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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The General & The Journalist · Crimea under pressure: Will Putin lash out? · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah, exactly, and it just seems to have been more precisely people sort of essentially trying to come up with plans just in case, contingency planning, without any sense that any kind of decision had been made behind it.

There's certainly no evidence at the moment that the Russians would want to escalate like that, not least because, remember, they are a tad busy.

I mean, the forces at their disposal are severely limited, and especially the kind of, you know, the Spetsnaz special forces, the sort of people whom they would want to deploy...

Well, A, they were thoroughly decimated back in 2022 when they essentially found themselves being just thrown into the role of light infantry.

And even now, I mean, they are overstretched in Ukraine.

So, you know, again, there are limits.

Now, again, when it comes down to it, if Putin decides, then the generals can't turn around and say, I'm sorry, boss, we don't have the people.

They'll have to somehow find the people.

But certainly at present, I think they're more focused on a campaign of escalation in Ukraine rather than a horizontal campaign to really get things much more serious in their confrontation with the West.

I think, I mean, you mentioned breaking cables and that, again, I could absolutely see that, though bear in mind that actually the modern communications infrastructure is actually moderately resilient.

You'd have to drag your anchor through a fair number of cables to really have a severe impact.

But in terms of assassinations and the like, you're absolutely right in terms of the calibration of threat around Litvinenko and Skripal.

But that was a very different context.

There is this sense that, this Russian sense, that the West is essentially quite morally flabby.

It doesn't like crossing demarcation lines.

But as far as Putin is concerned, we have already crossed a lot of lines.

We are already essentially encouraging and supporting with weapons and intelligence and everything else the Ukrainians to kill Russians and hammer the Russian economy.

So that sense that, sure, we might not try and do exactly the same.

We might not actually have British assassins going after someone in Russia, not least because Russia is a very hard target from a counterintelligence point of view.

But on the other hand, given how often the Ukrainians have been doing it,

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