RSI Connect: Russian Spetsnaz in the Grey Zone

Tor Bukkvoll
Senior Research Fellow
Norwegian Defence Research Establishment

Dr. Tor Bukkvoll is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. He has studied political developments in Russia and Ukraine since the mid-1990s, especially in the areas of defence and security. He speaks Russian and Ukrainian, and obtained his PhD from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Bukkvoll was a visiting research fellow at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey autumn 2019 to autumn 2020 and at the Changing Character of War program at the University of Oxford in 2008. Among his latest publications are: “Military Innovation Under Authoritarian Government - the Case of Russian Special Operations Forces”, 2015, Journal of Strategic Studies, (38) 5, pp. 602-625; “Tools of Future Wars – Russia is Entering the Precision-Strike Regime”, 2018, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, (31) 2, pp. 191-213 (with Roger N. McDermott); “Fighting on behalf of the state – the issue of pro-government militia autonomy in the Donbas war”, 2019, Post-Soviet Affairs, (35) 4, pp. 293-307; and “The Emergence of Russian Private Military Companies: A New Tool of Clandestine Warfare”, 2020, Special Operations Journal, (6) 1, pp.1-17 (with Åse Gilje Østensen).

Simon Miles
Sanford School of Public Policy
Duke University

Simon Miles is assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he teaches courses on international relations and strategy. He is the author of Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War, published in 2020 by Cornell University Press. Simon’s current project, On Guard for Peace and Socialism, is an international history of the Warsaw Pact.

David J. Kilcullen
Professor of International and Political Studies
University of New South Wales, Canberra
Professor of Practice at Arizona State University
CEO, Cordillera Applications Group 

Dr. David Kilcullen is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, and CEO of the geopolitical risk analysis firm Cordillera Applications Group. He previously founded and led the global consulting firm Caerus Associates, and the technology firm First Mile Geo (now Native). Professor Kilcullen is a leading theorist and practitioner of guerrilla and unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, with operational experience over a 25-year career with the Australian and U.S. governments as a light infantry officer, intelligence officer, policy adviser and diplomat. He served in Iraq as senior counterinsurgency advisor to U.S. General David Petraeus, then as a senior counterterrorism advisor to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and has served in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and Colombia. He is the author of five prize-winning books and numerous scholarly papers on terrorism, insurgency, urbanization and future warfare, and was awarded the 2015 Walkley Award (Australia’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) for longform journalism for his war reporting on the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He heads the Future Operations Research Group at UNSW Canberra, and teaches Masters courses on contemporary strategy, special operations, urban warfare and military innovation and adaptation at UNSW and ASU. He has led several concept-design projects for U.S. and allied governments, and currently works with national and city-level governments and commercial firms in the United States, Australia, Africa, Latin America and Europe on risk prediction, urban development, public safety, resilience and counterterrorism. He worked for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Afghanistan, and continues to work with advanced research agencies in the United States, Canada, UK and elsewhere, focused on technology, artificial intelligence and future conflict. He is a special adviser to the South Africa-based Brenthurst Foundation.

Mark Galeotti
Director, Mayak Intelligence Ltd.
Senior Associate Fellow, RUSI
Honorary Professor, University College London

Dr Mark Galeotti is an expert in Russian politics and security affairs, with a particular interest in the workings and interconnections between the intelligence agencies, organized crime, and the special forces.

An Honorary Professor at UCL SSEES, Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI, and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, he also runs his own consultancy, Mayak Intelligence. He read history at Robinson College Cambridge and took his doctorate in government at the LSE, and has since been Head of History at Keele University, Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, and a visiting professor at Rutgers-Newark (Newark, NJ), Charles University (Prague) and MGIMO (Moscow).
He served a term as a Senior Research Fellow with the British Foreign Office, and has also advised a wide range of agencies and institutions, from the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and NATO Parliamentary Assembly, to Europol and SHAPE.
He is also a prolific author, and his most recent books include We Need To Talk About Putin (Ebury, 2021), Russian Political War (Routledge, 2019), The Vory: Russia’s super mafia (Yale, 2018), and Spetsnaz: Russia’s Special Forces (Osprey, 2015). His next book, The Weaponisation of Everything, will be published by Yale University Press in 2022.