Dr Mark Galeotti

Mark read History at Cambridge University and Politics at the LSE, and has travelled extensively across Russia and the post-Soviet states.

He has been head of History at Keele University in the UK, academic chair of the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, head of the Centre for European Security at the Institute of International Relations Prague and a visiting professor at Rutgers-Newark (USA), MGIMO (Moscow), Charles University (Czech Republic) and the European University Institute (Italy).

A prolific author, his more than 30 books include Homo Criminalis: how crime organises the world (2025), Forged in War: a military history of Russia from its beginnings to today (2024), Downfall: Prigozhin, Putin and the new fight for the future of Russia, with Anna Arutunyan (2024), Putin’s Wars (2022), We Need to Talk about Putin (2019) and The Vory: Russia’s super mafia (2017).

He also hosts the In Moscow’s Shadows podcast on Russian politics.    

Mark is one of the world’s leading experts on Russian politics, crime and security (which are often one and the same), which may explain why Moscow banned him indefinitely in 2022.  

Mark is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

He now heads the Russia-focused consultancy Mayak Intelligence and is an honorary professor at University College London as well as a senior fellow with the Council on Geostrategy in London, and the Institute of International Relations Prague.