Ninety Members of The Chelsea Society and our guests had the rare opportunity to meet with Dr Mark Galeotti on Monday 16th January 2023.
“Mark Galeotti is the author of Putin’s Wars: from Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022), The Weaponisation of Everything (Yale, 2022), We Need To Talk About Putin (Ebury, 2019) and The Vory: Russia’s super mafia (Yale, 2018).
He has studied Russia for many years, and was on the first list of British people banned by Moscow. He is a specialist in the Russian military and security services, and is an Honorary Professor at University College London and Executive Director of the UK-based consultancy Mayak Intelligence. He read history at Cambridge and was awarded his doctorate in government by the LSE. He then joined the British Foreign Office, and later became an independent author and scholar in New York, Moscow, Prague, Florence and London.
He says “The increasingly untenable Ukraine war is undermining Putin’s popular legitimacy and his standing with a ruthlessly pragmatic elite that wonders whether he is still the ruler they need,” “Paradoxically, though, this also makes him more dangerous — repression is having to replace genuine authority.”
Members may have seen Mark Galeotti’s excellent article “Resolution or Escalation” in The Sunday Times on 1st January in which he concludes that 2023 will be a year of war in Ukraine, but it carries the hope of some kind of peace.
