Mark Galeotti is a long-time Russia-watcher, even though Moscow banned him this year. He read history at Cambridge and took his doctorate in government at the LSE, and after a stint with the Foreign Office has been a scholar and thinktanker in New York, Moscow, Prague and Florence. He is now back in the UK as an Honorary Professor at UCL and heading the consultancy Mayak Intelligence. A prolific author, his most recent books include Putin’s Wars (Bloomsbury, 2022), The Weaponisation of Everything (Yale, 2022), We Need To Talk About Putin (Ebury, 2019) and The Vory: Russia’s super mafia (Yale, 2018).