Putin has been in direct and indirect power for some 24 years now, and for most of them Russia has been at declared on undeclared war with someone. In his book Putin's Wars: from Chechnya to Ukraine, Mark Galeotti explores how and most crucially why Putin devoted so much effort and money into building his war machine, and the way that the experiences of previous wars - Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, the Donbas, Syria - led to his making the disastrous miscalculation of invading Ukraine in 2022. The new paperback edition of the book includes an additional chapter on the lessons of the war.

SPEAKER

Dr Mark Galeotti is one of the world’s leading experts on Russian crime and security (which are often one and the same), which may explain why Moscow banned him in 2022. After reading history at Cambridge, he took his doctorate in politics at the LSE. After a stint with the Foreign Office, he has been a scholar and think-tanker in London, New York, Moscow, Prague and Florence, and now heads the consultancy Mayak Intelligence and is an honorary professor at University College London and a senior fellow with RUSI and the Council on Geostrategy. His more than 30 books include Putin’s Wars (2022), The Weaponisation of Everything (2022) and We Need to Talk about Putin (2019) and the forthcoming co-authored Downfall: Prigozhin, Putin, and the new fight for the future of Russia (2024).