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
There are people who are absolutely trying to persuade Putin to do precisely what you said.
We've seen an increasingly open, strikingly open debate taking place within the elite.
Things that we know were being said behind closed doors in previous years.
are now coming out in newspaper op-eds and so forth.
People saying precisely, look, we can't allow this to become a forever war.
We've reached a point of diminishing returns.
Let's just try and freeze the conflict, start some kind of negotiations, which if we want, we can spin them out forever, or we can hopefully get sanctions relief or something as a result.
would seem to be admirably commonsensical.
Except the trouble is that that same argument that says, look, we can't let this war just drag out is also being used by ultra hawks to say, and that's why we need to escalate.
That's why we need to pull out all the stops, impose some kind of military solution quickly.
And yes, in the short term, it's going to be disruptive and expensive and dangerous.
But the point is we do it quickly.
then we can essentially stop the war on our terms.
And once we've done that, people will essentially forgive us what we've done.
It's a much more dangerous route, but it seems at the moment, seems to be the one that actually Putin is more inclined to.
And also...
All that time, he would presumably be reconstituting his rather badly battered armed forces, which allows him to also be thinking about another round if need be.
All true, except that, remember that to Putin, who doesn't really believe Ukraine is a country,
And who increasingly is willing to use the word war, not special military operation, because he's framing Ukraine as just simply one battlefield, a particularly kinetic battlefield in a wider struggle with, I was going to say the West, but really it's Europe, broadly constituted to include us.
From his point of view, I think he doesn't believe that there is real agency in Ukraine.
Showing 81–100 of 200 · page 5 of 10
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