On Monday, 4 December Anna Arutunyan will discuss her recent book Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine (Hurst, 2022), now published in paperback edition, with Mark Galeotti. The book describes the background and complex dynamics between various groups and factions involved in the Russian military aggression in Ukraine: from genuine enthusiasts and political adventurers to practical businessmen and cynical mercenaries; and outlines the chaos that led to the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The Russian government’s deniable use of rogues, businessmen, enthusiasts, mercenaries and political technologists confounded policymakers as Moscow waged a covert invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Did Crimea and Donbas reveal the Kremlin’s new ‘hybrid war’ playbook? Or was Moscow itself manipulated by the very forces it had unleashed? Given the disinformation and skewing of the narrative, it is no wonder that the international community has dramatically misunderstood the very nature of this war and was unprepared for the Kremlin’s sudden and brutal escalation in 2022.
As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine risks pitting the world’s great powers against each other, Hybrid Warriors traces the trajectory of the conflict from the bottom up. Starting from the first pivotal years in the 2010s, the book draws on unique interviews, reporting from the conflict zones, and wider on-the-ground research, to reconstruct the granular relationships between civilians, non-state actors and the Kremlin that co-opted them. In the process, it speaks not just to the history of this conflict, but also to our wider understanding of how Putin’s Kremlin works and how it has prosecuted its war on Ukraine.
About the speakers
Anna Arutunyan is a Russian-American journalist, author and analyst. She covered the 2014 war for USA Today from Crimea and Donetsk, and has since analysed the conflict for the International Crisis Group. Her work has appeared in the European Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, The Spectator, and Jane’s Intelligence Review. She is the author of several books about Russia, including book The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (Interlink Books, 2014), which was published in over a dozen languages. Anna is a Global Fellow at the Kennan Institute and Associate Director at the consultancy Mayak Intelligence.
Mark Galeotti is a specialist on the Russian military and security services, an Honorary Professor at University College London and Executive Director of the UK-based consultancy Mayak Intelligence. He has been Head of History at Keele University, a Senior Research Fellow with the Foreign Office, Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, and a visiting professor at Rutgers-Newark (Newark, NJ), Charles University (Prague), the European University Institute (Florence) and MGIMO (Moscow). His latest books are Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022) and The Weaponisation of Everything (Yale, 2022).