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
And, look, for many Russians, they don't necessarily have a car or whatever, but that doesn't really matter.
As you said, it's not just simply about the kilometer-long queues outside petrol stations and the like.
It is the fact that this is a very, very visible sign of the war coming home, that precisely the great billowing clouds of black smoke, the huge gouts of flame, the internet outages, which are justified on the basis of an attempt to try and prevent Ukrainian drones using them to finally home in on their targets.
All of these things are saying to Russians, this war that you were told will be quick,
would be cheap, would be easy, and above all, wouldn't affect you directly, really is affecting you.
Russians are fed up, but they don't really feel that they can afford or risk to do anything about it at this stage.
At this stage being rather crucial.
Well yeah, watch this space, and particularly because in September there are due to be elections to the State Duma, the Russian Parliament.
Now on one level, of course, we all know that Russian quote unquote democracy is a farce, that the election results will be rigged so that whatever result the political technologists of the presidential administration want to announce will be announced.
But they're also painfully aware that the bigger the gap,
between the real result and the announced result, then the less legitimate the outcome and the more likely there is to see for protests.
We saw the biggest protests in post Soviet times back in 2011, 2012, precisely were triggered by widespread revulsion at rigged elections.
So, you know, I think this is one of the reasons why this becomes a particularly uncomfortable moment for a political regime which was hoping it could just simply surf to an easy win.
Yeah, absolutely.
And had Vladimir Vladimirovich given me a call to ask for my advice, that's very much what I would advise.
The trouble is, it is very clear that our notions of common sense are not necessarily Putin's.
We probably were also sort of...
Struck by that in February 2022, when his invasion of Ukraine seemed to make no sense.
And it's not that Putin is some kind of irrational lunatic.
It's more that it's proof of the fact that even rational actors can make deeply stupid decisions based on what they're told and what their assumptions are.
Showing 61–80 of 200 · page 4 of 10
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