Russia in the 21st Century [Superthread]

[a_majoor]

Part 2

Counterintuitive though it may seem, Russia’s weakening economy is also unlikely to create public pressure for concessions. On the contrary, the damage to an already-stagnant Russian economy suffering from low energy prices is actually reducing Putin’s foreign-policy flexibility. Russia’s president needs to show that his country’s suffering has been worth it. Retreat could severely damage Putin’s carefully cultivated image as a strong man—a style Russians have historically appreciated—and alienate his hypernationalist political base. They resent sanctions, which they see as hurting ordinary people much more than Putin’s entourage, and they want their leaders to resist, not capitulate. For many, Russia’s dignity is at stake.

This came through clearly in a recent conversation with a top Russian official. When asked why his government would not try to negotiate a deal based on principles it has already articulated, such as exchanging Russian guarantees of Ukraine’s territorial integrity minus Crimea and Ukraine’s right to move toward the European Union for Western guarantees that Ukraine would not join NATO and that the United States and the European Union would relax sanctions, the official responded by saying, “We have our pride and cannot appear to be pressuring the insurgents to have sanctions reduced.”



THE KEY question is this: Will Putin continue to support the relatively moderate pragmatists, or will he turn toward the “hotheads”? So far, he has split the difference: Russia has provided effective but limited support to the separatists, while at the same time hoping against hope to restore many of its ties with the West (or at least with Europe). Putin has also tried to conceal the scale of Russia’s intervention in order to temporize and to exploit U.S.-European and intra-European differences.

Currently, the pragmatists retain the upper hand, in no small part because Putin has kept his government team almost intact both in the cabinet and in the presidential administration. While loyal to Putin and prepared to execute his agenda, that team consists primarily of officials whose formative experiences have been in establishing economic interdependence with the West and in attempting to make Russia a major voice in a world order predominantly shaped by the United States and its allies.

Foreign Minister Lavrov and others supporting his more pragmatic approach argue that Moscow can still do business with the United States and especially with the Europeans if Russia doesn’t close the door. The “hotheads” take the opposite view, insisting that the West would view any moderation in Russian policy as a sign of weakness. Portraying themselves as realists, they argue that NATO is determined to overthrow Putin, force Russia to its knees and perhaps even dismember the country.

Putin’s reluctance to change course dramatically so far explains his hybrid war in eastern Ukraine, which helps the separatists without Russia formally entering the conflict. It also underlies Russia’s unpersuasive denials that it is giving military support to the separatists, which simultaneously make Moscow subject to justified criticism and create unfounded hope in Washington and in Europe that Russia will be unable to absorb higher casualties in a war in which it claims not to participate.

Yet Putin’s attempt to pursue the pragmatists’ broad objectives while accommodating the “hotheads” on the ground in Ukraine may not be indefinitely sustainable. An increasingly prevalent view among Putin’s advisers sees hopes of a restoration of Western-Russian cooperation as a lost cause because U.S. and Western leaders will not accept any resolution that meets Russia’s minimal requirements. If the United States and the European Union would largely remove sanctions and restore business as usual, they would urge that Russia swallow its pride and reconcile. But if Russia is going to continue to be sanctioned, excluded from financial markets and denied Western technology, they say, then Russia should pursue its own independent path. Putin has yet to face a decisive moment that would require him to make a fateful choice between accommodating Western demands and more directly entering the conflict and perhaps even using force against Western interests outside Ukraine. And if that moment arrives, we may well not welcome his choice.



SANCTIONS ASIDE, two other developments could force Putin’s hand. One would be the prospect of military defeat of the separatists; the second would be NATO membership for Ukraine.

Putin drew a bright red line precluding the first in an interview with Germany’s ARD television channel on November 17, 2014. Speaking rhetorically, he asked whether NATO wanted “the Ukrainian central authorities to annihilate everyone among their political foes and opponents” in eastern Ukraine. If so, Putin declared categorically: “We won’t let it happen.” In every instance when the Ukrainian military seemed close to gaining the upper hand in the fighting, and despite U.S. and European warnings and sanctions, Putin has raised the ante to assure the separatists’ success on the battlefield.

Though Russia’s president has said less about the second red line, there can be no doubt that Ukraine’s potential NATO membership is a preeminent Russian concern. One important reason for Moscow’s willingness to let Donetsk and Luhansk go back under central Ukrainian control with a considerable degree of autonomy is the Kremlin’s desire for their pro-Russian populations to vote in Ukrainian elections and for their autonomous local governments to serve as a brake on Ukraine’s road to NATO. Russia’s political mainstream overwhelmingly supports preventing the emergence of a hostile Ukraine under NATO security umbrella less than four hundred miles from Moscow.

This feeling is grounded both in Russian security concerns and in nearly uncontrollable sentiments about Ukraine and its Russian-speaking population. The growing popularity of the slogan Rossiya ne brosayet svoikh—Russia does not abandon its own—reflects these feelings and resembles Russia’s pan-Slavic attitudes toward Serbia before World War I. One of us saw a powerful example of these emotions while watching a Russian talk-show discussion about Ukraine before a live audience. A Russian panelist declared that “our cause is just and we will prevail” to thunderous applause. Importantly, the speaker, Vyacheslav Nikonov, is not only a member of the pro-Putin United Russia party and the chairman of the parliament’s education committee. He is also the grandson of former Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who made the same statement after Hitler attacked the USSR in 1941. Nikonov is known for reflecting establishment perspectives. The early nineteenth-century Savoyard diplomat and conservative philosopher Joseph de Maistre saw something similar in his own time: “There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.” Russian nationalism today is such an explosive force.

Little imagination is required to find possible triggers for a decisive change in Putin’s posture. The most immediate would be a U.S. decision to arm Ukraine’s military. Could some in Putin’s government actually be seeking to entice the United States into arming Ukraine? While this seems far-fetched at first blush, another Russian interlocutor made a thoughtful case that this is indeed the plan of some around Putin, perhaps even with Putin’s consent. According to this theory, this ploy has both a tactical and a strategic rationale.

Tactically, an announcement by Obama that the United States was sending arms to Ukraine would give Putin an easy escape from what has become an increasingly untenable denial of the obvious. To fellow Russian citizens, Putin and his government have unambiguously and repeatedly insisted that Russia is not a party to the conflict, despite the fact that pro-Russian government politicians and separatist leaders brag about Moscow’s help on television. Even after the downing of the Malaysian airliner killed nearly three hundred last July, and despite continuous Western reporting of the facts, Putin has stuck to his story.

An announcement that Washington was arming Ukraine would, it is argued, give Putin the pretext he needs to affirm his narrative. He has claimed that the United States sponsored the Maidan coup that ousted Yanukovych, a democratically elected president, and has been supporting the current government’s war against fellow Russians in eastern Ukraine. Overtly arming Ukraine will thus unmask previously covert American activity and justify Russia responding with arms or even troops, initiating a game of escalation that plays to his strength.

Strategically, this would be what chess masters call a trap. By shifting the competition from the economic chessboard (where the United States and Europe have all the powerful pieces) to a military one, he will have moved from weakness to strength. In the military arena, Putin owns the commanding heights: there is hardly a weapon the United States can provide Kiev that Russia can’t match or trump; logistically, he can send arms by road, rail, sea and air across a porous border, while the United States is a continent away; within the ranks of Ukraine’s military, he has hundreds or even thousands of agents and collaborators. And, most importantly, as he has already demonstrated, the Russian military forces are prepared not only to advise separatists but also to fight alongside them—and to kill and to die. He assumes that the United States will never put boots on the ground in Ukraine. The more vividly he can drive this home to Europeans, so hard-line thinking goes, the more respect he can command.

Hard-liners see this as Putin’s best chance to snatch what they call “strategic victory” from the jaws of defeat. As they see it, Russia’s comparative advantage in relations with Europe and the United States is not economics. Instead, it is deploying military power. Europeans have essentially disarmed themselves and show little will to fight. Americans undoubtedly have the most powerful military on earth and are often prepared to fight. But even though they win all the battles, they seem incapable of winning a war, as in Vietnam or Iraq. In Ukraine, the “hotheads” hope, Russia can teach the Europeans and Americans some hard truths. The professionally executed operation that annexed Crimea virtually without a shot was the first step. But the deeper the United States can be sucked into Ukraine and the more visibly it is committed to achieving unachievable goals like the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the better from this hawkish Russian perspective. On the battlefield of war in Ukraine, Russia has what Cold War strategists named “escalation dominance”: the upper hand at every step up the escalation ladder. This is a proxy war the United States cannot win and Russia cannot lose—unless America is willing to go to war itself.



THE PRIMARY audience for this drama is, of course, Europe. The fact that neither European members of NATO nor the United States can save Ukraine is hoped to sink into the consciousness of postmodern Europeans. When it does, according to this logic, a skillful combination of intimidation and intimation of hope should give Russia an opening to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, providing relief from the most onerous sanctions and access to European financial markets.

Initially, Putin will attempt to exploit the expiration of EU sanctions, which are scheduled to expire in July. If that fails, however, and the European Union joins the United States in imposing additional economic sanctions, such as excluding Moscow from the SWIFT financial clearing system, Putin would be tempted to respond not by retreating, but by ending all cooperation with the West and mobilizing his people against a new and “apocalyptic” threat to Mother Russia. As a leading Russian politician told us, “We stood all alone against Napoleon and against Hitler. It was our victories against aggressors, not our diplomacy, that split enemy coalitions and provided us with new allies.”

At that point, Putin would likely change both his team and the thrust of his foreign policy. As a senior official said, “The president values loyalty and consistency, so letting people go and announcing fundamental policy changes comes hard to him. But he is a decisive man and when he reaches a decision, he does whatever it takes to get results.” This would mean a significantly more belligerent Russian policy across all issues driven by a narrative about a Western campaign to undermine the regime or indeed to cause the collapse of the country. Among other things, it would likely mean an end to cooperation on projects like the International Space Station, supplies of strategic metals like titanium, dealing with Iran’s nuclear program and stabilizing Afghanistan. In the latter case, this could include not only pressuring Central Asian states to curtail security cooperation with the United States, but also exploiting political differences in the Afghan ruling coalition to support the remnants of the Northern Alliance.



ONCE THE U.S.-Russian relationship enters the zone of heated confrontation, senior military officers on both sides will inevitably play a greater role. As the world saw in the lead-up to World War I, when the security dilemma takes hold, what look like reasonable precautions to one side may well appear as evidence of likely aggression to the other. Clausewitz describes the relentless logic that pushes each side toward “a new mutual enhancement, which, in pure conception, must create a fresh effort towards an extreme.” Commanders have to think in terms of capabilities rather than intentions. This pushes them toward steps that are tactically prudent but that invite strategic misinterpretation.

Predictably, leaders and their military advisers will also miscalculate. Before World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II did not believe that Russia would dare to go to war because its defeat by Japan less than a decade earlier had demonstrated the Russian military’s incompetence. At the same time, Russian defense minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov was assuring the czar that Russia was ready for battle and that Germany had already decided to attack. As Sukhomlinov said in 1912, “Under any circumstances the war is unavoidable and it is advantageous for us to start it sooner rather than later . . . His Majesty and I believe in the army and know that the war will only bring good things to us.” In Berlin, the German General Staff also argued for quick action, fearing the impending completion of a new network of rail lines that would allow the czar to move Russian divisions rapidly to Germany’s border. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as the crisis intensified, military commanders in both Russia and Germany rushed not to be the second to mobilize. As the Russian General Staff told Nicholas II, only an immediate and full-scale mobilization would prevent a quick defeat, if not of Russia itself, then at least of France, whose long-term support Russia needed to withstand the German assault.



LATVIA, ESTONIA, and Lithuania form the Achilles’ heel of the NATO alliance. They are protected by its Article 5 guarantee that an attack upon one will be regarded as an attack upon all. Thus, the United States has an unambiguous and undeniable responsibility to deter and defend attacks on the Baltic states. Given their size, proximity to Russia and substantial Russian-speaking minorities, this is a daunting requirement. It is not difficult to imagine scenarios in which either U.S. or Russian action could set in motion a chain of events at the end of which American and Russian troops would be killing each other.

There is currently a lively discussion among Russian hard-liners about how Russian dominance in both conventional forces and tactical nuclear weapons in Central and Eastern Europe could be used to Russia’s advantage. Putin has talked publicly about his willingness to use nuclear weapons to repel any effort to retake Crimea—noting that he relied on Russia’s nuclear arsenal during the Crimean operation. In these debates, many ask whether President Obama would risk losing Chicago, New York and Washington to protect Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius. It is a troubling question. If you want to either dumbfound or silence a table next to you in a restaurant in Washington or Boston, ask your fellow diners what they think. If stealthy Russian military forces were to take control of Estonia or Latvia, what should the United States do? Would they support sending Americans to fight for the survival of Estonia or Latvia?

Imagine, for example, an uprising of ethnic Russians in Estonia or Latvia, either spontaneously or at the instigation of Russian security services; a heavy-handed response by that nation’s weak police and military forces; an appeal by ethnic Russians to Putin to honor his “Putin Doctrine” declaration during the liberation of Crimea that he would come to the defense of ethnic Russians wherever they were attacked; an attempted replay of the hybrid war against Ukraine; and a confrontation with the battalion of six hundred American or NATO forces now on regular rotations through the Baltic states. Some Russians have gone so far as to suggest that this would provide sufficient provocation for Moscow to use a tactical nuclear weapon; Russia’s ambassador to Denmark, for example, recently threatened that Danish participation in NATO’s missile-defense system would make it “a target for Russian nuclear weapons.” What’s more, Russia is exploring stationing Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad—the Russian enclave between Lithuania and Poland—while Sweden’s intelligence has publicly stated that it views Russian intelligence operations as preparation for “military operations against Sweden.”

 

[a_majoor]

Part 3

IN A climate of mutual suspicion further fueled by domestic politics on both sides, assurances of benign intentions rarely suffice. Christopher Clark’s 2013 book, The Sleepwalkers, provides a persuasive account of how, in the days preceding World War I, both alliances contemptuously dismissed the explanations and assurances they heard from the other side.

Of course, alliances are now Putin’s weakest point. Russia does not have a single ally committed to supporting Moscow in war. Nevertheless, one should be cautious about counting on Moscow’s isolation in a longer-term confrontation with the West. One reason Kaiser Wilhelm II presented his ultimatum to Russia was that he did not believe England would join Russia in a war over the crisis in the Balkans, where London had traditionally opposed Russian influence. Furthermore, without England, few expected France to offer much resistance. What those who count on Russian isolation today do not properly take into account is that a powerful and assertive alliance prepared to pursue its interests and promote its values inevitably stimulates antibodies. It was that sense of Germany’s determination to change the geopolitical balance in Europe and in the world that prompted Britain to depart from a century of splendid isolation and become so entangled with allies that when war came, it had little choice but to enter. It is the same sense that is leading China today to expand its ties with Russia during its conflict with the United States.

To be clear, there is virtually no chance that China would join Russia against the United States and Europe in a confrontation over Ukraine. Likewise, China is not prepared to bail Russia out financially or to risk its lucrative economic integration with the West to support Moscow’s revanchist ambitions. But neither is Beijing indifferent to the possibility of Russia’s political, economic or (particularly) military defeat by the Western alliance. Many in Beijing fear that if the United States and its allies were successful in defeating Russia, and particularly in changing the regime in Russia, China could well be the next target. The fact that the Chinese leadership views this as a serious threat could, over time, push Beijing closer to Moscow, a development that would fundamentally alter the global balance of power.

Moreover, if there were a Russian-American war, one needs to think carefully about what actions the Chinese might choose to take against Taiwan, for example, or even to punish neighbors like Japan or Vietnam whom Beijing believes are cooperating with Washington to contain its ambitions.

Neither China nor Russia is the first state to confront a powerful and growing alliance. Nor is the United States the first to receive enthusiastic appeals from prospective allies that can add marginally to overall capabilities, but simultaneously bring obligations and make others feel insecure. In a timeless passage in his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounts the Athenian response to a troubled Sparta: “We did not gain this empire by force. . . . Our allies came to us of their own accord and begged us to lead them.” Needless to say, Sparta did not find that explanation reassuring—and that excuse did not prevent thirty years of war that ended with defeat for Athens, but at a price far beyond any benefits that accrued to the victor.

To recognize the potentially catastrophic consequences of war with Russia does not require paralysis in addressing the challenge of a resurgent but wounded Russia. The United States has a vital interest in maintaining its credibility as a superpower and in assuring the survival and security of its NATO alliance—and thus of every one of its NATO allies. Moreover, in international politics, appetites can grow quickly if fed by easy victories.

The Russian president’s currently limited objectives in Ukraine could become more expansive if Russia does not face serious resistance. After all, the smooth annexation of Crimea led to an outburst of triumphalist rhetoric in Moscow about creating a new entity, Novorossiya, which would include eastern and southern Ukraine all the way to the Romanian border. The combination of resistance by local populations, the Ukrainian government’s willingness to fight for its territory, and U.S. and EU sanctions quickly persuaded the Russian leadership to curtail this line of thinking. When a nation is prepared to fight for important interests, clarity about that determination is a virtue in discouraging potential aggression.

Yet the United States should be careful to avoid giving allies or friends—like Kiev—the sense that they have a blank check in confronting Moscow. During World War I, even such a strong supporter of the war as Pavel N. Milyukov—leader of Russia’s Constitutional Democrats and later foreign minister in the Provisional Government—was shocked at the lengths to which British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey would go in refusing to assign any blame for the conflict to the Serbs. “Listen,” he reports saying to Grey, “the war started because of Serb grandstanding. Austria could think that it was in serious danger. Serbia was aspiring to do no less than to split Austria.” To Grey, however, an ally could do no wrong.

The Balkan crises in the several years prior to World War I deserve careful study. Few at the time could conceive that they would become the flashpoint of a fire that would eventually become a continental inferno.

But they did. Meeting the challenge of an angry but weakened Russia today requires a subtle combination of firmness and restraint. Where vital American interests are engaged, we have to be able and willing to fight: to kill and to die. Effective deterrence requires three C’s: clarity about red lines that cannot be crossed (for example, attacking a NATO ally); capability to respond in ways that will make the cost of aggression greatly exceed any benefits an aggressor could hope to achieve; and credibility about our determination to fulfill our commitment. At the same time, we should recognize that if American and Russian forces find themselves firing upon each other, this would violate one of the principal constraints both sides respected assiduously during four decades of the Cold War—risking escalation to a war both would lose.

Military force and economic warfare such as sanctions are indispensable instruments of foreign policy. When employed without a sound strategic vision and artful diplomacy, however, instruments of coercion can develop their own momentum and become ends in themselves. Having managed a confrontation over the Soviet Union’s attempt to install nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba that he believed had a one-in-three chance of ending in nuclear war, President John F. Kennedy spent many hours reflecting on the lessons from that experience. The most important of these he offered to his successors in these words: “Above all, while defending our vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.” It is a lesson statesmen should apply to meet the challenge Russia poses in Ukraine today.

Graham Allison is director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans. Dimitri K. Simes, The National Interest’s publisher, is president of the Center for the National Interest.

 

[Good2Golf]

A very thought provoking read.

Given this thought:

Strategically, this would be what chess masters call a trap. By shifting the competition from the economic chessboard (where the United States and Europe have all the powerful pieces) to a military one, he will have moved from weakness to strength. In the military arena, Putin owns the commanding heights: there is hardly a weapon the United States can provide Kiev that Russia can’t match or trump; logistically, he can send arms by road, rail, sea and air across a porous border, while the United States is a continent away; within the ranks of Ukraine’s military, he has hundreds or even thousands of agents and collaborators. And, most importantly, as he has already demonstrated, the Russian military forces are prepared not only to advise separatists but also to fight alongside them—and to kill and to die. He assumes that the United States will never put boots on the ground in Ukraine. The more vividly he can drive this home to Europeans, so hard-line thinking goes, the more respect he can command.

What are Putin, his pragmtists and the "hotheads" to make of Canada sending 200 troops onto Ukraine soil?

Regards
G2G

 

[Kirkhill]

- St Petersburg

- Stavropol

- Moscow

- Novosibirsk

Putin has his own "traps" to worry about.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I agree, broadly and generally, with Graham Allison and Dimitri Simes: we are, Russia and the West and, especially Ukraine, playing a dangerous game.

We have massive, absolutely overwhelming social and economic advantages.

We have the strategic advantage, too.

Russia has the local, tactical (operational level) advantage based on geography and concentration of force.

We face one threat on one front (East); Russia faces at least two threats on at least two front (West, South and East). But, as Drs Alison and Simes point out, we did ourselves no military-strategic favours by adding Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania Slovenia, Slovakia and Romania to NATO. (Nor do Poland and Hungary do as much good as members as they would have done as buffers). The Baltic states, especially, are badly exposed and isolated.

All that being said, we should, in my opinion, reinvigorate the Cold War. We won it last time on, essentially, our social, political and economic strengths. We can defeat Russia, just as we defeated the Warsaw Pact, using the same tools. That may require Canada and Britain and Germany and many of the others to (unwillingly) spend more on defence and even assign troops to Eastern NATO regions (say in the Czech Republic) because we will want to force the Russians to waste money on the military when they really, desperately, need that (limited) money for productive national development. But, we can win, in my estimation, without firing a shot ... and it will be a victory worth having if it results in a new Russian civil war.

 

[Boxtop22]

I very much agree with 90% of Thucydide's three-part posts.

On the risk of nuclear warfare over the Baltic: I believe that neither the United States nor NATO (NATO isn't even allowed to offer negative-security assurances, anyway. And the B61-Mod-11 are pretty old weapons that would require NATO sending pilots in very-hot areas) are willing to use Area-denial nuclear devices to protect Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius. The US congress had already opposed the concept of an automatic declaration of war if Japan was to be attacked by China. If they won't stand up for Japan against China, they won't stand up for the Baltic against Russia. What would even be the point of losing thousands of man and risking a nuclear warfare to retake the Baltic, and why would Russia even take the Baltic at this point? The very same congress also questioned the validity of Article V, saying that no foreign treaty should have the power to send the United States to war as it could be a breach of her sovereignty. It would require an incredible escalation for Russia to consider this move. If anything (in a parallel universe) it's a safer (even though more challenging) bet for Putin to take Visby - since Sweden isn't a NATO member - and then force panicked leaders to negotiate a peace treaty trading Visby back for the independence of Eastern-Ukraine, than it would be to take Tallinn, Riga and/or Vilnius.

Putin does not want the Baltic, he is trying to make a point. The Soviet Union collapsed, and all we did (I'm not judging the morality of the actions) was look at it agonize, offer her some help, on the condition that Russia basically sell herself to us (cf. the HIID / USAID / Chubais group). Putin's first objective following his election was to give autonomy and might to the Russia he admired as a former senior officer.

I think his second objective is to reaffirm the power of Russia. One way would be to force a redefinition of the Global Order - which is a very dangerous path, because China doesn't not want such a redefinition. The alternative is to use Russia's military might, to force the West to recognize her as a very serious threat, and to force the West to sit down and renegotiate the role of Russia in the world. There is a diplomatic way out of this nightmare, unlike Campbell, I disagree with reinvigorating the Cold-War. It made the world unstable, it forces conflicts, removed democratically-elected leaders, and almost resulted in Nuclear Warfare on more than one occasion. We must prepare for war, we must be ready for war, but I think we must do what we can to prevent it. Another Cold-War is not an acceptable option at this point, not because a self-centered Russian President decided to fudge shit up in Ukraine. A Cold-War in our century, with our technology could swing in either way, we live in a much different world, with many more variables, and if we have learned from the Cold War, so have they. You learn more from a defeat than you do from a victory. Oh and given the number of GRU / FSB people all over Ottawa, I'm not sure we want to get into a cold-war before we clean our own-backyard...

Finally, I'd like to quote Kissinger's World Order. He analyzes Russia's historical behaviour in a Western context, and I think most of the following is still very accurate today. It's part of Russia's strategic culture.

"In the Westphalian concept of order, European statesmen came to identify security with a balance of power and with restraints on its exercise. In Russia's experience of history, restraints on power spelled catastrophe: Russia's failure to dominate its surroundings, in this view, had exposed it to the Mongol invasions and plunged it into its nightmarish "Time of Troubles" (a fifteen-year dynastic interregnum before the founding of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613, in which invasions, civil wars, and famine claimed a third of Russia's population). The Peace of Westphalia saw international order as an intricate balancing mechanism; the Russian view cast it as a perpetual contest of wills, with Russia extending its domain at each phase to the absolute limit of its material resources. Thus, when asked to define Russia's foreign policy, the mid-seventeenth-century Czar Alexei's minister Nashchokin offered a straightforward description: "expanding the state in every direction, and this is the business of the Department of Foreign Affairs ... When it was strong, Russia conducted itself with the domineering certainty of a superior power and insisted on formal shows of deference to its status. When it was weak, it masked its vulnerability though brooding invocations of vast inner reserves of strength. In either case, it was a special challenge for Western capitals used to dealing with a somewhat more genteel style."

[I'm still new here, so do tell me if you think I lack clarity, if I'm breaking some sort of Milnet culture, or if I'm doing anything wrong. I may get a little over-enthusiastic when it comes to discussing Russia...]

 

[Good2Golf]

Far earlier in this thread it was mentioned briefly that the one thing that Putin would actually NOT at all want is for Ukraine to "give" (with Western support to relocate ethnic Ukrainians) the East and South (but not South-West Odessa) to the Ethnic-Russian majority and the resultant direct-dependnace this Novorossia' would have on Russia and the impact it would have on Russia's economic growth (or contraction, most likely).  Western pride would have a hard time letting that happen, but with a decent enough relocation package and National support of the displaced Ukrainians, it would give the Russians the very thing they may not have ever counted on truly getting.  "Careful what you (surreptitiously) ask for, Russia...you may just get it."

:2c:

Regards
G2G

 

[vonGarvin]

We do not have the stomach for expanding our armies for another Cold war. We have fronts with which we can barely contend. (Syria, Iraq, the expanding  ISIS threats...)
We ought to make some noise, then quietly fade away. Period. Our Twitter generation is too involved with self gratification than to worry about some poor slob Slavs fighting each other over some place they've never heard about. Especially when it's not they who have threatened us on YouTube videos  as they behead their prisoners.

 

[Kirkhill]

We do not have the stomach for expanding our armies for another Cold war. We have fronts with which we can barely contend. (Syria, Iraq, the expanding  ISIS threats...)
We ought to make some noise, then quietly fade away. Period. Our Twitter generation is too involved with self gratification than to worry about some poor slob Slavs fighting each other over some place they've never heard about. Especially when it's not they who have threatened us on YouTube videos  as they behead their prisoners.

For a change we agree....

With respect to the separation of the Donbas from Ukraine, I guess that is what is behind Ukraine Starts Building Wall to Keep Russia Out.

Obviously Ukraine can't control entry to the Donbas but they can control egress into the rest of Ukraine.  That barrier will clearly delineate those Ukrainians Kyiv can help and those that are beyond help.  Ukraine can deliver aid to the barrier.  It can allow Ukrainians across the barrier. It will have no need for military vehicles beyond the barrier.  It could even leave the Russians in "peace" beyond the barrier and let the Separatists stew.

With respect to military aid, we could supply Ukraine with any weapons or systems that allow them to defeat any conventional military hardware that crosses the barrier.

Ukraine doesn't have to cede sovereignty over the Donbas. It can even try to enter its own sovereignty territory with civilians.  This would shift the onus on to those east of the barrier.

At that point it becomes a mini-variant of the Cold War and in some ways results in a "frozen war" like Transdniestria or South Ossetia.  The difference is the zone is quarantined.

 

[CougarKing]

Another political dissident weighs in on Putin:

Vox.com

Exiled Russian lawmaker explains why Putin isn't afraid of Obama
Updated by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub on April 21, 2015, 8:00 a.m. ET

On March 20, 2014, when Russia's State Duma voted on whether to annex the Ukrainian region of Crimea into Russia, 445 of the Duma's legislators voted yes and one voted no. The "no" was Ilya Ponomarev, a longtime leftist politician and critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Within a few months, Ponomarev was exiled from Russia and stripped of his legislative immunity from prosecution. Though he is still officially a Duma member, he now lives in the US and is attempting to organize a more formal opposition to Putin from outside of the country.

We spoke to him in Washington, DC, about the stability of Putin's rule, the Russian elites who help keep him in power, how things might change, and Putin's increasingly tense relationship with Europe and the United States. While Ponomarev believes change will come to Russia, he warned that it will take years — and believes it will likely come from a combination of Russian elites turning against Putin and popular unrest, not from the ballot box.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[McG]

Does Russia need the Ukraine crisis to maintain domestic moral and order?

How Vladimir Putin tries to stay strong
Russia’s president is trapped by his own strident anti-Western rhetoric
The Economist
18 Apr 2015

A RELATIVE hiatus in the fighting in eastern Ukraine (at least until this week) and a relative stabilisation in the Russian economy are prompting two questions. Is the worst of the war over and might better economic news calm the Kremlin—or is this a lull before a new storm?

The economic situation is not as bad as many predicted four months ago. Having lost half its value, the rouble has stabilised and even started to strengthen, thanks in part to a recent rise in oil prices. Inflation is running at 17% but is rising more slowly than many feared. Instead of a 5% contraction, the economy may shrink by only 3% this year. “The situation is not as catastrophic as many people thought,” is how a senior Russia banker sums up the mood.   


Yet the fragile economic balance is not being used by Vladimir Putin as an argument for returning to peace and prosperity, but rather as evidence that he is standing strong against Russia’s adversaries. The state media have trumpeted the strengthening of the rouble against the dollar and the euro as a victory in the face of American and European enemies determined to ruin Russia.

The Kremlin’s narrative of war has long moved beyond Ukraine to the West in general. The claim that their country is at war may be news to Americans, but it has been drilled into the minds of many ordinary Russians. The prospect of a war with the West is now a big concern for public opinion. Some 81% of the population sees America as a threat, the highest proportion since the Soviet Union fell apart.

According to this narrative, Russia is under attack on all fronts—economic, ideological, Middle Eastern, European—and must respond accordingly. This week’s decision to sell the S-300 missile system to Iran is part of this response (see article). As for the supposed threat from the European Union, Channel One news recently instructed its viewers: “Put crudely, the EU started and flourished as a mechanism for redistributing the gains from the collapse of the USSR and former communist bloc. At some stage, however, the flow of resources from conquered markets started to run out and expansion to the east was the only option.” This expansion, it adds, has now been stopped by Russia; so the EU, deprived of new sources of prosperity, may soon crumble.

In this world of mirror images, America serves as Russia’s reflection and alter ego. It ascribes to America its own actions: incitement of violence in Kiev, support of extreme nationalists in eastern Ukraine, military involvement in the conflict. In a recent article, Sergei Naryshkin, Speaker of the Russian parliament, blamed America for “unleashing a military-political adventure” in Ukraine and stalling its peaceful resolution. “America needs the continuing bloodshed in the Donbas as a means of achieving something important for itself,” he wrote. The sanctions against Russia and the information hysteria in the Western media are a cover for America’s economic “gangsterism”, he added.

What are Russia’s motives and goals in this confrontation, and is it now trapped in a spiral of aggression? Russian officials talk obsessively of geopolitics, but the answers depend not on what the West does but on how the Kremlin calculates its risks at home, since staying in power is its main goal. A study commissioned by Alexei Kudrin, a former finance minister, and conducted by a group of Russian sociologists led by Mikhail Dmitriev of the New Economic Growth, a think-tank, suggests that the roots of Mr Putin’s actions in Ukraine lie in the Kremlin’s need to solidify its legitimacy after the growing discontent that erupted into street protests during the winter of 2011-12.

Those protests were driven mainly by Russia’s middle class, frustrated by its lack of prospects. After a decade of rapid income growth that boosted living standards, priorities shifted to such aspirations as better justice, education and health care that Mr Putin’s regime of crony state capitalism could not provide. In the eyes of the middle class, Mr Putin was becoming a symbol of stagnation rather than stability—so his ratings began to fall. Trust in the state media also wobbled. Observers started to compare the situation to the mid-1980s, when a frustrated intelligentsia became a driving force behind Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The protests in Russia’s larger cities started to resonate with economic and social discontent in poorer provinces, and risked erupting into an open social conflict.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea arrested this trend. Alexei Navalny, a leader of the protests of 2011-12 who memorably named Mr Putin’s United Russia a party of crooks and thieves, says that the president has hijacked the political agenda by substituting imperial nationalism for building a modern state. The annexation of Crimea won over provincial Russia and legitimised his rule even in the eyes of many who had protested against him two years earlier. As Mr Dmitriev sees it, unmet hopes of personal fulfilment were assuaged by symbolic victories for the state.

The war in eastern Ukraine and the economic crisis have turned the euphoria associated with Crimea into a paranoid and defensive patriotism aimed against the West, pushing Mr Putin’s approval ratings up to nearly 90%. The Kremlin can ill afford a real military clash with the West, but it will claim any signs of Western weakness as victories. To demonstrate its strength, it is brandishing its nuclear arms and flexing its muscles all around NATO’s borders. Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a think-tank, says Mr Putin wants his nuclear threats taken seriously, and adds that the risk of nuclear war is greater than at any time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But the immediate goal of such intimidation is to persuade the West to drop sanctions, which would be presented at home as a huge victory.

Against this background a resolution of the Ukrainian crisis and de-escalation of tensions with the West would push the focus back onto economic and social problems, lowering Mr Putin’s ratings, just as happened after Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008. A continuation of the war in Ukraine and the stand-off with the West will keep his ratings up for longer. But while this may benefit Mr Putin, it risks leaving Russia isolated and economically stagnant.

Russia’s budget cuts are a good guide to Mr Putin’s priorities. The upkeep of the Kremlin and spending on the army and security services take 40% of the entire budget. But spending on health care and infrastructure has been reduced twice as much as spending on defence. Among other winners in the budget are the state media which spew out hatred and aggression.

The object of this aggression can vary: two years ago it was migrants and corrupt officials. Now it is the West, “national traitors” and a “fifth column” that included Boris Nemtsov, a liberal politician assassinated in Moscow in February. In this way the Kremlin’s aggression has become a narcotic that may lead to an overdose, causing it to lose control. Indeed, the mood could one day switch from an external enemy back to Mr Putin himself, not least because the image of America constructed by the Kremlin’s propaganda bears such a close resemblance to the reality of Russia.

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21648678-russias-president-trapped-his-own-strident-anti-western-rhetoric-how-vladimir-putin-tries

 

[Boxtop22]

At least a bit. There's a great article which covers the link between Ukraine, foreign enemies and domestic power.

I'll copy-paste it since it requires a membership.

Source: http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/21/putins-empire-of-the-mind/


Putin’s Empire of the Mind

How Russia's president morphed from realist to ideologue -- and what he'll do next. BY MARK GALEOTTI, ANDREW S. BOWEN APRIL 21, 2014

A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Russian imperialism. When Vladimir Putin first came to power in 1999, he talked ideologically but acted rationally. He listened to a range of opinions, from liberal economist Alexei Kudrin to political fixer Vladislav Surkov — people willing to tell him hard truths and question groupthink. He may have regarded the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, but he knew he couldn’t re-create it. Perhaps the best metaphor is that while he brought back the Soviet national anthem, it had new words. There was no thought of returning Russia to the failed Soviet model of the planned economy. And as a self-professed believer who always wears his baptismal cross, Putin encouraged the once-suppressed Russian Orthodox Church. He was a Russian patriot, but he also was willing to cooperate with the West when it suited his interests. One of the first leaders to offer his condolences after the 9/11 attacks, Putin shared Russian intelligence on al Qaeda with the United States. He did not hesitate to protect Russia’s interests against the West — in 2008 Putin undercut any thought of NATO expansion into Georgia by launching a war against its vehemently pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili — but Putin’s challenges were carefully calibrated to minimize repercussions while maximizing gains. He shut off gas to Ukraine, unleashed hackers on Estonia, and, yes, sent troops into Georgia, but he made sure that the costs of asserting regional hegemony were limited, bearable, and short term. But that was the old Putin. Today, the West faces a rather different Russian leader. After all, the annexation of Crimea, by any rational calculation, did not make sense. Russia already had immense influence on the peninsula, but without the need to subsidize it, as Ukraine had. (Russia has already pledged $1.5 billion to support Crimea.) The Russian Black Sea Fleet’s position in the Crimean seaport of Sevastopol was secure until 2042. Any invasion would anger the West and force it to support whatever government took the place of Viktor Yanukovych’s administration in Kiev, regardless of its composition or constitutionality. In Putin’s actions at home as well, the Russian president is eschewing the pragmatism that marked his first administration. Instead of being the arbiter, brokering a consensus among various clans and interests, today’s Putin is increasingly autocratic. His circle of allies and advisors has shrunk to those who only share his exact ideas. Sober technocrats such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu played seemingly no role in the decision-making over Crimea and were expected simply to execute the orders from the top. This has become one of the new themes of Russian politics: the conflation of loyalty to the Kremlin with patriotism. It says much that dissidents at home, from journalists failing to toe the official line to protesters on the streets, are castigated either as outright "foreign agents" (every movement, charity, or organization accepting foreign money must register itself as such) or else as unknowing victims and vectors of external contamination — contamination, that is, from the West, whose cosmopolitanism and immorality Putin has come to see as an increasing threat to Russia’s identity. As a result, Putin’s relationship with Russia’s elite — now often foreign-educated, usually well-traveled, and always interested in economic prospects abroad — has become tortuous. Having provided members of the elite with opportunities during his first presidency, Putin not only mistrusts the elite now, but sees it as unpatriotic. Some $420 billion has flowed out of Russia since 2008, and in 2013, Putin decried those who were "determined to steal and remove capital and who did not link their future to that of the country, the place where they earned their money." In response, he launched a program of "de-offshorization" that has prompted major Russian telecom, metals, and truck-manufacturing companies to announce their return to Russia. And Alexander Bastrykin, the powerful head of the Investigative Committee and one of Putin’s closest acolytes, promised a crackdown on schemes designed to transfer money out of the country. These efforts are representative of a broader reconsolidation that requires the West to stay out of Russia’s politics and that prevents its ideas and values from perverting Putin’s country. In this context, Yanukovych’s ouster from the Ukrainian presidency was the inevitable catalyst for a decisive expression of a new imperialism. From the Kremlin’s perspective, a Western-influenced and -supported opposition movement in Kiev rose up and toppled a legitimate leader who preferred Russia over the European Union, in the process threatening the liberties and prospects of the ethnic Russian population in Ukraine’s east. Perhaps the world should have paid more attention when Putin made 2014 Russia’s "Year of Culture." This was to be when the country celebrated its unique identity — a year of "emphasis on our cultural roots, patriotism, values, and ethics." It was nothing less than a recipe for a new Russian exceptionalism, one that Putin himself would craft and impose. Seen in those terms, the turmoil in Ukraine did not merely allow him to step in — it demanded it. The imperialism that has sprung from Putin’s revived emphasis on Russian identity cannot neatly be compared with either its tsarist or its Soviet forebears. The tsarist empire was driven by an expansionist logic that would gladly push Russia’s boundaries as far as they could stretch. Although multiethnic, there was no question that ethnic Russians were the imperial race and that others — with a few exceptions, such as the Baltic German aristocrats on whom Tsar Nicholas I relied — were second-class subjects. This was Russkii, ethnic Russian, not Rossiiskii, Russian by citizenship. By contrast, Soviet imperialism embodied, at least in theory, a political ideology greater than any one people or culture and a rhetoric of internationalism and evangelism. Putin has spent considerable effort in forging a new Rossiiskii state nationalism. Absent is the visceral anti-Semitism of the Russian Empire, and the widespread racism and hostility visible within much of Russian society is not reflected in government policy. Nor does the president seem interested in expanding direct Russian rule (as opposed to political authority) or in exporting any particular political philosophy to non-Russians. At the same time, Putin thinks that "the [ethnic] Russian people are, without a doubt, the backbone, the fundament, the cement of the multinational Russian people." In other words, though ethnic Russians do not rule the state, they do provide the foundations for the "Russian civilization" on which it is based. Putin’s reference to Russia as a "civilization" signals itself a return to the time-honored belief that there is something unique about Russia rooted not only in ethnic identity but in culture and history — a belief that began when the country became the chief stronghold of Eastern Orthodoxy after the fall of Constantinople. As he put it in his 2012 state-of-the-federation address: "In order to revive national consciousness, we need to link historical eras and get back to understanding the simple truth that Russia did not begin in 1917, or even in 1991, but, rather, that we have a common, continuous history spanning over 1,000 years and we must rely on it to find inner strength and purpose in our national development." <
span class="pull-quote">Putin’s conception of what it means to be Russian combines the stern-jawed heroics of the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad with the exuberant loyalty of the tsar’s own Cossacks, while excluding the humanism of Andrei Sakharov and the ascetic moralism of Leo Tolstoy. It is a version of Russian history and philosophy cherry-picked to support Putin’s notion of national exceptionalism. In fact, he recently assigned regional governors homework, writings by three prominent 19th- and 20th-century intellectuals: Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov, and Ivan Ilyin. These three, whom Putin often cites, exemplify and justify his belief in Russia’s singular place in history. They romanticize the necessity of obedience to the strong ruler — whether managing the boyars or defending the people from cultural corruption — and the role of the Orthodox Church in defending the Russian soul and ideal. In this, Putin is directly drawing on a classic Russian dichotomy between autocracy and anarchy, as well as on the country’s experiences during the 1990s, when there was no strong, consistent central rule and the country was beset by rebellion, gangsterism, poverty, and geopolitical irrelevance. In his 2013 state-of-the-federation speech, Putin made the connection between authoritarianism and social order, admitting, "Of course, this is a conservative position. But speaking in the words of Nikolai Berdyaev, the point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state." THIS IS THE CENTER OF PUTIN’S IMPERIAL VISION: The pragmatic political fixer of the 2000s now genuinely believes that Russian culture is both exceptional and threatened and that he is the man to save it. He does not see himself as aggressively expanding an empire so much as defending a civilization against the "chaotic darkness" that will ensue if he allows Russia to be politically encircled abroad and culturally colonized by Western values at home. This notion of an empire built on the basis of a civilization is crucial to understanding Putin. There are neighboring countries, such as those in the South Caucasus, that he believes ought to recognize that they are part of Russia’s sphere of influence, its defensive perimeter, and its economic hinterland. But, he stops short of wanting forcefully to bring them under direct dominion because they are not ethnically Russian. Even when Moscow separated the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008, for example, it set them up as independent puppet states; it did not annex them into the Russian Federation. Putin does insist, however, that Moscow is the protector of Russians worldwide. Where there are Russians and Russian-speakers and where Russian culture and the Russian Orthodox faith hold or held sway, these are nash — "ours." Despite his mission to "gather the Russian lands" like the 15th-century’s Prince Ivan the Great, this does not necessarily mean occupying Crimea today, Donetsk in eastern Ukraine tomorrow, and Russian-settled northern Kazakhstan the day after, but it helps define what he thinks is Russia’s birthright. In his defense of the annexation of Crimea, he said that the Soviet Union’s collapse left "the Russian nation … one of the biggest, if not the biggest, ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders." Crimea, after all, is historically, ethnically, and culturally Russian, which is why, after its residents voted in favor of annexation, Putin approvingly noted that "after a long, difficult, exhausting voyage, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their native harbor, to their native shores, to their port of permanent registration — to Russia." By contrast, the case to reach out to Transnistria in Moldova, for example, or even eastern Ukraine, is less clear. The Transnistrian Russians are relatively new colonists, arriving after World War II, and eastern Ukraine has Russian cities, but also a Catholic, Ukrainian countryside. Putin is putting as much effort into defending his vision of "Russian civilization" at home as abroad, and he has drawn a direct connection between the two. In the past, he was a patriot, a Russian Orthodox believer, and a social conservative, but he saw the difference between his own views and state policy and was little interested in enforcing a social agenda. Indeed, he warned in 1999 that "a state ideology blessed and supported by the state … [means] practically no room for intellectual and spiritual freedom, ideological pluralism, and freedom of the press — that is, for political freedom." But what he once merely frowned upon, Putin now wants to ban. The conservative backlash, with laws against gay "propaganda," the heavy-handed prosecution of members of punk band Pussy Riot after their "blasphemous" performance in a church, and renewed state control of the media, all speak to a new moral agenda — a nationalist and culturally isolationist one. Just as Putin has been trying to "de-offshorize" the Russian elite, he is now launching what could be called a "moral de-offshorization." His more recent pronouncements have been full of warnings about the "destruction of traditional values," threatening the moral degradation of Russian society. The Russian Orthodox Church thus comes increasingly to the fore as a symbol and bastion of these traditional values and all that they mean for the new imperialism. Russian Orthodoxy was never an especially evangelical faith, concentrating on survival and purity over expansion, and much the same could be said of Putin’s worldview. In Putin’s previous presidency, the church was supportive, but just one of many of his allies. Now, though, from the pulpit to television news programs, the church is one of the most consistent and visible supporters of Putin’s state-building project. When interviewed on the subject of Crimea, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, one of Putin’s cassocked cheerleaders, asserted that the church has long believed that "the Russian people are a divided nation on its historical territory, which has the right to be reunited in a single public body." IN 1999, SOON BEFORE HE BECAME ACTING PRESIDENT, Putin released a personal manifesto in which he admitted that Soviet communism was "a road to a blind alley, which is far away from the mainstream of civilization." Now, he is looking for exit ramps from that mainstream. Speaking in 2013 at the Valdai International Discussion Club, he warned against "mechanically copying other countries’ experiences" because "the question of finding and strengthening national identity really is fundamental for Russia." It is a quest that he has taken upon himself in the name of personal and national greatness: A people with a destiny cannot be allowed to let him, themselves, their country, and their mission d
own. All this helps explain the difficulty that Western governments have in understanding and dealing with him, especially this most aggressively cerebral U.S. administration. It seems that much is lost in translation between the Kremlin and the White House. Putin is not a lunatic or even a fanatic. Instead, just as there are believers who become pragmatists in office, he has made the unusual reverse journey. Putin has come to see his role and Russia’s destiny as great, unique, and inextricably connected. Even if this is merely an empire of, and in, his mind — with hazy boundaries and dubious intellectual underpinnings — this is the construct with which the rest of the world will have to deal, so long as Putin remains in the Kremlin.

 

[jollyjacktar]

A pretty slick video, I have to admit. 

Russian Armed Forces Response to NATO 2015

 

[Kirkhill]

An interesting blog on Russian Defence Policy

Some interesting takeaways from current articles:

Recruitment and Professionals suggests that move to a professional force is real but glacially slow - many are entering but few are staying around.  The vast bulk of the 700,000 PY force is made up of 1 year conscripts (half with less than 6 months training) and "professionals" with less than 3 years service.

The Plan calls for a 915,000 PY force by 2017 (all services and branches).

According to TASS, Goremykin told the assembled media that the MOD will very soon have 300,000 contractees, because it now has exactly 299,508.  He added that the military gained 80,000-90,000 men on contract service in 2013 and 2014, and has added 19,000 in 2015 thus far.

We can peel back the contract service onion as a result:

If, from this 299,508, we subtract 90,000 + 90,000 + 19,000, the Russian MOD had only 100,508 contractees as recently as 31 December 2012. Pankov claimed 186,000 contractees at the start of 2013.  The 85,492-man discrepancy represents contract attrition over the last 27 months, or an average loss of 3,166 contractees — an entire brigade of recruits — every 30 days.

As Mokrushin notes, General Staff Chief Valeriy Gerasimov said there were only 295,000 contractees in late December.  If 19,000 were added in 2015 but the total is only 299,508, then a net of only 4,508 was added due to the loss of 14,492 contractees during those months.  Call that five percent attrition, but annualized it’s 20 percent.

We were told in early November 2014 that the Russian military, for the first time, had more contractees than conscripts.  Since there were 305,000 conscripts at the time, ipso facto, contractees must have numbered at least 305,001.  You can add the November-December losses — 10,001 — to 14,492 and you get 24,493 lost in five months.  That’s 4,899 per month on average — call that two brigades of recruits lost — every 30 days.

Russian recruiting centers have to keep a torrid pace just to stay even with these losses.

But back to Goremykin.  He said the MOD’s goal for 2015 is to reach 352,000 contractees, and plans for the outyears haven’t changed — 425,000 by 2017, and 499,000 by 2020.

With possible attrition of 27,000 over the next nine months, the MOD will have to recruit 79,000 contractees to be at 352,000 by the end of 2015.

Goremykin indicated the MOD will continue allowing conscripts with higher education to serve two years as contractees instead of one as draftees.  The percentage choosing this option isn’t large, but it’s growing, according to him. The six-year service requirement to qualify for a military-backed mortgage may be dropped to five years just to encourage this category of contractees to re-up.

The GUK chief said there are plans to make the Russian Navy almost 100 percent contractee, starting with its submarine forces first, then most of its surface forces.

According to RIA Novosti, General-Colonel Goremykin also announced this year the MOD will make its entire contingent of “junior commanders” (NCOs) contractees.  It intends to do away with the longstanding practice of selecting and making some draftees into sergeants.  Goremykin added, “This is a task for this year.”

Two take aways:

As always, it’s difficult to trust the MOD’s numbers; they tell us about additions, but not subtractions.
As shorthand, we tend to call newly recruited and enlisted Russian contractees professionals when, in fact, they have just signed up to become professional.  Whether they do is a function of whether they stay, get trained, and become experienced.  One senior Russian commander has said he considers soldiers professionals when they’ve served two or more contracts (6+ years).

And this report from the recent "surprise inspection" exercises.

Not Enough Men or Transports

Another large-scale Russian military “surprise inspection” has concluded, and military commentator Ilya Kramnik has placed it, and other exercises, into perspective for Lenta.ru.

Interpreted as a prologue to war in Europe by some, the Kremlin-directed “surprise inspections” are the logical continuation of a process in recent years.  It is the process of developing strategic mobility through deployment exercises, according to Kramnik.

The latest six-day “surprise inspection” focused on deploying and redeploying forces in Russia’s Arctic regions, but President Vladimir Putin expanded it into a nation-wide exercise.

Kramnik focuses his analysis first on the Kaliningrad exclave.  Russia has practiced its defense of this region since the mid-2000s on an expanding scale. But the first large-scale drill in Kaliningrad, Kramnik says, was Zapad-2009.

Kaliningrad is where the pattern of special attention to troop mobility developed. In “surprise inspections,” military units from almost every armed service and branch were delivered by ground, rail, sea, or air transport to unfamiliar ranges in that region to conduct training missions.

The pattern has repeated in each of Russia’s “strategic directions.” Although Kramnik doesn’t describe it as such, it is, in effect, the establishment of expeditionary forces within the Russian military intended for internal transfer and use on any of Russia’s borders (or beyond them). 

If mobility questions play a key role in Kaliningrad, Kramnik continues, they are dominant when it comes to the Arctic.  All Arctic deployments depend on Navy and Air Forces transport capabilities.  Then he writes:

“It relies first and foremost on reestablishment of infrastructure which supports, if necessary, the redeployment [переброска] of troops by sea and by air and not requiring large numbers of personnel for daily service and security.  13 airfields, radar stations, repaired ports and other facilities allow forces to return quickly ‘in a threatening period.’  And to control the surrounding sea and air space a rather sufficiently compact grouping based here on a permanent basis.”

Kramnik concludes that Russia is confronting its weakness — armed forces not large enough to garrison its immense territory.  This increased attention to strategic maneuver is a means to compensate for an insufficient number of troops.  He takes a comment from Viktor Murakhovskiy:

“Today we don’t have a single self-sufficient grouping on any of our [strategic] directions.  This is the main reason for the great attention the Armed Forces leadership allocates to the potential for redeploying forces.”

Mobility, guaranteed by a developed railroad network, and in distant and isolated TVDs by the world’s second largest inventory of military-transport aviation, should support the potential for Russia, if necessary, to “swing the pendulum” — effectively maneuvering forces between different TVDs, Kramnik writes.  The capacity provided by the civilian airlines and fleet can also add to this.

But besides men, Russia also lacks enough transport aircraft. 

Kramnik writes that while attention has gone to constructing and reconstructing airfields and finding personnel to service them, the VTA’s order-of-battle is in critical condition, especially in terms of light and medium transports.  The average age of the An-26 inventory is nearly 35 years; the An-12 more than 45 years.

Events of the last year in Ukraine ended what were already difficult talks with Kyiv about building the An-70 and restarting production of the An-124.  Meanwhile, much of the Antonov Design Bureau’s competence has degraded, according to CAST Deputy Director Konstantin Makiyenko.

So today, Kramnik says, Russia has at its disposal only one serial VTA aircraft — the modernized Il-76, developed 40 years ago with serious limits on the weight and dimensions of military equipment it can deliver.  It will be supplemented by the Il-112 (light) and Il-214 (medium) transports, and by a “future aviation system transport aviation” or PAK TA.

The very same reported PAK TA that generated hysterical press here, then here, and here by promising to land an entire armored division of new Russian T-14 / Armata tanks overnight, anywhere in the world.  From an aircraft industry at pains to duplicate large but old designs like Antonov’s?  Obviously, a sudden outbreak of irrational Soviet-style giantism.

In the end, Kramnik concludes that VTA needs a high priority or Russia will have trouble moving combat capable groupings to the Arctic and Far East.  New aerial tankers are needed as well.

 

[pbi]

My take on this is that Putin, in order to maintain power and prevent Russians from asking serious questions about the future of their country, has mixed up a very nasty and dangerous stew of extreme nationalism, religious fervor and unthinking social regression. Combine these with the xenophobia and racism which are, in my opinion, both deeply rooted in Russian culture, and you get something quite scary.

Personally, I find nothing very "left wing" or "communist" about Putin's Russia at all. It bears more resemblance to a fascist or right-wing nationalist regime, since it relies on all the same tricks, and appeals to the same vile instincts.

As we sometimes see in the West, it's all too easy to wage a campaign to silence or demonize critics of the government by condemning them as "unpatriotic", or "in the pay of foreign interests", or, worse, "elites". (Funny how a word which once had such a good connotation has somehow become an epithet). The difference in the West is that the activities of a formal political opposition and of a media critical of the government of the day are both fairy well established, there is generally reliable rule of law, and we have at least a reasonable chance of a change of government after a few years.

In my view none of these things currently exist in Russia, (nor have any history) which makes the situation all the more alarming.

 

[a_majoor]

My take on this is that Putin, in order to maintain power and prevent Russians from asking serious questions about the future of their country, has mixed up a very nasty and dangerous stew of extreme nationalism, religious fervor and unthinking social regression. Combine these with the xenophobia and racism which are, in my opinion, both deeply rooted in Russian culture, and you get something quite scary.

Personally, I find nothing very "left wing" or "communist" about Putin's Russia at all. It bears more resemblance to a fascist or right-wing   left wing nationalist regime, since it relies on all the same tricks, and appeals to the same vile instincts.

As we sometimes see in the West, it's all too easy to wage a campaign to silence or demonize critics of the government by condemning them as "unpatriotic", or "in the pay of foreign interests", or, worse, "elites". (Funny how a word which once had such a good connotation has somehow become an epithet). The difference in the West is that the activities of a formal political opposition and of a media critical of the government of the day are both fairy well established, there is generally reliable rule of law, and we have at least a reasonable chance of a change of government after a few years.

In my view none of these things currently exist in Russia, (nor have any history) which makes the situation all the more alarming.

Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, the various "cult of personality" regimes like the DPRK or Venezuela are all subsets of Socialism.

 

[Boxtop22]

Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, the various "cult of personality" regimes like the DPRK or Venezuela are all subsets of Socialism.

That is pretty off topic, and unverified. You would first have to define what you consider to be socialism, and draw a line between actually socialist regimes and those who claimed to be.

My take on this is that Putin, in order to maintain power and prevent Russians from asking serious questions about the future of their country, has mixed up a very nasty and dangerous stew of extreme nationalism, religious fervor and unthinking social regression. Combine these with the xenophobia and racism which are, in my opinion, both deeply rooted in Russian culture, and you get something quite scary.

Personally, I find nothing very "left wing" or "communist" about Putin's Russia at all. It bears more resemblance to a fascist or right-wing nationalist regime, since it relies on all the same tricks, and appeals to the same vile instincts.

As we sometimes see in the West, it's all too easy to wage a campaign to silence or demonize critics of the government by condemning them as "unpatriotic", or "in the pay of foreign interests", or, worse, "elites". (Funny how a word which once had such a good connotation has somehow become an epithet). The difference in the West is that the activities of a formal political opposition and of a media critical of the government of the day are both fairy well established, there is generally reliable rule of law, and we have at least a reasonable chance of a change of government after a few years.

In my view none of these things currently exist in Russia, (nor have any history) which makes the situation all the more alarming.

I have to say that I find this to be a little bit oversimplified. Also, the whole part about xenophobia being deeply rooted in Russian culture, is kind of a huge cliche. I personally did not find Russia to be more racist than many European countries. I mean, one could argue that racism is deep rooted in the American culture as well (Obama is black? So what...). I am not trying to compare, I am just saying these are pretty vague statements that do not really mean anything and are very hard to substantiate. Not that I want to defend the Russians, but I think generalizing and oversimplifying prevents us from fully understanding them and their culture, and as long as we keep doing that, we won't provide adequate answers to the Russian equation. I see where you're going though, and I agree with the general idea but their society is far more stratified than most people try to describe it as.

I've seen a lot of highly educated, cultured, anti establishment people in Russia. They are not as vocal, true, but we tend to diminish the power of the people in Russia. They have a voice, they have power, they just haven't resorted to using it yet because they need more incentives for that. It's a cultural difference, a fundamental one, they won't change their society for progress, they'll change it out of need, there is a certain cultural stoicism accross their land. If you want a good indicator of the people's potential power, look at Putin's efforts to convince them. He resorted to big-media campaigns, he took risks and put himself in situations he hates, just to get Russians on his side. Unrelated to the current crisis, he fired Moscow's mayor during the big fires, a very-very close friend of his. He wouldn't have done that if he didn't fear popular pressure. Russia is corrupt, and it's far from being a democracy like we imagine it, but it is also very far from being that sort of fascist / nazi State where people are deprived of all rights, can't express themselves, can't assemble, etc. I've seen gay people protesting, I've seen anti-Putin protesting, I've seen all sorts of people protesting in big numbers there. At the end of the day, we must make sure not to fall in his trap, an mix the Russians, Russia and Putin all together. His objective is that we believe that he has the support of his country, and on the other side, he wants to convince his people that they must support him, because we're against them...trickeyyy.

As for Putin, of course he resorts to scare-tactics and fear mongering, but that's as old as politics. Find me a country which doesn't? Half of the global war on drugs, war on terror, was pretty much excessive scaremongering to support ideological objectives (i.e. the neocon's era). I recognize that he is a massively corrupt son-of-a-borsch but that's part of the game, that's politics in about 80% of the world. It's a messy game, often dirty, sometimes bloody.

 

[jollyjacktar]

Some of the new military gear on parade practice for the Victory parade.  Photos and video at story link.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3067609/Putin-unveils-new-Russian-tank-1993-powerful-gun-huge-arsenal-sophisticated-military-hardware.html

 

[MilEME09]

The T-14 and its family seem to be a good concept, many parts will probably be interchangeable between all the vehicles.

 

[CougarKing]

Vox.com

Why one of Russia's top foreign policy experts is worried about a major war with Europe
Updated by Max Fisher

Western countries have sought to sanction and isolate Russia over its actions in Ukraine. They have increased their military activity, particularly in the NATO-allied Baltic states along Russia's borders, to deter any more aggression. Russia, in turn, has sought to cultivate European allies who could split the anti-Russian coalition. It has also increased its own military activity along the borders of NATO, and it has warned repeatedly that it could use nuclear weapons to deter a Western attack. Both sides are competing for influence in Germany, which is widely seen as Europe's deciding vote on any Western response to Russia — economic, political, or military.

In Western capitals, policymakers tend to be more focused on Middle Eastern problems such as ISIS or Iran. Those paying close attention, though, warn that Russia could try to permanently split NATO, or even that the saber-rattling could escalate out of control into a full-blown war that nobody wants.

(...SNIPPED)