Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine w/ Anna Arutunyan & Mark Galeotti

Join Anna Arutunyan at Pushkin House for the launch of the paperback edition of Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine. Anna will be in conversation with Mark Galeotti.

About the book

‘In her illuminating, well-researched book, Arutunyan sets out a nuanced argument about the Donbas conflict.’ — Financial Times

Focussing on Putin’s volunteer militants, Arutunyan’s reportage covers the pro-Russian insurgency and the war it sparked in eastern Ukraine.

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 book The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult 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 and The Weaponisation of Everything.