Introduction

Cornered like a rat, Vladimir Putin is more dangerous than ever. We want his regime to be unstable, fragile, and collapsing – but 14 months of war have shown it is remarkably resilient. We wanted the Russian people to rise up against tyranny, but more than a million fled the country instead. Analysts, politicians, and the media have been wrong about so much when it comes to Russia. What are we still getting wrong. Mark Galeotti is an author and academic – by training an historian – but in practice an interdisciplinary scholar with interests encompassing politics, criminology, security studies, international relations, and anthropology. He is a specialist in transnational and organized crime, security affairs, Russian Politics, Russian History, Intelligence and Security. Mark has a PhD in Government from LSE and has worked as a Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of History at Keele University. He is a Principal Director at Mayak Intelligence, and is an Honorary Professor, SSEES at UCL. He is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. He has also been Professor of Global Affairs at New York University from 2009 to 2016.