Episode 337: Inside Russia’s Political War Against the West with Professor Mark Galeotti

In this episode, we host Professor Mark Galeotti to explore how Russia wages political warfare against the West beyond the conventional battlefield. Drawing on decades of work on Russian power, intelligence, organised crime, and state coercion, Professor Galeotti explains why Moscow’s challenge to Europe is not best understood simply through hard power but rather through sabotage, disinformation, criminal proxies, cyberactivity, and the deliberate exploitation of Western vulnerabilities. He also reflects on how Putin’s system works today, why the Kremlin so often misreads both its adversaries and itself, and what episodes such as the Prigozhin mutiny reveal about the strengths and fragilities of the Russian state.

We discuss why “political warfare” may be a more useful term than “hybrid war” and how Russia blends state and criminal networks. From sabotage plots and outsourced coercion to red-teaming, resilience, insider threats, and the use of AI to identify vulnerabilities, this conversation offers a timely guide to how Russia applies pressure below the threshold of open war – and what Western states, institutions, and organisations need to do to prepare more intelligently.

Professor Mark Galeotti is one of the leading experts on modern Russia, with particular expertise in its security politics, intelligence services, organised crime, and political warfare. He is Director of Mayak Intelligence, an Honorary Professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, and an Associate Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy.

Professor Galeotti is a prolific author of more than 30 books on Russia, writes regularly for The Times and The Spectator, is a frequent contributor to RUSI and Foreign Policy, and hosts the podcast In Moscow’s Shadows.

The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical instability and organised crime to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.

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Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.

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Transcript

[00:00:01] Mark Galeotti: So much revolves around this term that’s often used for Russia, “a mafia state”, which I don’t really like. I can understand that it works great for headlines, but it implies that either the state controls the gangsters or the gangsters control the state, and neither of those is quite true. What we actually have are these transactional deals that create networks which tend to blend the criminal, the political, the security apparatus, and the police, and so forth.

[00:00:26] Dominic Bowen: Welcome back to The International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.

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[00:01:32] Dominic Bowen: Increasingly, Russia complements its war machine with other activities, including sabotage, cyber activity, disinformation, criminal networks, coercive diplomacy, and, of course, exploiting the weaknesses in our democracies. I’m Dominic Bowen, and I’m the host of The International Risk Podcast, where we unpack the risks that really matter to you. In this episode, we’re exploring Russia’s hybrid war, what it really looks like in practice as Moscow continues to exploit divisions and test resilience within the West. And our guest today is Professor Mark Galeotti, and he’s especially interesting not just because he studies Russia, but because he has spent decades looking at this overlap between state power, intelligence, military coercion, and organised crime. Mark runs Mayak Intelligence.

[00:02:16] Dominic Bowen: He’s also an Honorary Professor at UCL. He’s a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, and he’s an Associate Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy. He’s a regular writer for The Times and The Spectator, and he’s a frequent contributor to RUSI and Foreign Policy magazine, and he’s the host of his own podcast, In Moscow’s Shadows. Professor Galeotti, welcome to The International Risk Podcast.

[00:02:41] Mark Galeotti: Thanks very much. Delighted to be here.

[00:02:43] Dominic Bowen: And, Mark, I know you travel quite a lot. Whereabouts do we find you in the world today?

[00:02:47] Mark Galeotti: Well, actually, at the moment you find me, thank God, at home briefly in Broadstairs on the Kent coast, in between travels, just before heading off shortly to Warsaw.

[00:02:56] Dominic Bowen: Home can be boring, but down near Kent is meant to be absolutely beautiful, so that doesn’t sound too bad.

[00:03:00] Mark Galeotti: Quite. I mean, this is it: having lived largely in megacities, to be living in a small, slightly shabby Victorian seaside town, but literally right by the sea — I’ll definitely take that.

[00:03:10] Dominic Bowen: Well, maybe for the next interview we’ll have to record down in Kent. But, Mark, in your 2019 book We Need to Talk About Putin, you argued that the West often gets Putin wrong, describing him as a madman or a master strategist, or simply as a caricature. Now, since you wrote that book, we’ve had a full-scale and illegal invasion of Ukraine. There’s been the Prigozhin mutiny, there’s been deeper sanctions, and a much more openly militarised Russian state. And my sense is that analysts are still getting this wrong, and they’re still swinging between overestimating Putin’s omnipotence and underestimating the system he sits atop.

[00:03:46] Dominic Bowen: How do you see Putin and the Russian state today, at the beginning of 2026?

[00:03:51] Mark Galeotti: Yes, I mean, it’s a good question. Look, this is the problem. If you look at so much Western analysis — in fact, never mind Putin, it’s also about Russia — that one minute Russia is teetering on the edge of collapse and the next it’s some existential military threat that may not be able to win a war in Ukraine, but is somehow going to roll its tanks right up to the English Channel. So there is this sort of strange dissonance. And I think particularly with Putin — and I say this as someone who has watched Putin throughout his career, really from before he was president at the end of 1999 — nonetheless, he is very dull in so many ways, and in part that’s his strength.

[00:04:26] Mark Galeotti: He is this kind of grey blur that everyone can overlay their own fears and expectations on. But in fact, he is a man who got very lucky. Yes, he has some talents and skills, particularly in terms of elite management, but in so many ways he’s rather limited and increasingly isolated from the realities of his own country. So, in some ways, Russia itself reflects this. On the one hand, even after four years of bloody and grinding war, it’s still a relatively dynamic nation.

[00:04:57] Mark Galeotti: It’s a modern, institutionalised country that just happens to have this almost medieval court sitting on top of it, where power is defined by your proximity to Putin. And for that reason there is this constant tussle between autocracy and technocracy. There are a lot of smart Russians, not least people like the Chair of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, who are managing this system surprisingly well, considering all the pressures on it. And often they are simply having to deal with whichever moronic policy comes from Putin or Putin’s cronies, or whatever bit of corrupt self-enrichment they’re engaged in. So it’s this odd country.

[00:05:36] Mark Galeotti: It’s not near collapse; it is slowly sliding into stagnation at the moment. It is still having to spend more than it should on defence and the military — something like 40% of the federal budget. It is not sustainable in the long term, but it’s not about to run out of money any time soon. And in so many ways it’s actually sliding back. The first two terms of Putin’s career were actually surprisingly successful, but all of those successes are being cannibalised now in the name of war.

[00:06:05] Mark Galeotti: And the way I tend to formulate it is that both Ukraine and Russia are losing, but the Ukrainians might perhaps be losing a little more quickly.

[00:06:12] Dominic Bowen: And so, if we continue just to look at Putin a little bit more, is he just a man? Is there a system behind him? What would the world look like? I think it was quite interesting that in 2022 there was lots of debate about whether someone would try to assassinate Putin, and what would that look like. Would Russia fragment into 72 different smaller states? What’s your opinion on a post-Putin world? Is it something we should be considering? And if so, what would it look like?

[00:06:34] Mark Galeotti: Well, we certainly should be considering it. Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to happen any time soon. I mean, he is 73, and despite the periodic claims that he’s got Parkinson’s, he’s got leprosy, he’s got blood cancer — invariably saying that he’ll be dead within six months — well, the first time I heard that rumour was back in 2014. Twelve years later, he’s still there. Given that he has the best medical care available to him, he may well be around for a while.

[00:07:00] Mark Galeotti: Assassination would be difficult. There is a massive security apparatus around him, and likewise a coup. Impossible? No, but at the moment very, very unlikely. But still, he will go.

[00:07:11] Mark Galeotti: The thing is that historians, I think, are going to see Putin as a transitional figure, the last gasp of Homo Sovieticus, the Soviet generation, and there is a system around him. But the point is, because it’s not institutionalised — I’ve called it an adhocracy — it’s very much based on what the boss wants you to do today. But the point is that may well not be what the boss wanted you to do yesterday, and it will be different tomorrow. I think that we’re actually going to see Russia survive.

[00:07:38] Mark Galeotti: It’s not going to break apart. There’s really no evidence of that kind of secessionist movement, except in the predominantly Muslim regions in the North Caucasus. Frankly, most Russians would be delighted to see them go because they see them as both a security risk and a drain on their treasury. But apart from that, look, I think that actually what we will see is a resurgence of the technocracy. If one looks at the next political generation down — the ones who are frankly getting increasingly impatient, looking at their watches and wondering when it’s going to be their time in power —

[00:08:05] Mark Galeotti: these people are essentially opportunist kleptocrats. Sure, they may well be patriots or whatever, but essentially what they want is a Russia that is stable, but above all the chance to steal on an industrial scale and to enjoy that theft safely. And so I think what we’ll see is, in some ways, a slide back to something quite familiar, almost a bit like the Russia of early Putinism. And in that case, the new Russia becomes perhaps a more amenable partner to deal with in the future, because they won’t be looking for a war with the West. If nothing else, if you steal on that scale, you want to be able to enjoy all the perks of life.

[00:08:42] Mark Galeotti: And Dubai and Shanghai are all very well, but you’re used to thinking of London, Paris, Milan, and New York as your playgrounds. I think that we will see not necessarily a more democratic Russia, but certainly a more stable and more recognisable one.

[00:08:56] Dominic Bowen: And one of the most useful threads in your work is that you don’t just treat crime, intelligence, and politics as separate silos. Actually, yesterday I was travelling — probably why I’ve got no voice today. I was speaking all day to a large company, several times during the day, and one of the things I was talking about was the geopolitical and strategic threats and how the international is now local, and these hybrid threats that we talk about are linked to organised crime and they’re linked to the same risks that businesses are facing. And you show how criminality is not just a side story to power; it’s often really woven into how policy and power are exercised and how they’re protected. We see that in Venezuela and with extremist groups in Africa partnering with drug cartels in Europe.

[00:09:34] Dominic Bowen: And you spoke about the opportunistic kleptocrats and the next generation of Russian leaders. If you had to explain today’s Russia, the system today, to a business leader or policymaker in Europe, is it more useful to think of Russia as a state using criminals, or a state captured by criminals, or maybe something more hybrid or more dangerous than either of those labels actually suggests?

[00:09:56] Mark Galeotti: So much of it revolves around this term that’s often used for Russia, “a mafia state”, which I don’t really like. I mean, I understand it works great for headlines, but it implies that either the state controls the gangsters or the gangsters control the state. And neither of those is quite true. What we actually have are these transactional deals, these understandings, that create networks which tend to blend the criminal, the political, the security apparatus, and the police, and so forth. So, yes, I think this is a useful way to see it here, because when it comes down to it, in many ways Russia is, in these terms, not that different from what we saw in Japan, or indeed in Italy, right after the Second World War, which took decades to work their way through, insofar as there is a political elite who are in charge, but nonetheless see all kinds of good reasons to make deals with criminals.

[00:10:51] Mark Galeotti: Now, in Italy and Japan, it was as much as anything else because the criminals could get out the vote. And whether it was the Christian Democrats in Italy or the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, to a large degree it was handy to have an outsourced instrument: the people who could beat up your political opposition, the people who could ensure that the votes got cast the right way, and so forth. And in return, maybe you pushed some government contracts in the way of certain individuals, but often you simply turned a blind eye. And I think that’s often the situation that we have seen historically in Russia. The real problem is that, with the war in Ukraine from 2022 onwards, we have seen Russia move into much more of a war-fighting mode generally.

[00:11:30] Mark Galeotti: And what was once, you might say, a fairly clear arrangement — which is essentially that Putin had a social contract with organised crime that basically said, look, as long as you don’t do anything that’s embarrassing to the state, that looks like a challenge to the state, then that’s fine. I remember years back, at the time when Putin — who, after all, no one really knew; he was just this very obscure figure, the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, and then an official for one year, head of the Federal Security Service — but no one really knew him, and suddenly he was Prime Minister and then he was Acting President and standing for election. At the time he very much stood on a law-and-order platform. And I remember talking to one of the traditional mafia godfathers of Russia who, some years later, was recounting how at that time he had under his bed a packed suitcase with documents and money and all the other things he would need so that, if he got a tip-off from one of his people in the prosecutor’s office or the police that they were going to come after him, he could just grab that and make for the airport.

[00:12:28] Mark Galeotti: Now, he never had to use that suitcase. There were a lot of people who thought that Putin would actually crack down on organised crime, but then they realised that in fact he didn’t really have a problem with it. And another anecdote, again from the same sort of time: a police officer in Moscow who said that, really, in that first year of Putin — 2000 — his job was basically arranging sit-downs with various mafia figures in Moscow to lay out to them the new rules of the game: what they could do, what they couldn’t do. If you crossed one of these red lines, then the state would regard you as a challenge and it would throw everything at you. And for a long time the gangsters were willing to accept these rules.

[00:13:05] Mark Galeotti: Essentially it was a social contract. Especially since 2022, we’ve seen the state turning more and more to organised crime as an instrument, as a sanctions-busting instrument, to reach out and carry out assassinations of people it regards as traitors abroad, as a way of gathering intelligence, particularly now that so many of their proper, card-carrying spies have been expelled from embassies. So they look to proxies. And if we think of the fire — the arson attack against Ukrainian-owned warehouses in Leyton, in London — again, just carried out by low-level thugs who’d been recruited online and sent to do it.

[00:13:43] Mark Galeotti: And this is the problem, this is the risk — and I’ll climb off my soapbox in a moment — the more the state relies on organised crime as an instrument, this is a transactional relationship. It has to give it things. We know, for example, that there are gangs that are smuggling drugs and people and other things out of Russia who are basically given a free pass through Russia’s border controls, so long as, on the way back, they are bringing in goods that the state wants smuggled in to break sanctions. So, the more this relationship continues, the harder it becomes to draw that line between state and crime, between underworld and upper world, and it’s harder and harder to say exactly who is in charge. Ultimately, still, the state is the biggest gang in town, but nonetheless it is much less clear than it was, say, five years ago.

[00:14:37] Dominic Bowen: It’ll be very interesting to see if Putin regrets that in the next few years. But certainly one thing that Putin, I think, has badly misread is Western resolve and cohesion. He assumed sanctions and support for Kyiv would be limited and easily weathered. This is not to mention the amazing resolve and determination of the Ukrainians resisting Russia’s invasion. I know I was in Ukraine in January and February 2022, just before Russia invaded. I was actually in Avdiivka and Kramatorsk and Mariupol. And one of my biggest fears was how strong Europe’s resolve would be when Russia eventually invaded. And Putin badly misread that. But similarly, Russia’s illegal invasion really exposed serious structural weaknesses within the Russian armed forces, including corruption, pure rot, poor inter-agency coordination and leadership, and just this habit of telling the boss what he wants to hear. So I continue to wonder — and I haven’t heard a good answer, and I’m hoping you’ve got it, Mark — how could Putin, a former intelligence officer, get the intelligence about Ukraine, about the West, and about his own military just so wrong?

[00:15:46] Mark Galeotti: Well, first of all, let’s just dwell on that point about Putin as a former intelligence officer, because he was indeed in the KGB. What we also know, though, is he wasn’t a very good one. We’ve actually had access to some of his personnel records that did come out, and it’s clear he was — I mean, let’s call him a solid B-minus. He was fine. There was nothing wrong with him, but he was never in the elite. He had this vision of himself as going in and becoming one of these James Bond-type figures. This is a guy who, as a kid, grew up on a diet of these Soviet films about cunning Soviet agents and things. He didn’t get into the foreign intelligence service side of the KGB. At first, he was basically just watching dissidents.

[00:16:35] Mark Galeotti: Eventually he did, because of his command of German, when they were looking for German speakers. But even then, he wasn’t actually recruiting agents; he was basically just running files in Dresden. He was much less Bond and much more Miss Moneypenny. He was in a position which needed to have someone with a high security rating, but that was it. He’s more than anything else, I would say, an intelligence fanboy. He still likes to think of himself as one, but he never was very good. So, on the one hand, I don’t think he has actually demonstrated a particularly good understanding of how intelligence tradecraft works and, particularly, the pathologies of the intelligence briefing process. But the other thing is, look, I think Putin has particularly suffered from one of these problems that so many authoritarian leaders do.

[00:17:19] Mark Galeotti: Over time, you start off knowing that you don’t know very much, eager to learn, with a circle of people who often will have different perspectives and are willing to challenge you, and you’re willing to travel around the country to get a sense of what’s what. But over time, you get lazy, you get complacent, you get less tolerant of people telling you that you’re wrong, and you encourage and promote those who don’t tell you what you need to know, but what you want to hear. And that’s clearly happened to Putin. I mean, there was this extraordinary televised meeting of his Security Council a few days before the invasion, in which we saw Dmitry Kozak, who was his point man in terms of negotiations with Ukraine, clearly trying to say that we really needed to let the negotiations continue. Putin shut him down. Even Nikolai Patrushev, the most hawkish of his people and his de facto national security adviser — and a man who, unfortunately, although he’s no longer in the same position as Secretary of the Security Council, scared the bejesus out of me because he really was more dangerous in many ways than Putin even — he was saying, look, let’s just give it some time.

[00:18:39] Mark Galeotti: But the point is, Putin didn’t want to hear that. He shut down any attempt to question. He basically hectored and bullied and demanded that people, in essence, reinforce his own bizarrely skewed worldview about Ukraine not being a real country, about the West not being willing to do anything, and that essentially Ukrainians would just roll over at any attempt to impose a puppet regime. So this is the thing: Putin has created the machine that betrayed him.

[00:19:04] Dominic Bowen: And in that respect he can blame no one but himself. So, yes, he made it clear what he wanted to hear. He has good intelligence-gathering capacities within the Russian state, some very smart analysts who understand Europe, who understand the West, who understand Ukraine, but none of the critical material makes its way to him. And this is a process that’s been taking place over years. I remember, trying to think, maybe 2015 or 2016, I was in Moscow having tea with a relatively recently retired Russian spy.

[00:19:37] Mark Galeotti: And even he lamented, look, we’ve learned you do not bring bad news to the Tsar’s table. In other words, you don’t try and tell Putin what he doesn’t want to hear. So in this respect, he had this fantasy notion of the war, and a lot of people must have known perfectly well that it wasn’t going to work out that way, or that if you were going to invade Ukraine you had to go about it a different way, with different levels of resources, but no one could or would actually tell him, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, we need to think again.”

[00:20:11] Dominic Bowen: I do recall that, and I remember just thinking that it had to be staged. There was something wrong, because I remember that I think it was 21 February, just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when Putin humiliated the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It was just absolutely startling. He’s usually a very polished speaker, very much a Kremlin insider, but just the nervousness that he had, and then Putin just absolutely embarrassing him. And I think he said something like, “Speak plainly. No negotiations. Are you in favour or not?” And then he just told him to go back to your seat. I mean, it was absolutely humiliating, but just strange. And you had Putin at one end, and then you had all the advisers at the other end looking like naughty children who were about to be sent off to the firing squad. It was very, very strange.

[00:20:59] Mark Galeotti: It was strange, but precisely because, as you said, it felt staged. I think in some ways that’s the whole point. The reason it was so strange was that this was one of those rare times when we actually got an unstaged look at what things are like inside that court, as everyone desperately and nervously tiptoes round the boss and tries to guess. Because often this is the thing: he clearly hadn’t told them what he wanted to hear. He was forcing them, King Lear-like, into a position in which they had to guess what he wanted to hear and say it to him. And when they failed to guess right, exactly, he would hector and berate them. I mean, it would take a hell of a lot to make me feel sorry for this collection of blackguards and bureaucrats, but nonetheless it came pretty damn close.

[00:21:52] Dominic Bowen: I mean, just the level of, I guess, arrogance and narcissism from Putin, because nevertheless those people are all very senior and have quite strong connections. And you’d have to be fairly confident that when they walk out of the room, they don’t all look at each other and say, “A coup? Is it time for a coup yet, before it’s one of us?” But interestingly, when we talk about coups and Russian history, your books from 2024, Putin’s Wars, but also Forged in War, trace these longer historical roots of Russian state behaviour. And I wonder, when it comes to today’s political warfare, how much this reflects those deeper Soviet and post-Soviet habits of statecraft. So what do we need to understand, and what are we misunderstanding, when we look at Putin’s relationship with the Soviet Union and those historical analogies? What are we misunderstanding there, and what do we need to know?

[00:22:45] Mark Galeotti: Yes, I mean, I’m glad this is a four-hour podcast, which will allow me to properly dig into the details here. No, I mean, I think the thing is, for me, as someone who is a professional historian, it so annoys me that Putin himself clearly regards himself as something of a historian. He loves drawing on these historical parallels and, indeed, drawing them around himself. He’s portrayed himself as everything from a modern-day Peter the Great onwards, and he clearly is obsessed by this notion of his historic legacy and how he will go down in history. But the point is he doesn’t really understand Russian history well, so I claim from my Olympian ivory tower.

[00:23:24] Mark Galeotti: And I think one of the key things is, look, Putin is not trying to recreate the Soviet Union. If he wanted to do that, then why isn’t he looking at, for example, Central Asia, where he certainly would have had a chance? Nor, actually, is he trying to restore the Tsarist empire. It’s more that he actually believes that Russia is a great power, and a great power has a right to a sphere of influence which includes, for example, countries like Ukraine. He has this very nineteenth-century notion of what geopolitics is all about: a handful of great powers, and the only question for every other country is essentially which great power actually controls you. And he sees what’s going on in Ukraine not as it really is — a struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty — but actually as a tussle between Russia and the West for who gets to run Ukraine.

[00:24:41] Mark Galeotti: But in terms of the wider historical picture, look, Russia has a history which really has been shaped by war. Most countries have, to a degree, but in Russia it’s particularly stark. And these have often been wars that have been fought against what would seem to be more powerful antagonists. Their forces are larger, they are more technologically advanced, they have deeper economic wellsprings of support, whatever else. And this has really led to two things that I think are relevant today. And it is breaking my heart to summarise basically my whole book, Forged in War, in five minutes, but there you go. Your listeners can always go out and buy it, he said, with a bit of naked advertising. First of all, a sense that if Russia knows it’s going to get involved in a conflict, then maybe it ought actually to start that conflict so that it can determine the timeframe.

[00:25:08] Mark Galeotti: And in some ways this is just a geopolitical equivalent of something that Putin himself said in his memoirs, something that he learned running with street gangs in what was then still Leningrad: if you’re going to get into a fight, you throw the first punch. But also, when you are struggling against a more powerful nation or bloc of nations, you probably have to fight asymmetrically. You don’t want to be fighting in the fields and in the areas where they are strongest; you want to move the battle to where they might be more vulnerable. And look, we know with Napoleon, when he marched forward, it was in a way about using Russia’s size and stranding him in Moscow until he had to withdraw, while you essentially burn the fields and poison the wells around him so that he can’t fight that way. It’s not about meeting this pre-eminent genius of war on the battlefield, on his terms, and breaking him. It’s finding a way whereby you can use your own strengths against him.

[00:26:24] Mark Galeotti: Well, likewise, what we see now — I mean, the Russians, I think, have no intention of a military conflict with NATO, which is still the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen. But instead they’ve identified that our weakness — which is also arguably our strength — is precisely that we’re a coalition of democracies with all sorts of disagreements within and between our countries. And the Russians can do what they can to try to get a crowbar into some of those fault lines and leave them open as much as possible in order essentially to paralyse us, to distract us, and to divert us so that we can’t, for example, muster the unity to continue supporting Ukraine, and just generally speaking that we become that much more vulnerable to Russian pressure.

[00:27:07] Dominic Bowen: And I wonder if we take it a little bit closer. I mean, one of the things that I still find most astonishing, and one of the most astonishing episodes in recent Russian politics, was the Prigozhin affair. And I think there are so many different aspects: the fact that Prigozhin was able to take over military command posts and cities; he was able to send his Wagner column up the M4 motorway towards Moscow; and he really exposed how thin parts of the Putin regime’s immediate response really were. And as you and many others have argued, it didn’t look like a conventional coup attempt, but much more some sort of high-risk coercive gamble that ultimately spiralled into something much bigger. But the fact that Prigozhin got so far, then he suddenly stopped, but then he later returned to Russia, despite the obvious danger, still feels like one of the clearest windows into how Putin’s system actually works. It’s opaque, it’s improvised, and ultimately it’s very lethal. But Prigozhin’s — I think it was June 2023 — mutiny had lasted only about 24 hours. He went to Belarus, along with many of his soldiers, and then he was killed in a mysterious plane crash two months later. And I just wonder how he was able to get so extraordinarily close to the capital, then stop, seemingly unexplained, but then return despite the obvious personal risks. So I’m keen to hear your views, Mark, about what explains those three things: how he got so far, why he chose not to press on, and ultimately why he behaved as though he could survive when no one thought he could.

[00:28:43] Mark Galeotti: Yes, I mean, look, this was, as you say, not a coup, or even an attempted coup. This was something that actually, again from a historical perspective, often looked like the mercenary companies that were so dominant in Europe in the late medieval era and the Renaissance. For them, I think what happened would have been quite familiar: this kind of coercive renegotiation that, when it comes to a point where you actually want to renegotiate your contract, you turn to your paymasters and you just sort of show some muscle, flash a bit of leg, and hope that you can persuade them your way. I mean, this was Prigozhin’s last gasp to try to enlist Putin to support him in a struggle that Prigozhin was having with Defence Minister Shoigu, who was a much more competent political operator and had outflanked Prigozhin at every turn. And also, look, this is Prigozhin, a product of what’s known as the Zone, the Russian prison camp system, who very much stuck with the very macho code of the Zone, one of which is that you never back down.

[00:29:43] Mark Galeotti: If you back down once, you’re going to be backing down forever. And Prigozhin had never really faced a defeat in a tough struggle with another rival. He’d always somehow managed to prevail. But now he was losing against Shoigu, and I think he just felt he had to go all in to try to win it. But yes, the fascinating thing is you had this column of about 3,400 troops heading up the motorway towards Moscow. Clearly that wasn’t going to take Moscow — 3,000 troops are not going to take Moscow — but nonetheless, symbolically, that they got as far as they did. And for me, the most striking thing was precisely the degree to which pretty much everyone was just waiting to see what happened. I mean, one of the key internal security forces is the so-called National Guard, Rosgvardiya, which is controlled by one of Putin’s former bodyguards, absolute loyalist General Viktor Zolotov. And as I understand it, on that crucial Saturday of the whole mutiny, Zolotov was burning up the phones, trying to get in touch with commanders of the National Guard along the route of march to get them to do something — break a bridge, barricade the road, whatever it took.

[00:30:54] Mark Galeotti: And those commanders were doing everything they possibly could to avoid being contactable by phone. So I’m sure there were a lot of cell phones getting eaten by dogs or unexpectedly running out of charge or whatever else, because people wanted to avoid being given direct orders that they would either have to obey or openly disobey. Better just to stay in limbo. And we’ve seen this before. Back in 1991, hardliners staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader, and on that first day of the coup there were record levels of sickness within the Soviet police force, as everyone thought, “Well, I don’t know, I don’t like this coup. It might succeed, it might not. So why don’t I call in sick today, give it a day, and just see what happens?” And then by day two the coup was clearly already beginning to splutter out, and therefore they suddenly acquired the bravery to come out against it. So this is really what happened. And I think it was quite a salutary blow, and quite how much Putin has fully internalised it, it’s hard to know.

[00:32:03] Mark Galeotti: But nonetheless it is clearly understood that the old assumptions — that if nothing else the security apparatus was rock-solidly behind Putin — now have to be questioned. Not to say that they’re going to turn against him, but if there is some kind of crisis, some black swan event, or whatever it could well be, there may be a lot of people who just think, “Let’s just see what happens.” And I think that, for me, is the most lasting legacy of the Prigozhin mutiny. And it’s probably one of the reasons why Prigozhin was killed. I mean, Prigozhin clearly thought that he’d made a deal with Putin, because what happened was he launches his mutiny and at first Putin, as is usually the case, doesn’t know what to do. Putin’s not a good man in a crisis. He doesn’t like taking risks, he doesn’t like feeling that he’s being rushed into anything. And so actually this mutiny went on longer than it might have.

[00:32:50] Mark Galeotti: Once Putin did openly come out and call this treachery and so forth, that’s when Prigozhin knew the jig was up. He had to strike and achieve something before Putin was forced to come off the fence. So once he did, Prigozhin was then trying to make a deal, and therefore a lot of this was going on while, behind the scenes, Prigozhin was trying to make a deal and basically said, “I’m sorry, how can I make it up to you?” And he clearly thought he had won himself at least a year to demonstrate his continued loyalty and utility to Putin, which is why he was still travelling back and forth, rather than simply changing his name and hiding in a small shed somewhere in Argentina or whatever. But the point is, it seems to be that, having made this deal on over-generous terms — because, again, Putin just wanted this problem to go away — afterwards there were people coming up to him and saying, “Come on, you look weak, this is not doing you any good. You can’t just let this continue.” And that’s when he decided to, shall we say, renegotiate his deal with Prigozhin by means of a bomb stuck in Prigozhin’s private plane.

[00:34:12] Mark Galeotti: But the point is, having to kill Prigozhin like that after he’d made a deal with him actually made Putin still look weak, because it was the first time he’d actually broken a deal with an insolent subordinate. So, yes, I think you’re absolutely right. The whole Prigozhin mutiny is not just a bizarre and fascinating example in itself; I think it really shows that Putin’s control over his own elite is wavering a bit. Certainly not as sure as it used to be. And the degree to which everyone is a self-interested political entrepreneur — they are absolutely rock-solidly behind Putin, so long as it is, A, necessary and, B, profitable. When those things change, so do their loyalties.

[00:34:46] Dominic Bowen: Yes, loyalty — “I’ll stand behind you 100% of the time when it works for me” — is a unique sort of loyalty. But you’ve long pushed people to move beyond what you call the lazy use of the term “hybrid war”, instead encouraging people to consider “political war” as a much more useful term to understand what Russia is doing against the West, and in Europe in particular. This is something that I speak a lot about to executive teams and business leaders and government agencies across Europe. It’s something that everyone is very, very interested in, about the threats that they have to deal with because of this ongoing hybrid warfare activity. When you speak to people, what are the most important components of this Russian political warfare today that you think governments and corporations are still failing to properly understand and prepare for?

[00:35:41] Mark Galeotti: I think two things. One of them is intent and one of them is method. If we look at intent, again there tends to be an assumption. We try to look back for case studies and you think of, say, Crimea, the annexation of Crimea, which was a classic hybrid warfare operation in many, many ways, in that it started with disinformation and political subversion and so forth. And then you have the little green men — the commandos without insignia — popping up and claiming to be just local self-defence forces. And then only later do we actually have the mass inflow of Russian military materiel and soldiers. That was an example of this kind of operation, but it is not the standard trajectory. And the trouble is that now there are often those people who assume, well, if we see disinformation, when are the little green men going to pop up? And that’s not the way the Russians think.

[00:36:34] Mark Galeotti: The Russians are much more holistic in their sense of security and their sense of other people’s insecurity. They are effects-based. They think, well, what do we want to achieve? And then what are the best means at our disposal to achieve that? And sometimes, sure, the best means at their disposal will be a parachute regiment, but much of the time actually the best means at their disposal will be cyber-attacks or disinformation or finding some ways of supporting some particularly divisive political actors or movements. But they don’t really care which it is. They simply look at the toolbox and choose the best tool. And to that end, in effect, we create our own threat surface. The Russians have no predisposition to say, well, we like to use cyber-attacks against critical national infrastructure rather than supporting political movements. They don’t care. They are agnostic in that respect. By deciding or defining what are going to be our weak points, we shape how the Russians operate.

[00:37:23] Mark Galeotti: So one of my concerns is precisely that we have a tendency to get enthused by one particular type of threat at any one time, and boom, we dive on that. We have to have a task force, we bring in consultants, we spend money, and while we do that we often neglect the others. We don’t tend to red-team and think, well, okay, fine, so while we’re closing this particular stable door, how many others are we leaving unbolted and open? And this applies to corporates, but I would suggest it applies even more sharply to governments, which have a tendency to be even more constrained by bureaucratic institutions and suchlike. I mean, for example, at the moment Europe is rearming, and that’s overdue and necessary because, although I don’t believe for a moment that Putin has military ambitions to attack NATO, it makes sense because, conceivably, I could be wrong, but also he could change his mind. We don’t want to create that sense of temptation. And also, we don’t know who’s going to follow Putin. So in that context, fine, we are.

[00:38:51] Mark Galeotti: But at the same time, my big concern is that we are neglecting so many of the other potential points of vulnerability that we are not, for example, investing enough in our intelligence and counter-intelligence services. For the cost of one F-35 fighter — which, anyway, I have my concerns about, but that’s a whole other issue — you could dump that amount of money into an intelligence service and it could have a transformative impact. We don’t have a tendency to think across these particular areas. Policing — I mean, basic policing — is often actually something that allows people to feel that not only is the government concerned about them, but also viable enough to protect them. If people think that their government is essentially hostage to alien ideologies or just simply unable to look after them, they will look to the populists who are claiming, “Ah, we can protect you.” And if one looks at the rise of populist parties, not all of which, but some of which, are — I wouldn’t say pro-Kremlin — but certainly opposed to supporting Ukraine, well, that’s part of the process. Even just basic issues like the sense of coherence within societies.

[00:40:19] Mark Galeotti: Because what the Russians do — they have no magic mind-control powers with their disinformation — but what they do is they identify existing communities of thought that are unhappy with the status quo and encourage them. And because Putin’s Russia is a post-ideological one, it doesn’t really have any ideology beyond a sort of inchoate Russian nationalism, it can support everyone. It can support nationalists and separatists in America; it can support Black Lives Matter and the National Rifle Association at the same time. It doesn’t care. Just as long as people are usefully disruptive, it can support them. So I think it’s this issue of the holistic nature of the challenge, and the fact that it will naturally head towards our vulnerabilities, which I don’t think is properly picked up. We have a tendency to identify a vulnerability and get obsessed by that and neglect the others.

[00:40:59] Dominic Bowen: Yes, I think you’re totally right. A lot of the boardrooms and executive teams, and even government agencies that I work with, still separate geopolitics from security, from compliance, from financial crime, even though, as you’ve said, Russia systematically blurs those boundaries. And I think a lot of the things that you work on, and other scholars have been working on, show that coercion can arrive through corruption, intermediaries, data exposure, commercial ties, energy dependence, diaspora pressure, rather than just a single event or a single line of operation. And so I wonder, how do we mitigate this? If you’re briefing a multinational CEO, what are the top two or three risks and issues that you think they really should be looking at, that they’re currently underestimating when they’re doing their corporate planning and their risk assessment?

[00:41:48] Mark Galeotti: Well, I will start by actually slightly subverting the question and saying it’s not a specific risk, but it’s actually about red-teaming. It’s about trying to think, because the Russians can do often very clumsy, ugly, and stupid things. However, they also can be very smart. And I think often the issue is, well, whether it’s a government planning on introducing a new law or a policy, or whether it’s a corporation looking at where it’s going to invest its resources, have people try to think: what would some smart, morally bankrupt individuals identify as the potential opportunities that throws up for them? Whether it’s, for example — again, to give first a government example — the mass expulsion of Russian agents in embassies that took place through 2022 and 2023. Very useful to kick out all these known intelligence officers who were there as second cultural attaché or whatever else. But the point is, we knew that the intelligence agencies weren’t simply going to say, “Oh well, it was nice while it lasted, we can’t do any more spying.” Of course they were going to look for new ways of doing it, and particularly they turned to proxies, recruiting local sympathisers or criminals or whatever to carry out various acts across Europe subsequently.

[00:43:12] Mark Galeotti: We should have thought about that. We should have realised that the Russians were going to try to find ways around not having their own officers on the ground. So we should prepare. So basically, red-team. Always think about, okay, well, how can this be used? Because that gives you that sense in advance. Secondly, appreciate the degree to which the Russian state outsources. I mean, for example, if we think of various ransomware attacks, there’s very little evidence that actually the Kremlin tells criminals, “Go and carry out a ransomware attack against this company, this National Health Service provider, or whatever.” Rather, what they have made clear is, look, if you carry out attacks against the West, we are not going to do anything to investigate or prosecute that. Carry out an attack against a Russian target, or within our own allies, then you may well be in trouble. But hey, with the West, knock yourself out. So it’s not actually that the Russian state is putting resources in. What they’re actually doing is simply encouraging a whole variety of what you could think of as criminal entrepreneurs to try their hand.

[00:44:18] Mark Galeotti: So again, what that tends to mean is the threat is much more diffuse than we think. Again, there is often this assumption that the threat from Russia is a single great white shark, one mighty predator. In fact, it’s a whole shoal of piranhas — individually each much less impressive and dramatic — but the point is that while you’re busy dealing with one, the rest of the shoal is eating the flesh off your back. So anticipate that you will have a very varied threat pattern. And finally, there is an area that the Russians have not yet fully exploited, but there are a few indications that they are beginning to look more at: precisely the insider threat. The disgruntled official — or, even better, the IT security technician, or whatever — basically people within systems.

[00:45:12] Mark Galeotti: And the thing is, because of social media, what we’re seeing is the Russians beginning to use AI to massively trawl social media and try to correlate the signs that suggest that someone is disgruntled and may be open to recruitment. So that, for example, the person who on one social messaging board posts about how life is hard because they’re having to work too much and they’re not getting enough money, and somewhere else they maybe post something that has some kind of interesting — and I’m using “interesting” in inverted commas — political view, and so on. Put all that lot together and you can begin to create a profile terrifyingly quickly. And often this is one of the areas in which AI does seem to work terrifyingly accurately. So I think what we can anticipate is a lot more micro-targeting of disgruntled employees to be used as potential vulnerable points in the future.

[00:46:14] Dominic Bowen: I think you’re spot on, Mark. I think you’re exactly right there, and I think that’s something we really need to be paying a lot of attention to. And you argue that there is less of a Russian master plan or a great white shark, and more of this broader drive to weaken NATO and weaken the European Union. The DHL incendiary package plot was one Russian state-linked sabotage operation back in the summer of 2024. And for those who don’t remember it, it was basically using parcel services, notably DHL and DPD, to move small explosive incendiary devices through European logistics hubs, apparently as test runs for an attack on transatlantic cargo flights. And so I wonder if this cargo fire plot marks a new phase, or simply just public confirmation of something that was already underway, and how this compares with underwater cable incidents in the Baltic Sea and wider sabotage campaigns across Europe. Do you see this as a step on the escalation ladder by Russia against the West, or is this just purely opportunistic? And if it is just opportunistic experimentation, what is the objective?

[00:47:23] Mark Galeotti: I mean, I think the objective is clearly ultimately to begin to create political pressure on Europe to back away from challenging Russia and its assertive campaign, particularly in terms of supporting Ukraine. The thing is that, on one level, one could think this campaign is extraordinarily diffuse and often pretty trivial. So you burn down a shopping centre here in Poland, and you place some small incendiary devices within the cargo holds or warehouses of courier firms, and you burn down some warehouses in London. And none of these, one would imagine, would shift the needle at all.

[00:48:10] Mark Galeotti: However, I would say that the answer is really to be found in three things. One is that the Russian intelligence apparatus is quite varied and often quite competitive. So you have a whole variety not just of different institutions, but also of different local directorates and the like, all trying to demonstrate to the boss that they are active and effective. And in a way, often — and we see this — in some ways one could just as easily point to the regular claims at the moment about how many targets in Iran have been hit by US activity. Often activity is a substitute for impact. So just by saying, “Look, we’ve done all these various things”, that makes it sound as if you’re being successful, even if it’s not really moving anything.

[00:48:47] Mark Galeotti: Secondly, I think some of these are targets that are designed to develop campaigns that can be disproportionately expensive. If, for example, we start getting worried about an escalating campaign of incendiary devices within parcels, there’s going to have to be a much greater effort put into screening them. What’s that going to mean? Huge delays, a lot of outlay on security personnel and scanning devices. What if they start moving to containers? Think of the microscopic proportion of container traffic which is actually scanned, and if we have to increase that, then the fractional costs added onto shipping — which then obviously get transferred onto the customer as well as the supplier — all of these things. There are ways in which actually you can turn our desperate attempts to create frictionless and highly efficient means of moving goods around into a vulnerability.

[00:50:09] Mark Galeotti: But the final point I’d make is I think part of the reason for this very diffuse campaign is because we are still seeing the Russians in what one could call the beta-testing phase of their campaign: that they have identified that actually globalisation gives them new opportunities to cause mischief for us. And they’re still testing things out, because we see almost that there’s a pulse of activity and then there tends to be a pause, and then another pulse. Now, again, partly that’s because of operational reasons — how long it takes to set up operations and the like — but I think it is also precisely that, to put it in very corporate terms, they carry out a spate of operations and then they stop to have their lessons learned, and then they try a few more things and try and see. Because I think in part they’re working out. We saw, for example, that there were some individual antisemitic attacks which were then massively amplified through disinformation campaigns. They’re also looking at how they can connect different aspects of their campaign together.

[00:50:48] Mark Galeotti: So my concern is that what we are seeing is them refining their campaign, which means that we could conceivably see, in one month, six months, two years — who knows? — something much more coordinated and much more effective, because they will have sat down and actually decided, “This is how we do this right.”

[00:51:10] Dominic Bowen: No, thanks for explaining that, Mark. And I just wonder, in the last 30 seconds, when you look around the world, what are the international risks that concern you the most?

[00:51:19] Mark Galeotti: I mean, I think that for me, obviously the big looming one is climate change, but because it’s big and looming and too scary, it’s so easy for us not to think about it too much. No, I think for me it is very much about the speed of technological innovation. It’s AI, it’s quantum computing, all of these things which actually are taking control of the security environment out of our hands. More than anything else, I think it is the degree to which we will stop being people who can predict security threats and just end up being the chroniclers of the security threats which have unfolded. That’s not a very comfortable environment in which to be.

[00:51:58] Dominic Bowen: I hope you’re not right.

[00:52:00] Mark Galeotti: As do I. It’s not often you get a pundit and an academic saying, “I hope I’m wrong”, but I hope I’m wrong.

[00:52:04] Dominic Bowen: I sadly do find myself at least once a week saying, “I hope I’m wrong”, but that is the times we live in. But, Mark, thank you very much for your time, and thank you very much for coming on The International Risk Podcast today.

[00:52:14] Mark Galeotti: It’s been my pleasure.

[00:52:15] Dominic Bowen: Well, that was a great conversation with Professor Mark Galeotti. His work is especially valuable and really helps us properly understand Russia as a complex, adaptive, and opportunistic actor. And we’ll link to some of Mark’s books and his articles in the show notes below, so please do have a look at those. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Edward Penrose.

[00:52:33] Dominic Bowen: I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening to The International Risk Podcast. We’ll speak again in the next couple of days.

[00:52:40] Dominic Bowen: Thank you for listening to this episode of The International Risk Podcast. For more episodes and articles, visit theinternationalriskpodcast.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Instagram for the latest updates and to ask your questions to our host, Dominic Bowen. See you next time.