In Moscow's Shadows 250: Moscow's Comms Playbook (And Why It's So Bad)
5/31/202641 min
A Russian drone hits a Romanian apartment block, two civilians are injured, and suddenly a stray weapon becomes a case study in how Putin’s Kremlin handles bad news. Why does the Kremlin’s crisis management default to a belligerent, self-sabotaging sequence that turns a manageable incident into a wider political problem?
It comes down to the priorities of an insecure, personalistic authoritarian system that equates any admission of failure with weakness, that regards information as a battlefield, and which lacks institutional filters between personality and policy.
Details of the 23 June event in Potsdam I mentioned are:
https://www.bundeswehr.de/de/marc-galeotti-autocracy-vs-technocracy-explaining-ukraine-war-6107930
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMark Galeotti· Host0:00
A stray Russian drone slams into an apartment block in Romania, and in the process offers us a case study in what we could consider the Kremlin's belligerent crisis management, and why Putin's Kremlin is so often its own worst enemy. [dramatic music] Hello, I'm Mark Galeotti, and welcome to my view of Russia in Moscow Shadows. This podcast of varying length, frequency, and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons like you, and also by the crisis exercise software company, Conductor. Before I start, now, in some ways this is actually a little bit misleading because there were some sort of out of sequence specials and so forth, but technically speaking, this is the two hundred and fiftieth episode of In Moscow Shadows. I literally only realized that when I was actually saving this file, and so I want to use this opportunity to thank you, who-- all of you who have been listening for whatever length of time it has been. And yeah. Well, I just hope that it continues