Keir Giles

Keir Giles (born 26 January 1968) is a British writer who is considered an expert on the Russian military. He has written multiple books on the geopolitical conflict between the West and Russia such as NATO's Handbook of Russian Information Warfare published through NATO Defense College. Giles has commented extensively on the Serdyukov reforms§, Russian disinformation§, and the Russo-Ukrainian war§.

Career Giles has written on security issues affecting Russia and on the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. He wrote for the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom's Advanced Research and Assessment Group, is a research director with the Conflict Studies Research Centre, which is a group of subject matter experts in Eurasian security, and is a senior consulting fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House. He was educated at Orley Farm School, Winchester College and UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Before his academic career, he underwent pilot training in the Royal Air Force, and briefly worked as a stand-up comedian and actor, appearing in A Captive in the Land and other productions by Gorky Film Studio. Giles also worked for the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, the BBC Monitoring service, and Ernst & Young in Moscow. He is the author of multiple books about the Russian approach to warfare and related security issues affecting Russia and the Russian Armed Forces.

In June 2019, Giles became suspicious of and helped to undercover Katie Jones, a supposed expert of American politics that did not exist but was an AI-generated face, and was part of "a vast army of phantom profiles lurking on the professional networking site Linkedin" in the words of the Associated Press. In his works, such as Russia's War on Everybody (2022), which is based on interviews with forty people across a dozen countries, Giles argued that for years Russia has been waging "a clandestine war against the West". In Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (2019), he argued that leaders of the Western world repeated the same mistakes in their relations with Russia, and pushed forward a series of recommendations that gives the book its title. He is also the author of a NATO report on Russia's information warfare.

Commentary and analysis Giles is considered an expert on the Russian military, and has extensively commented on Russian-related issues, such as the Russo-Ukrainian War, and its developments, such as Russia's offensive in eastern Ukraine, the United States sending a Patriot missile defense system to Ukraine, and the West's plan to send tanks to Ukraine. He has also discussed hybrid warfare and sees the threat of sabotage against submarine communications cables as a possible further vector of aggression by Russia against NATO. He said that the capabilities of the former are "well-developed ... not just to locate and interfere with cables, but also to tap into them for espionage purposes."

Russian Armed Forces

In April 2014, Giles said that "this is a very different Russian army from that seen during the Georgia war of 2008". Despite victory in the Russo-Georgian War, Russia's military performance was underwhelming, and he said that this "was a post-Soviet army, not much changed from the 1980s, and designed for a very different form of combat". In September 2017, about the Russian Zapad military exercise in Belarus, he said that "previous Russian exercises on this scale have prepositioned troops for undertaking military operations, against Georgia in 2008 and against Ukraine in 2014, and both of those moves were precipitated by an immediate political crisis – currently absent in Europe. And there have been plenty of other major Russian exercises in between, which did not end up with somebody getting invaded."

Improvements were noted in the units employed during the takeover of Crimea in 2014. Giles said: "In the last couple of years, there have been indications, even in military parades in Moscow, that this is a more Western-looking army. New load-carrying equipment for ordinary soldiers and a wider distribution of personal radios – until recently the preserve of platoon commanders at best – are simple and obvious indications of how the Russian army has invested in improving and modernising its equipment overall." In October 2015, about the possibility of Russian submarines cutting off the internet, he said: "I very much doubt that anyone would think of cutting off the US. It is only going to work in locations where the internet geography is going to create a vulnerability in communications." He added that other countries might consider it viable to do so, and said that "Internet infrastructure needs the same kind of protection at times of crises as other strategically important infrastructure." According to Giles, Russia "is becoming less and less interested in covering its tracks". In a December 2021 interview to the Italian news agency AGI, he defined the Kremlin's list of requests to NATO as a "Christmas list". In January 2022, Giles said that the British warning was a sign of "the U.K. effectively taking the lead of a strong NATO and European response to Russia's threats to Ukraine". He added: "With the U.S. apparently willing to engage with Russia's demands on Moscow's terms, and the EU irrelevant and asleep at the wheel, it has fallen to the U.K. to deal with the challenge both in terms of rhetoric ... and in terms of direct action, raising the likely cost of a Russian incursion in Ukraine by providing direct shipments of defensive munitions." In January 2022, citing long-range missile attacks or cyber-attacks targeting critical infrastructure due to Ukraine's weaker anti-missile defences, Giles said: "The different scenarios for how exactly Russia might seek to persuade the West to meet its (security) demands by punishing Kyiv don't even necessarily include a land incursion."

In February 2022, amid the military buildup to the invasion of Ukraine, Giles stated that Russia is "swift to label its adversaries and victims in Europe as Nazis. We have seen this not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia's vilification of the Baltic states." In June 2022, about the possibility of a ceasefire on the Russian side, Giles said: "This is a ploy which could be used by Russia at any time, if it wants to capitalise on European pressure on Ukraine to surrender and give up territory in exchange for notional peace."

In September 2022, days before the 2022 Russian mobilisation was announced, Giles argued that declaring mobilisation would be unpopular; he also said that this would require declaring the military operation a war, which would be an admission that the invasion was not going as planned and that they are not winning. In December 2022, Giles stated that predictions or denials of a new offensive were based on "whether people are applying Western standards of readiness" to Putin's military. He added: "Russia has undertaken one wave of mobilization and is quite capable of undertaking more. We would be more likely to see a better organized, even if low-tech, offensive from Russia in the early stages of next year." He cited a number of possible outcomes from Xi Jinping's trip to Russia, including definitive moves that could point to two directions, such as direct support for Putin in the conflict or explicitly calling on him to end it. In September 2023, about the possibility of joint military exercises between Russia and North Korea, he said: "Just as you can tell a person by their friends, you can tell a country by the company it keeps. In Russia's case, that company now consists largely of fellow rogue states."

Russian assassinations

In March 2018, about the early stages of investigation into the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Giles stated: "We can't make assumptions at this stage, but Russian involvement seems the most likely explanation. It fits the pattern of increasingly brazen attacks, trying to eliminate people who have either embarrassed the leadership or cost them money." About other Russian attempted and successful assassinations, he commented: "Let's not forget that these assassinations are well into double digits, and there are probably others we'll never find out about. What Russia has been learning through all of this is that there are no costs or consequences. Nobody cares enough to actually respond to Russia, so they continue." In September 2023, he further cautioned that while there may be discontent among the elites who are close to Putin and support him, Wagner and Prigozhin posed a specific threat that Putin would not allow to occur again. He said: "Unlike anybody in Putin's inner circle, Wagner was a disruptive element from outside the pyramid of power. Anybody else who is considering challenging Putin is unlikely to be in the same position because nobody else outside the inner power structures has access to the kind of resources that Prigozhin did."

Criticising Giles' opinion piece, Caspar Shaller, the media editor of Die Tageszeitung, commented that such an analysisbased on what he called "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" doctrinewhen applied to ex- members, trivialised Nazi atrocities, and itself only served to further Russian propaganda aims. Shaller criticised Giles for pointing out that Hunka and his unit had never been charged with war crimes, and claimed instead that the Nuremberg trials had ruled that all volunteer members of the Waffen-SS were guilty of war crimes (without noting that Hunka was conscripted into the Waffen-SS and was not a volunteer). He rebuked the German publishing house Axel Springer SE, which fully owns Politico, for publishing the opinion piece.

Works NATO's Handbook of Russian Information Warfare (NATO Defense College, 2016) Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Brookings/Chatham House, 2019) What Deters Russia: Enduring Principles for Responding to Moscow (Chatham House, 2021) Russia's War on Everybody: And What it Means for You (Bloomsbury, 2022) How Russia Uses Nuclear Threats to Shape Western Responses to Aggression (Chatham House, 2023) Who Will Defend Europe? An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent (Hurst, 2024)