
And that is why I think, although Putin is not by nature a man who makes decisions quickly or easily, and he would much rather sit on the fence and just hope things work out, this is why I think it's getting harder and harder for him not to make a decision of some kind, whether it means peace, which is unlikely, or whether it means some kind of escalation, which is worrying, but more likely.
I mean, it was a logistics node, as near as I can tell, precisely because of the degree to which we had this very effective sort of strangulation siege by drone that is already taking place.
I think that's becoming less of a factor.
And we see supplies for the Russian forces in the southeast of Ukraine now being much more actually provided directly from the mainland by land routes or by drone in a few cases.
So I think that the logistics role has diminished.
What really still matters is actually the use of the air bases.
You know, Crimea is still the site from which the Russians can and do launch drone and airstrikes into southern Ukraine.
And it gives them a capacity to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses by the fact that they can therefore send in their attacks from all sorts of different directions and
but also actually send them shorter distances, again, to minimize the chance of the Ukrainians being able to respond.
So if they lose that, then in a way their strikes against southern Ukraine will have to take sort of longer routes and therefore be easier to identify and if need be shoot down.
It is just the wider political dimension.
And remember, this is a politician who, above all, is interested in survival.
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