Link to Event Recording
Details:
Mark Galeotti will provide an assessment of the Main Operations Directorate (GUO) and explore one of the most important and least-well-understood elements of the General Staff, looking not just at its formal roles but also its culture and interests and the varied ways it influences both how the Russian military arms and fights, but also the wider policies and strategic culture which determine when and how it is deployed.
Biographies
Speaker: Mark Galeotti
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.
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