A new chill in the Moscow air?

Just a quick round-up of some recent, largely Ukraine-centred writings. What can one read into the latest Victory Day celebrations? In Deconstructing Victory Day for Russia! magazine, I suggest the answer is a country increasingly able to fight modern hybrid wars, but with a people disinclined to do so, despite the increasingly ideological tone of Putin’s Empire of the Mind, explored in Foreign Policy. This helps explain why Moscow’s War in Ukraine Relies on Local Assets, as I wrote in the Moscow Times, even if this means, as I discuss in Foreign Policy, that Ukraine’s Mob War even means that organised crime has become part of Russia’s resources, just a particularly extreme example of The New Great Gamers: covert, clueless and civilian soldiers of the new battlespace. Of course, this all contributes to the toxic mess that will be left when the conflict is over, such that one can almost Pity the Winner in Eastern Ukraine. Nonetheless, this poses a serious challenge to the security institutions of the West, as I explore in NATO and the new war: dealing with asymmetric threats before they become kinetic, and even its security and intelligence community, in that if we are to understand How MI5 and CIA Can Fight the Russian Threat, this will have to start with understanding the nature of that threat. After all, one of the key lessons of Putin, Ukraine and asymmetric politics, as I discuss in Business New Europe, is that this is Not a New Cold War: Great Game II, closer to 19thC geopolitics but fought with 21stC means and memes.