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In Episode 494 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Mark Galeotti — host of In Moscow's Shadows and one of the most informed and provocative voices on modern Russia — about the war in Ukraine, the risk that it spills over into NATO's eastern flank, and the escalatory paths and deepening dependency on Beijing that will define Russia's place in the emerging global order.
The first hour takes stock of Russia's war in Ukraine, a conflict Galeotti describes as several wars happening simultaneously — a grinding battle of attrition in the Donbas, an economic war of deep strikes on refineries and critical infrastructure, and a political war that has enveloped not only the conflict's chief counterparties but every major power and regional bloc for whom this war has become the central battlefield in the emergence of a new global order. They discuss the human and economic costs of the fighting, the strategic aims of Europe's nation states and how those align with Washington's, and the fraying, increasingly uneven state of Western support, before turning to the mind of Vladimir Putin — the insecurities Galeotti places at the core of his character, his survival instincts, his narrow circle of trust, and the forces shaping his perception of how the war is going.
The second hour explores what Putin would actually need in order to end the war, why he keeps chasing a symbolic victory in the Donbas rather than the settlement presently available to him, and why his aversion to weakness is essential to making sense of his calculations. The conversation then turns to succession, what tends to follow the death or departure of a personalistic ruler, the lessons of Stalin's untimely death, and why Galeotti expects any transition of power in Moscow to reflect the will of a coalition of post-Soviet elites rather than the machinations of a younger, smarter Putin. They weigh the escalatory paths that worry European capitals, from a direct challenge to NATO's eastern flank to the campaigns of sabotage, subversion, and hybrid warfare that Galeotti considers more plausible, and close by examining how America's entanglement in the Middle East has been received in Moscow, what a hollowed-out but battle-hardened post-war Russia could mean for the world, Moscow's lopsided and deepening dependency on Beijing, the prospects for Washington to cleave Russia away from China's sphere of influence, and what all of it means for energy markets and the global economy.
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Episode Recorded on 08/11/2026
