Putin's Wars

I’ll admit, I approached *Putin’s Wars* expecting another dry recitation of troop movements and sanctions. What I got was something far more disturbing—a narrative that feels like listening to a war room recording unspooled in real time. David Sibley’s narration is the secret weapon here. His voice isn’t just clear; it’s *present*. When Galeotti describes the 2014 MH17 shootdown, Sibley’s pacing slows to a crawl, forcing you to sit with the horror of a second-by-second disaster. But the best moments come when Galeotti zooms out to expose the grotesque logic of Putin’s wars—for example, how Russia’s victory in Syria was never about Assad’s survival but about testing drone strikes and electronic warfare on real targets before bringing those tools home. Sibley’s Russian pronunciation isn’t pandering; it’s functional, like a journalist’s notebook scribbled in Cyrillic. My one gripe? Galeotti’s occasional tangents into Soviet nostalgia feel overlong, as if the audiobook is taking a cigarette break mid-battle. Still, this is the rare audiobook where the narration *enhances* the material, turning what could’ve been a lecture into a gripping, stomach-turning thriller. If you’ve ever wondered how a former intelligence officer turned a country into his personal chessboard, this is where the story clicks into place.