Stratfor: Russia's Great Power Strategy

[Crafty_Dog]

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Russia Warily Eyes a U.S.-Iran Deal
Analysis
November 14, 2013 | 0528 Print Text Size
Russia Warily Eyes a U.S.-Iran Deal
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (R) and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Oct. 7. (SONNY TUMBELAKA/AFP/Getty Images)
Summary

Russia is concerned that a U.S.-Iranian accord could alter the regional balance of power at Moscow's expense. Even before the possible entente, the Kremlin was worried that the U.S. military withdrawal from much of the Islamic world would give the United States more freedom of action elsewhere. An agreement with Iran could undermine Moscow's influence in the Middle East and open the door to U.S.-Iranian cooperation along Russia's southern borderlands. Like many other global and regional players with a stake in the outcome of the talks, Russia will have to contemplate a world in which Iran and the United States are not at odds.
Analysis

Over the past two decades, Russia has been one of Iran's primary supporters at a time when Tehran was relatively isolated in the international community and had hostile relations with many Western powers. However, Moscow and Tehran never shared any particular affinity. In fact, Russia and Iran have historically competed for influence in Turkey, the Caucasus and Central Asia. During the imperial periods, Persia and Russia fought several large wars from 1722 to 1828. While the Soviet Union was the first state to recognize the Islamic republic in 1979, relations between the two were cool, in part because Tehran condemned Moscow's restrictions on religion and the Soviets were already allied with Iraq.
Russia and Iran: Competing Spheres of Influence

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, relations between Tehran and Moscow began to warm while Iran's international isolation was growing. Russia committed to take over construction of Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant and became a source of military hardware for Iran. Russia has also provided Iran with intelligence on a range of matters, including Israeli networks in Lebanon and U.S. and British plans to destabilize the Iranian government by, for example, taking advantage of the 2009 "Green Revolution" protests.

For much of the 2000s, U.S. attention (military and otherwise) was focused on the Islamic world, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the standoff with Iran. Moscow took advantage of Washington's preoccupation to start rolling back Western influence in Russia's borderlands. In addition, Russia could leverage its ties with Iran in negotiations with Washington on other matters, such as U.S. support for anti-Russian governments in Ukraine and Georgia. The relationship with Iran was also a way for Russia to secure its southern flank and limit Iranian-Russian competition in the region.
George Friedman and Robert D. Kaplan on U.S.-Iran Relations

Indeed, Moscow has found the standoff between Iran and the United States to be a particularly useful foreign policy tool. For example, during Moscow's negotiations with Washington over U.S. missile defense installations in Central Europe, Russia threatened to counter by selling S-300 missile defense systems to Iran. But Russia has been careful not to support Iran too much, both because a strengthened Iran would threaten Russia's southern flank and because it could provoke the United States and its allies into taking action against Moscow.
From Leverage to Liability

Russia is comfortable and familiar with partnering with a U.S. foe, though in the past such relationships have not proved durable. During the Cold War, Moscow assumed that the United States and China would remain adversaries because there were too many constraints on either side to ever reach a compromise. Following the Sino-American entente in 1971, the United States became a swing player in Sino-Soviet relations, and China became the same in Soviet-American relations. A similar phenomenon is now taking place with Iran. Russia knows that any agreement between Iran and the United States does not mean the two will become allies, and a change would not necessarily affect Russia immediately. But Russia's leaders past and present have had to be long-term strategists, and the Kremlin is weighing the ramifications of an U.S.-Iran entente well into the future.

First, should there be a true rapprochement with Iran, it could free Washington to focus more on other parts of the world. Moscow is worried that Washington would expand its attention both in Russia's periphery, where it has been attempting to boost its influence, and inside Russia itself, where the United States has actively supported anti-Kremlin groups. Russia would not be able to use Iran to counter any U.S. activities against Moscow's interests, and it has little else that is comparably effective in negotiations with Washington.

The second concern is how much the U.S.-Iranian relationship warms in the long term. Iran alone cannot threaten Russia in the region, since the Islamic republic is much smaller economically and militarily. However, U.S. backing could allow Iran to weaken Russia's regional position. Moscow cannot be certain that improved U.S.-Iranian ties would not eventually lead to increased military cooperation and support similar to Washington's relationship with Tehran in the decades before Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Moscow's Areas of Concern

A U.S.-backed Iran increases the vulnerability of Russia's southern flank. Specifically, there are three regions that Russia is concerned could once again fall away from its influence: Turkey, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Namely, Iran has the potential to be a regional energy competitor to Russia, and it can act as a land bridge for Eurasian transit through the Russian borderlands to the Persian Gulf.

Turkey is Russia's second-largest energy consumer, as well as another regional rival to Moscow's influence in its borderlands. Ankara has been looking for alternative suppliers for energy in order to reduce its dependence on Russia. Though there are minor alternatives such as Azerbaijan, Iran has the potential to seriously compete with Russia on the energy production front. Iran is already a minor energy exporter to Turkey, but with increased foreign investment and support in Iran's energy sector -- particularly from U.S. firms -- the country could increase its production on a scale that might challenge Russian energy dominance in the region. In addition, the historical geopolitical competition that saw Russia spar with Ottoman Turkey and Persian Iran -- with the countries alternately aligning with and against one another -- could resume.

The second region where Russia's sway could be undermined is the Caucasus, where Russia relatively successfully increased its influence this year. Currently, Armenia is isolated and reliant on its relationship with Russia in nearly every respect. Georgia has ushered in a government that is more cooperative with Russia, and Russian troops are still stationed in the country's breakaway territories. Azerbaijan has become more accommodating to Russian interests to avoid isolation as the rest of the region moves closer to Moscow. Russia will want to solidify its position in the Caucasus in the short term in case Iran (possibly with U.S. backing) attempts to undermine Russia's position. For example, Iran could offer Azerbaijan an alternative land route for transporting energy to Turkey and Europe or the Persian Gulf. Iran could also boost trade and energy exports to Armenia or Georgia, challenging Russian influence there.

Lastly, Moscow's grip on Central Asia -- a region already seeing increased Sino-Russian competition -- could be jeopardized. The current struggle between Moscow and Beijing has centered on the flow of energy out of Central Asia. Russia has strengthened its control over the pipelines that run between Turkmenistan and China through Kazakhstan. However, Turkmenistan's largest natural gas fields are on the border with Iran, making Iran an option for increasing Turkmen energy exports to the Persian Gulf or the West. Iran could become a transit corridor for Kazakh and Uzbek energy as well. For Central Asian states concerned about possible instability in Afghanistan, Iran could also prove to be a useful security partner on intelligence or even military cooperation in the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal.

The Kremlin understands these vulnerabilities, but it also sees that there is little it can do to interrupt the trajectory of U.S.-Iran negotiations. Instead, Russia has to be thinking of how to protect its position in a changing world. If Iran is no longer an option, finding a new tool to counter U.S. actions and shoring up the southern borderlands will be at the top of Moscow's list of priorities.

Read more: Russia Warily Eyes a U.S.-Iran Deal | Stratfor

[Crafty_Dog]

Russia is facing a confluence of strategic challenges in the former Soviet periphery, an area where the Kremlin has worked hard to expand Russian influence over the past decade. An emerging financial crisis in Kazakhstan and the political crisis in Ukraine are threatening Russia's economic and strategic interests. At the same time, progress in Georgia and Moldova's path toward European integration is eroding Russia's leverage in the region.

What is a Geopolitical Diary? George Friedman explains.

These challenges to Russia's status as a resurgent regional power come at a delicate time because the country faces a growing host of domestic difficulties. Demographic decline, ethnic tensions and a continued dependency on an unreformed extractive industry are looming dark clouds on the horizon for the Kremlin. While not yet threatening Russia's dominance, the current crises in the former Soviet space are a challenge to Moscow's long-term strategy for the region.

Yesterday, the National Bank of Kazakhstan devalued the country's currency, the tenge, by nearly 20 percent in the aftermath of the emerging markets crisis that has been rocking developing economies over the past few weeks. The impact of the devaluation was immediate, with some currency exchanges and shops throughout Kazakhstan shutting down. More important, the devaluation has raised fears of contagion to other regional economies. A financial crisis in the Moscow-led Customs Union -- currently comprising Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus -- would hamper the expansion efforts of the bloc and perhaps even threaten the cohesion of what has been a cornerstone of Russia's strategy to secure its Central Asian hinterland.

The Kazakh move has also placed additional pressure on the already volatile economic and political situation in Ukraine, where Russia faces yet another strategic threat. Constrained in part by its need to maintain its international image during the Sochi Winter Olympics, Russia has been unsuccessful in helping President Viktor Yanukovich to end the political standoff and defuse the protests that have been reinvigorated by support from the West as well as from independent domestic actors. The ongoing political stalemate in Ukraine has demonstrated that although Russia has significant levers of influence in the country, it is for now unable to unilaterally shape political outcomes.

Farther west and south, Russia faces growing pressure in maintaining its influence in another two traditional strategic focal points: Georgia and Moldova. While those countries are not as essential to Russia's security as Ukraine, they are the key for the Kremlin's strategy of consolidating its southwestern flank. European incentives have contributed to the development of Moldova and Georgia's Western-leaning trajectory in recent years.

While Georgia's current ruling Georgian Dream coalition has been more open to engagement with Russia than the previous administration of President Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia is developing a strong partnership with NATO and is pursuing a path to European integration that threatens Russia's policy. However, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili has balanced Wednesday's announcement that the United States would finance his country's participation in the NATO Response Force with a public statement that he would be willing to meet with Russian leaders. Similarly, Moldova is building stronger ties to Western institutions.

Also on Wednesday, the European Parliament took a step toward visa liberalization for Moldovans, further incentivizing Moldovan leaders to strengthen cooperation with the European Union. Russia's support for breakaway regions, as well as its past economic pressures on Georgia and Moldova, have not been effective in dissuading the countries from pursuing integration with the West.

Much of Moscow's current assertive foreign policy in its periphery has been driven by concerns that its relatively strong position in the region will come under threat, especially when the United States is able to pay serious attention to the former Soviet periphery. The Putin administration is in the process of addressing the delicate question of restructuring the country's energy sector -- the lifeline of the country's economy -- while also managing the country's looming demographic crisis and growing ethnic tensions, which have the potential to spiral into violence.

The confluence of crises in its periphery may not necessarily signify a definite weakening of Russia's global and regional position -- the European Union, for all its rhetoric, remains weak and internally divided while the United States remains relatively distant -- but it adds to Moscow's growing burden.

Read more: Russia Suddenly Feeling Under Siege | Stratfor

[Crafty_Dog]

Very interesting piece

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/world/europe/foes-of-america-in-russia-crave-rupture-in-ties.html?emc=edit_th_20140316&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0

[Crafty_Dog]

By
Ruchir Sharma
March 23, 2014 5:55 p.m. ET

Vladimir Putin had been named the "world's most powerful person" last year by Forbes magazine well before he annexed Crimea. The land grab added to the string of geopolitical victories credited to the Russian leader—including his rescue of Syria's Bashar Assad in the chemical-weapons standoff and the safe harbor he gave to the American secrets-spiller Edward Snowden. But Mr. Putin's real power base, the economy, is crumbling.

Russia's economic growth rate has plummeted from the 7% average annual pace of the last decade to 1.3% last year. Now the brokerage arm of the country's largest state bank, Sberbank, SBER.MZ -0.23% expects zero growth in 2014.

Sensing trouble, wealthy Russians have been moving money out of the country at one of the fastest rates in two decades—$60 billion a year since 2012—and now foreign investors are pulling out too. The ruble has fallen by 22% against the U.S. dollar since 2011, and the Central Bank of the Russian Federation has been fighting to prevent a ruble collapse since the Crimean crisis began.

The situation is especially revealing because oil—the mainstay of the Russian state—has stayed relatively stable, hovering at $110 per barrel for three years. Yet the Russian economy is stagnating. This suggests deep-seated problems.

After Mr. Putin became president in 2000, he began working to end the political turmoil and inflation that gripped Russia under Boris Yeltsin. He managed the economy responsibly, getting control of the government budget and retiring debts. Rising global oil prices and easy money did the rest. Between 2000 and 2010, growth and per capita income rose to $10,000 from $1,500. Mr. Putin started this decade with an approval rating of 70%.

But he grew complacent and cocky. Former KGB allies replaced economic reformers in his inner circle. As former President George W. Bush told me in an interview, Mr. Putin in private conversations morphed from a leader who worried about Russia's debt to one who by 2008 taunted the U.S. for having too much debt. He went from saving oil profits in a rainy-day fund to spending them to cement his power.

Before 2008, Russia was putting back to work the oil fields, factories and labor force that were idled by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even so, Mr. Putin built little that was new. While Russia has a relatively high rate of investment, 26% of GDP, much of the money gets funneled into dubious projects by the state. Now the spare capacity is shrinking, and the old Soviet roads and railways are deteriorating, as any regular visitors to Russia can attest.

The inflation rate now stands at 6.3%, fourth highest among the major emerging markets, and well above the emerging world average of 3.8%. Russia has become a classic weak-investment, high-inflation economy.

Despite his growing reputation as a geostrategic mastermind, Mr. Putin's economic strategy is increasingly self-defeating, focused on extending Kremlin control. While countries like Mexico are moving to open up the state oil industry, Russia is closing it off, tossing out foreign partners. Rosneft, the large state oil company, is buying out private companies and now controls 40% of the country's oil production. It is launching its own oil field-services company, bringing in-house a service that multinational oil companies have been hiring out to efficient private contractors for years.

Russia grew richer during the last decade but did not develop in the normal sense of building up more sophisticated manufacturing industries. In a vibrant developing economy such as Korea or the Czech Republic, manufacturing accounts for at least 20% of GDP. Manufacturing in Russia accounts for just 15% of GDP, down from 18% in 2005. Small and medium-size companies of any kind, including banks, struggle to gain a foothold alongside state behemoths.

The result is that the Russian state has few new sources of income outside of oil and gas, at a time when it is taking on more dependents. Demographics are putting a squeeze on public finances, as roughly a million Russians are retiring each year, and too few young people are replacing them in a workforce of about 100 million. The situation leaves fewer taxpayers to fund pensions, after a five-year period in which the Kremlin raised pension payouts by an average of 25% a year.

This is a medium-term threat to the federal budget, which is in surplus now but shows a dangerous deficit if oil revenues—$222 billion or around 10% of GDP last year, according to IMF figures—are left out of the equation. Because of slowing growth and deteriorating terms of trade, the non-oil government deficit is now 11% of GDP. The current account is in a similar position: an apparent surplus, dependent on oil. The non-oil current-account deficit is currently running at a whopping 10% of GDP.

To keep its federal budget in balance, Russia requires an oil price of $110 barrel, so it is tiptoeing on the edge. Yet because other commodity prices have fallen, the price of oil, now $107 per barrel, is at a 30-year high compared with industrial metals. This suggests that oil, too, may be poised for a downshift—which would have a crippling impact on the Russian economy.

For now Russians are applauding their president's confident portrayal of the great power player. But that may change if the economy keeps deteriorating. Remember that by late 2011, as the scale of Russia's slowdown was becoming clear, Mr. Putin's approval ratings tanked and he faced protests in Moscow.

Mr. Putin's approval rating has bounced back following the Sochi Olympics and the invasion of Crimea. But the rest of the world should not be fooled. The world's "most powerful man" is scoring his geopolitical victories from an increasingly vulnerable economic position.

Mr. Sharma is head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and author of "Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles" (Norton, 2012).

[Crafty_Dog]

Noonan: Mr. Putin's Revealing Speech
At the Kremlin, he makes the case for an increasingly aggressive Russia.
By Peggy Noonan
March 27, 2014 7:35 p.m. ET

It is not fully remembered or appreciated—to some degree it's been forced down the memory hole—that a primary reason the American people opposed the Soviet Union and were able to sustain that opposition (and bear its costs) was that the Soviets were not only expansionist but atheistic, and aggressively so. It was part of what communism was about—God is a farce and must be removed as a force. They closed the churches, killed and imprisoned priests and nuns. Wherever communism went there was an attempt to suppress belief.

Americans, more then than now a churchgoing and believing people, knew this and recoiled. That recoil added energy, heft and moral seriousness to America's long opposition. Americans wouldn't mind if Russia merely operated under an eccentric economic system—that was their business. They wouldn't mind if it had dictators—one way or another Russia always had dictators. But that it was expansionist and atheistic—that was different. That was a threat to humanity.

One of the strategically interesting things about Vladimir Putin is that he has been careful not to set himself against religious belief but attempted to align himself with it. He has taken domestic actions that he believes reflect the assumptions of religious conservatives. He has positioned himself so that he can make a claim on a part of the Russian soul, as they used to say, that his forbears could not: He is not anti-God, he is pro-God, pro the old church of the older, great Russia.

That is only one way in which Putinism is different. The Soviets had an overarching world-ideology, Mr. Putin does not. The Soviets had an army of global reach, Mr. Putin has an army of local reach. The Soviet premiers of old, as Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an interview, operated within "a certain sense of bureaucracy, of restraints." Mr. Putin's Russia is "so concentrated economically and politically that we don't know what constraints there are on his autonomy." There is cronyism, crackdowns on the press. Mr. Putin has weakened formal institutions—and "institutions are inherently conservative" because "they provide checks and balances." Mr. Haass added that "Putin's ambitions and limits are not clear."

I think we got a deep look at Mr. Putin's attitudes and goals in his speech last week at the Kremlin, telling the world his reasons for annexing Crimea. It is a remarkable document and deserves more attention. It was a full-throated appeal to Russian nationalism, and an unapologetic expression of Russian grievance. (The translation is from the Prague Post.)

At the top, religious references. Crimea is "where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus."

Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia. Yes, in 1954 "the Communist Party head, Nikita Khrushchev" decided to transfer it to Ukraine. "What stood behind this decision of his—a desire to win the support of the Ukrainian political establishment or to atone for the mass oppressions of the 1930s in Ukraine—is for historians to figure out." But Khrushchev headed "a totalitarian state" and never asked the Crimeans for their views. Decades later, "what seemed impossible became a reality. The U.S.S.R. fell apart. . . . The big country was gone." Things moved swiftly. Crimeans and others "went to bed in one country and awoke in other ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former [Soviet] republics." Russia "was not simply robbed, it was plundered." Crimeans in 1991 felt "they were handed over like a sack of potatoes."

Russia "humbly accepted the situation." It was rocked, "incapable of protecting its interests." Russians knew they'd been treated unjustly, but they chose to "build our good-neighborly relations with independent Ukraine on a new basis." Russia was accommodating, respectful. But Ukraine was led by successive bad leaders who "milked the country, fought among themselves for power."

"I understand those who came out on Maidan with peaceful slogans against corruption," Mr. Putin said. But forces that "stood behind the latest events in Ukraine" had "a different agenda." They "resorted to terror, murder and riots." They are "Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites." "They continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day." They have "foreign sponsors" and "mentors."

He declared that "there is no legitimate executive authority in Ukraine now," that government agencies are controlled by "imposters," often "controlled by radicals." In that atmosphere residents of Crimea turned to Russia for protection. Russia could not abandon them. It helped them hold a referendum.

"Western Europe and North America" now say Moscow has violated international law. "It's a good thing that they at least remember that there exists such a thing as international law—better late than never." And Russia has violated nothing: Its military "never entered Crimea" but was already there, in line with international agreements. Russia chose merely to "enhance" its forces there, within limits previously set. There was not a single armed confrontation, and no casualties. Why? Because Crimeans wanted them there. If it had been an armed intervention, he said, surely a shot would have been fired.

In the decades since the Soviet Union's fall—or, as Mr. Putin called it, since "the dissolution of bipolarity on the planet"—the world has become less stable. The U.S. is guided not by international law but by "the rule of the gun." Americans think they are exceptional and can "decide the destinies of the world," building coalitions on the basis of "if you are not with us, you are against us"—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. The "color revolutions" have produced "chaos" instead of freedom, and "the Arab Spring turned into the Arab Winter."

Mr. Putin cleverly knocked down the idea of European integration. The real problem, he said, is that the West has been moving against "Eurasian integration." Russia over the years has tried to be cooperative, but the U.S. and its allies have repeatedly lied and "made decisions behind our backs." NATO expanded to the east; a missile-defense system is "moving forward." The "infamous policy of containment" continues against Russia today. "They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner. . . . But there is a limit to everything."

Russia does not want to harm Ukraine. "We do not want to divide Ukraine; we do not need that." But Kiev had best not join NATO, and Ukrainians should "put their own house in order."

What does this remarkable speech tell us? It presents a rationale for moving further. Ukraine, for instance, is a government full of schemers controlled by others—it may require further attention. It expresses a stark sense of historical grievance and assumes it is shared by its immediate audience. It makes clear a formal animus toward the U.S. It shows Mr. Putin has grown comfortable in confrontation. His speech posits the presence of a new Russia, one that is "an independent, active participant in international affairs." It suggests a new era, one that doesn't have a name yet. But the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union were one thing, and this is something else—something rougher, darker and more aggressive.

It tells us this isn't about Crimea.

It tells us this isn't over.

[G M]

http://www.theweek.co.uk/europe/ukraine/57830/why-are-polish-men-london-getting-military-call-papers

No worries. Wars never start in Poland.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-29/isolated-russia-makes-friends-hold-military-drill-china-strikes-multi-billion-deals-

[DougMacG]

Copying Ambassador Basora's piece into this thread by request:

This looks about right to me, "Unless and until the West takes a seriously strong stand against Putin’s undeclared war against Kiev and commits to keeping Ukraine united and independent, Putin will continue on his present path of stealth conquest."

Foreign Policy Research Institute

http://www.fpri.org/articles/2014/05/putins-greater-novorossiya-dismemberment-ukraine

Putin’s “Greater Novorossiya” - The Dismemberment of Ukraine
Adrian A. Basora, Aleksandr Fisher  
About the Author:  http://www.fpri.org/contributors/adrian-basora  
(more at the link, sources, footnotes)  May 2014

On April 17, Vladimir Putin introduced a dangerously expansive new concept into the Ukraine crisis. During his four-hour question and answer session on Russian TV that day he pointedly mentioned “Novorossiya” – a large swath of territory conquered by Imperial Russia during the 18th century from a declining Ottoman Empire. This historic Novorossiya covered roughly a third of what is now Ukraine (including Crimea).

Subsequent comments and actions by Putin and his surrogates have made it clear that the Kremlin’s goal is once again to establish its dominance over the lands once called Novorossiya. Furthermore, it is clear that Putin hopes to push his control well beyond this region’s historic boundaries to include other contiguous provinces with large Russian-speaking populations.

Most commentators and media are still focusing on Putin’s annexation of Crimea and on the threatened Russian takeover of the eastern Ukraine provinces (oblasts) of Donetsk and Luhansk. But the far more ominous reality, both in Moscow’ rhetoric and on the ground, is that Putin has already begun laying the groundwork for removing not only these, but several additional provincesfrom Kiev’s control and bringing them under Russian domination, either by annexation or by creating a nominally independent Federation of Novorossiya.

Unless the U.S. and its European allies take far more decisive countermeasures than they have to date, Putin’s plan[1] will continue to unfold slowly but steadily and, within a matter of months, Ukraine will either be dismembered or brought back into the Russian sphere of influence.

Putin’s convenient and expansive (though historically inaccurate) ‘rediscovery’ of Novorossiya now appears to include the following provinces in addition to Crimea: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, Mikolaiv and Odessa. If he can turn this vision into a reality, Moscow would dominate the entire northern littoral of the Black Sea and control a wide band of contiguous territory stretching all the way from Russia’s current western boundaries to the borders of Romania and Moldova (conveniently including the latter’s already self-declared breakaway province of Transdnistria).



If all of these provinces are either annexed by Russia or form a nominally independent federation of ‘Greater Novorossiya’, the population of Ukraine would drop from 46 million to 25 million. This would not only subtract nearly 45% of Ukraine’s 2013 population but also roughly two thirds of its GDP, given that the country’s eastern and southern provinces are far more industrialized than those of the center and west.[2]

So far, neither financial sanctions nor international condemnation of Russia’s aggressions against Ukraine have had the slightest deterrent effect against Putin’s strategy. Instead, he is now steadily undermining Kiev’s control of the country’s eastern oblasts in small slices – currently at the rate of two or three strategic centers per day – the same pace and playbook that enabled Russia to establish total control of Crimea within a matter of weeks.

Given its track record so far, the weak government in Kiev and its even weaker military and security forces are obviously powerless to put a stop to Putin’s Novorossiya strategy. Meanwhile, the western powers continue to talk but take actions that are patently having no deterrent value. Unless the U.S. and its European allies can manage a quantum leap in their sanctions and counter-measures, Putin’s strategy seems likely to continue to unfold, slowly but steadily, likely without need for any overt large-scale Russian military intervention other than menacing moves on Ukraine’s borders.

If this happens, not only will the map of Ukraine be dramatically redrawn, but the entire geopolitical balance of Europe will be decisively altered. And, needless to say, the fate of democracy in the region, which has already suffered worrisome erosion in several post-communist countries over the past few years, will be severely compromised.

And, beyond Europe, Putin will have taken a giant step towards creating his new Moscow-dominated Eurasian Union. This is a potentially massive geopolitical and economic bloc stretching through the Caucasus into post-Soviet Central Asia – with obvious negative global repercussions.

Putin’s Vision of “Greater Novorossiya”

Novorossiya (literally, New Russia) refers historically to a very large section of present-day Ukraine lying north of the Black Sea and stretching from Luhansk and Donetsk in the east to Odessa in the west. Russia, and subsequently the USSR, controlled this region from the 18th century until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. But in the Soviet period it was part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic rather than directly part of Russia.

Ominously, however, on April 17, when Putin evoked the memory of historic Novorossiya, he also exclaimed that only “God knows” why Russia surrendered this region in 1922 to Ukraine.

Just a few weeks earlier, Putin had described Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to incorporate Crimea into Ukraine in 1954 in a remarkably similar vein. The analogy seems all too obvious.

Furthermore, as if Putin’s concept of correcting historic anomalies were not sufficiently threatening, he quickly expanded his description of Novorossiya to include territories that lie well beyond its actual historical boundaries, most notably by explicitly including Kharkiv – a major city and important oblast that was never part of that historic region.

Furthermore, Putin and his hard-line Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, along with the Kremlin’s prolific propaganda machine, also regularly attempt to legitimize Russian intervention by focusing on the high number of “Russians” in Ukraine overall. Lavrov has also repeatedly claimed that Moscow has a right to protect Russian “citizens” in Ukraine – thus adding a further argument in favor of defining the new version of Novorossiya quite expansively.

http://www.fpri.org/docs/resize/image_2-400x307.png

Putin’s Motives and Russian Grand Strategy

Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine strategy is driven by three goals: survival, empire and legacy.

First and foremost, Putin sees the fate of Ukraine as an existential issue both for himself and for the authoritarian regime that he and his inner circle have gradually rebuilt over the past fifteen years. The Orange Revolution of 2004 was a deep shock to Putin because of the echoes it created in Russia and because Ukraine seemed to be on the brink of becoming a major source of longer-term “democratic diffusion” right on Russia’s long southwestern border. Fortunately for Putin, however, the luster of this revolution quickly wore off once its leaders gained office and failed to live up to their reformist promises. From the start there was infighting between Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko; reforms were postponed; the Ukrainian economy spiraled downward and corruption remained rampant.

By the time Yushchenko’s presidency ended in 2010, many voters had come to see Viktor Yanukovych as a preferable alternative. Yanukovich also reportedly benefited from substantial financial and “political technology” support from Moscow. For Putin, Yanukovych was a promising alternative to the western-oriented “Orange” leaders, since he seemed likely to maintain strong trade and financial ties with Russia, show proper deference towards Moscow and, above all, keep Ukraine out of NATO. But it turned out that too many Ukrainians were unwilling to follow the Putin/Yanukovich script.

When Yanukovich fled Kiev on February 21, it must have seemed to the Kremlin that a second wave of the Orange Revolution had taken control of Ukraine. Putin no doubt trembled with fury – but also with fear.

Putin’s second driving motive for going all out to reassert as much dominance as possible in Ukraine combines his goals of restoring a Russian empire and of burnishing his personal legacy. It is abundantly clear that Putin seeks to restore Russia to its former imperial glory, and in so doing to secure for himself a place in history as one of the greatest Russian leaders of all time. In a 2005 speech, Putin famously stated that “the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.”[3]

Putin’s comments on the Soviet Union, taken together with his current vision of Novorossiya, should make it crystal clear to the West that the crisis in Ukraine is not a small-scale conflict, nor simply an internal political problem between eastern and western Ukraine. Rather, a de facto war for control of Ukraine has begun – and Ukraine, in turn, is only a part (though a very important one) of Putin’s strategic plan to re-establish Russian hegemony over as much as possible of the former Soviet Union, and thus to reassert Russia’s role as a major global power.

Repeating the Crimea Playbook, Province by Province

Although his strategy in Ukraine is highly ambitious, Putin is clearly convinced that the most effective tactic is to proceed one stealthy step at a time. He will avoid overt military intervention if at all possible so as not to shock the western powers into genuinely painful countermeasures. Putin is clearly repeating the Crimea pattern in eastern Ukraine, having already established de facto control of over a dozen key locations in its most important eastern province, Donetsk. This is Ukraine’s most industrialized oblast[4], with a population of 74.9 percent Russian speakers and very strong industrial ties to Russia.



The next three oblasts most immediately threatened by Russian stealth takeovers are Luhansk with 68.6 percent Russian speakers, Zaporizhia with 48.2 percent. Kherson with 24.9 percent also belongs on the immediately endangered list, despite its lower percentage of Russian-speakers, because Russia needs to control it along with Donetsk in order to create a “land bridge” between Russia and Crimea. A further “favorable” factor from Moscow’s viewpoint is that Kherson – along with Donetsk, Zaporizhia and part of Luhansk – falls largely within the boundaries of historic Novorossiya.

Beyond these four provinces, there have already been major Russian incursions into the two contiguous provinces of Luhansk and Kharkiv (which has a 44.3 percent Russian speaking population). And, as mentioned earlier, Putin has also proclaimed publically, even though inaccurately, that Kharkiv is part of Novorossiya.

To the west of the six oblasts mentioned above are Mykolaiv and Odessa, which have 29.4 percent and 41.9 percent Russian speakers, respectively. The strategic port city of Odessa has already seen the same type anti-Kiev agitation and organization of a secessionist movement that are the hallmarks of the Crimea playbook. Christian Caryl, an American journalist and editor of Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab, has recently interviewed Odessans who are excited about the prospect of an autonomous Novorossiya state. He quotes one citizen as exclaiming, "A population of 20 million, with industry, resources. With advantages like that, who needs to become a part of Russia? By European standards that's already a good-sized country.”[5]

Language, Ethnicity and Attitudes



In claiming a Russian right to intervene in these eastern and southern provinces, it is clear that Moscow will use a maximalist definition of “Russians”. This means counting the number of Russian speakers rather than the number of ethnic Russians.[6] This is to Putin’s advantage, since the number of ethnic Russians in these provinces is much lower than the number of Russian speakers. Furthermore, not only do many Ukrainians living in the east and south acknowledge Russian as their native tongue, but an additional significant percentage speak the language fluently, which Moscow could well use as a further rationale either for the annexation of these provinces or to create an enlarged version of Novorossiya that would in fact be subservient to Moscow.

Beyond fueling ethnic and linguistic differences to justify Russia’s incursions into Ukraine, Putin is working systematically to create a permanent rift between eastern and western Ukrainians based on pre-existing differences of perspective and attitude, and by building upon manufactured confrontations and grievances.

Recent public opinion polls conducted by the Baltic Surveys/The Gallup Organization show that the linguistic and ethnic divisions between western and eastern Ukraine also correlate with the two regions’ viewpoints on a variety of issues including: Russia’s military excursion in Crimea, the EuroMaidan protests that ousted Yanukovich, and the upcoming presidential election on May 25.[7] According to the poll, over 94 percent of western Ukrainians believed Putin’s actions in Crimea constituted an invasion, while only 44 percent of eastern Ukrainians believed the same. In fact, 45 percent of eastern Ukrainians believed that the referendum in Crimea on joining Russia is a legitimate right of the residents of Crimea to express their opinion about the future of Crimea.

Sixty-six percent of citizens in western Ukraine said they viewed the Euromaidan events positively while only 7 percent of citizens in eastern Ukraine said the same. While 34 percent of citizens in western Ukraine said they would vote for Petro Poroshenko, the “chocolate oligarch”, in the upcoming presidential election, only 7 percent of eastern Ukrainians agreed, and 11 percent said they would vote for Serhiy Tihipko, a former member of Yanukovich’s Party of Regions who has taken a pro-federalization stance.

Perhaps most importantly, 59 percent of citizens in eastern Ukraine are already in favor of joining Russia’s Customs Union as opposed to 20 percent who are in favor of joining the European Union.

The total population of Putin’s ideal Greater Novorossiya (Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, Dnepropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Odessa, and Crimea), would be approximately 21 million. This would be a sizable potential addition to the Customs Union with Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan, which would give Putin’s Russia even stronger economic leverage against the European Union.

Russian journalist Yulia Latynina views Putin’s tactics in Crimea and eastern Ukraine as a new military strategy, in which the government controls and distorts information to cast Russia and the pro-Russian separatists as the victims. She argues that this “is far more important than achieving a military victory. To come out the winner in this scenario, you don't have to shoot your enemy. All you have to do is either kill your own men — or provoke others into killing them — and then portray it as an act of aggression by the enemy with all of the attendant media spin.”[8] Due to this media spin, all of the Ukrainian government’s attempts at diffusing the situation in the eastern provinces have horribly backfired.

Implications for Moldova and Beyond

Even assuming that Putin achieves his ambitious vision of a Greater Novorossiya, there is no guarantee that Putin will stop at Odessa. In fact, the contrary seems likely. Moldova would also be directly threatened. In March, the separatist de facto government in Transdniestria asked to be incorporated into the Russian federation.[9] Putin could thus easily repeat the same tactics that were successful in Crimea and are working in eastern Ukraine, in Transdniestria. This breakaway region would become independent from Moldova and possibly join the Novorossiya federation.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the potential impact of this scenario on the weak remainder state of Moldova or, for that matter of the putative rump state of central and western Ukraine. Suffice it to say that, if Ukraine and the West do not act decisively against Russian “irredentism” in eastern Ukraine, any state in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, or Central Asia with a Russian speaking minority could well be at risk of either dismemberment or of de facto Russian domination as the price of avoiding it.

Can Putin be Stopped?

It is hard to envision any realistic scenario whereby the current Ukrainian government in Kiev might stop this slow and steady dismemberment of the country. Given pro-Russian separatists’ success in seizing government buildings all across eastern Ukraine with impunity, what options does the current Ukrainian government have?

If Ukraine can manage to make serious military efforts to counteract the gradual slicing off of its provinces, Moscow will blame the resultant bloodshed on Western-instigated “fascists” in Kiev and would likely intervene militarily to assure the victory of the pro-Russian separatists whom they are currently instigating and assisting with semi-covert military support. Putin has already expressed indignation towards Ukraine’s miniscule “anti-terrorist operations” in the east and has called these actions a “grave crime.”[10]

Given Ukraine’s likely ineffectiveness in dealing with Russia’s incursions into its territory, what options does the West have in dealing with Russia’s increased aggression and imperialistic ambitions?

The U.S., its NATO allies and the European Union are left with two basic options. The first is to continue the current pattern of de facto acquiescence. The West can continue its current course of public condemnation and minor punitive economic and financial sanctions that stop short of really serious pain on either side. If so, Putin will almost certainly ignore the West’s sanctions, despite their toll on the Russian economy. He will thus move steadily ahead with his plan to either separate and federalize eastern and southern Ukraine, or incorporate it into Russia.

The alternative is for the West to undertake truly deep and thus mutually painful economic sanctions that would sharply reduce Russia’s oil and gas exports and revenues, decimate foreign investment and wreak havoc with that country’s economy. This would require going very far beyond the half-hearted European support for intensified sanctions against Russia that we have seen so far, especially among European countries with strong trade ties to Russia.[11]

And, given the insulation of Putin and his ruling elite from economic pain, there would also need to be a strong show of military resolve. The U.S. would need to at least double the number of its forces stationed in Europe (currently only 66,000 vs. 400,000 during the Cold War) and NATO would have to move several thousand European, Canadian and American troops to the eastern borders of Poland and the Baltic republics, and to northeastern Romania.

As of now, the West has not committed a substantial number of troops to the defense of Eastern Europe, despite its treaty obligations to defend these NATO members. On April 23rd, the U.S. sent 150 American troops, with 450 more expected to join them, to Poland as part of a military exercise.[12] However, these 150 troops are dwarfed by Russia’s 40,000 men stationed at the Ukrainian border.[13] From Putin’s expansive perspective, these micro-exercises are derisory at a time when he has held military exercises near Ukraine involving troops in the tens of thousands.

Putin will not be deterred by anything short of a commensurate show of resolve by the Western powers.

Unless and until the West takes a seriously strong stand against Putin’s undeclared war against Kiev and commits to keeping Ukraine united and independent, Putin will continue on his present path of stealth conquest. He will implement his own vision of Novorossiya as a step towards re-establishing a “Greater Russia” – one that continues its aggressive expansionism well beyond Ukraine and in which he plays a major role on the world stage dedicated to undercutting the West and its democratic values.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/opinion/russias-anti-west-isolationism.html?emc=edit_th_20140721&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193

[Crafty_Dog]

By Robert D. Kaplan and Eugene Chausovsky

Editor's Note: With Russia, Europe and Ukraine continuing negotiations over natural gas supplies this week, Stratfor is republishing this Global Affairs column from November 2013. In addition to detailing the web of energy pipelines that connects the two landmasses, Chief Geopolitical Analyst Robert D. Kaplan and Senior Eurasia Analyst Eugene Chausovsky make the case that the relationship between Russia and Europe revolves around hydrocarbons -- and that Moscow's best option is to preserve as much of its European market share as possible.

At this juncture in history, the fate of Europe is wound up not in ideas but in geopolitics. For millennia, eruptions from Asia have determined the fate of Europe, including invasions and migrations by Russians, Turkic tribes and Byzantine Greeks. Central and Eastern Europe, with their geographical proximity to the Asian steppe and the Anatolian land bridge, have borne the brunt of these cataclysms. Today is no different, only it is far subtler. Armies are not marching; rather, hydrocarbons are flowing. For that is the modern face of Russian influence in Europe. To understand the current pressures upon Europe from the east it is necessary to draw a map of energy pipelines.
Russian-European Natural Gas Networks
Click to Enlarge

One-quarter of all energy for Europe comes from Russia, but that statistic is an average for the whole continent; thus, as one moves successively from Western Europe to Central Europe to Eastern Europe that percentage rises dramatically. Natural gas is more important than oil in this story, but let us consider oil first.

Russia is among the top oil producers worldwide and has among the largest reserves, with vast deposits in both western and eastern Siberia. Crucially, Russia is now investing in the technology necessary to preserve its position as a major energy hub for years and decades to come, though it is an open question whether current production levels can be maintained in the long term. Russia's primary gateway to Europe for oil (and natural gas) is Belarus in the north and Ukraine in the south. The Druzhba pipeline network takes Russian oil through Belarus to Poland and Germany in the north and in the south through Ukraine to Central Europe and the Balkans, as well as to Italy. Russia certainly has influence in Europe on account of its oil, and has occasionally used its oil as a means of political pressure on Belarus and Ukraine. But moving westward into Europe, negotiations over Russian oil are generally about supply and pricing, not political factors. It is really with natural gas that energy becomes a useful political tool for Russia.

Russia is, after the United States, simply the largest producer of natural gas worldwide, with trillions of cubic meters of reserves. Europe gets 25 percent of its natural gas from Russia, though, again, that figure rises dramatically in Central and Eastern Europe; generally, the closer a country is to Russia, the more dependent it is on Russian natural gas. Central Europe (with the exception of Romania, which has its own reserves) draws roughly 70 percent of the natural gas it consumes from Russia. Belarus, Bulgaria and the Baltic states depend on Russia for 90-100 percent of their natural gas needs. Russia has used this dependence to influence these states' decision-making, offering beneficial terms to states that cooperate with Moscow, while charging higher prices and occasionally cutting off supplies altogether to those that don't. This translates into real geopolitical power, even if the Warsaw Pact no longer exists.

The Yamal pipeline system brings Russian natural gas to Poland and Germany via Belarus. The Blue Stream pipeline network brings Russian natural gas to Turkey. Nord Stream, which was completed in 2011, brings Russian natural gas directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea, cutting out the need for a Belarus-Poland land route. Thus, Belarus and Poland now have less leverage over Russia, even as they are mainly dependent on Russia for their own natural gas supplies by way of separate pipelines.

The next major geopolitical piece in this massive network is the proposed South Stream pipeline. South Stream would transport Russian natural gas across the Black Sea to Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Austria, with another line running to Italy via the Balkans and the Adriatic. South Stream could make Central Europe and the Balkans more dependent on Russia, even as Russia does not require Ukraine for the project. This, combined with Nord Stream, helps Russia tighten its grip on Ukraine.

But there is also Caspian Sea oil and natural gas to consider, particularly from Azerbaijan, which inhibits Russia's monopoly. Oil and natural gas pipelines built with the help of Western energy companies in the 2000s bring energy from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku through Georgia to Turkey and onwards to Europe. Furthermore, the Nabucco pipeline network has the potential to bring Caspian Sea natural gas across the Caucasus and Turkey all the way to Austria, with spur lines coming from Iraq and Iran. Obviously, this is a complex and politically fraught project that has not materialized. Winning out over Nabucco has been the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), a far less ambitious network that will bring Azerbaijani natural gas across Turkey to Greece and Italy. Because TAP avoids Central Europe and the Balkans, its selection over Nabucco constitutes a clear victory for Russia, which wants Central and Eastern Europe dependent on it and not on Azerbaijan for energy. In fact, Russian political pressure was a factor in TAP's victory over Nabucco.

The real long-term threat to Russian influence in Europe comes less from Azerbaijan than from the building of liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals. These are facilities located on coastlines that convert LNG back to natural gas after it has been liquefied to enable transport across seas and oceans. With an LNG terminal, a country is less dependent on pipelines emanating from Russia. Poland and Lithuania are building such terminals on the Baltic Sea and Croatia wants to build one on the Adriatic. The Visegrad countries of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have been building pipeline interconnectors, in part to integrate with -- and take advantage of -- these Baltic terminals. This LNG comes from many sources, including North Africa, the Middle East and North America. That is why Russia is deeply concerned about vast shale gas discoveries in the United States and elsewhere in Europe -- natural gas that could eventually be exported with the help of LNG terminals to Central and Eastern Europe.

Russia is also worried about the European Union's attempt to break its energy monopoly through legal means. According to new legislation known as the Third Energy Package, which is still in the process of being implemented, one energy company cannot be responsible for production, distribution and sales, because the European Union defines that as a monopoly. And such monopolistic practices actually describe Russian energy companies like Gazprom. If the European Union gets its way, Russian corporate control will be unbundled.

Therefore, we forecast that Russia's use of energy to extract political concessions will weaken over time, but will nevertheless remain formidable in parts of Central and Eastern Europe. While energy has served as an effective tool for Russia to wield political influence in Europe, Moscow is first and foremost concerned about maintaining the revenue from energy exports that has become so crucial for Russia's own budget and economic stability. In this sense, maintaining European market share (and further developing market share in Asia) takes precedence over political manipulation for Moscow.

Consequently, Russia will have to become even more subtle and sophisticated in the way that it deals with its former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact satellites.

Read more: Pipelines of Empire | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook

[DougMacG]

In the context of Putin running Russia, this seems quite plausible to me:

Russia’s Next Land Grab

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/opinion/russias-next-land-grab.html?_r=1

WASHINGTON — UKRAINE isn’t the only place where Russia is stirring up trouble. Since the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Moscow has routinely supported secessionists in bordering states, to coerce those states into accepting its dictates. Its latest such effort is unfolding in the South Caucasus.

In recent weeks, Moscow seems to have been aggravating a longstanding conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan while playing peacemaking overlord to both. In the first week of August, as many as 40 Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers were reported killed in heavy fighting near their border, just before a summit meeting convened by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

The South Caucasus may seem remote, but the region borders Russia, Iran and Turkey, and commands a vital pipeline route for oil and natural gas to flow from Central Asia to Europe without passing through Russia. Western officials cannot afford to let another part of the region be digested by Moscow — as they did when Russia separated South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, just to the north, in a brief war in 2008, and when it seized Crimea from Ukraine this year.

Conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is not new. From 1992 to 1994, war raged over which former Soviet republic would control the autonomous area of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region with a large Christian Armenian population of about 90,000 within the borders of largely Muslim Azerbaijan. The conflict has often been framed as “ethnic,” but Moscow has fed the antagonisms. That war ended with an Armenian military force, highly integrated with Russia’s military, in charge of the zone. The war had killed 30,000 people and made another million refugees.

Even today, Armenia controls nearly 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory, comprising most of Nagorno-Karabakh and several surrounding regions. Despite a cease-fire agreement since 1994, hostilities occasionally flare, and Russian troops run Armenia’s air defenses. Moscow also controls key elements of Armenia’s economy and infrastructure.

More to the point, Russia has found ways to keep the conflict alive. Three times in the 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan signed peace agreements, but Russia found ways to derail Armenia’s participation. (In 1999, for example, a disgruntled journalist suspected of having been aided by Moscow assassinated Armenia’s prime minister, speaker of Parliament and other government officials.)

An unresolved conflict — a “frozen conflict,” Russia calls it — gives Russian forces an excuse to enter the region and coerce both sides. Once Russian forces are in place, neither side can cooperate closely with the West without fear of retribution from Moscow.

The latest violence preceded a summit meeting on Aug. 10 in Sochi, Russia, at which Mr. Putin sought an agreement on deploying additional Russian “peacekeepers” between Armenia and Azerbaijan. On July 31, Armenians began a coordinated, surprise attack in three locations. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham H. Aliyev, and defense minister were outside their country during the attack and Mr. Aliyev had not yet agreed to attend the summit meeting. But the Armenian president, Serzh A. Sargsyan, had agreed to; it’s unlikely that his military would have initiated such a provocation without coordinating with Russia. (The meeting went on, without concrete results.)

Before the meeting, Moscow had been tightening its grip on the South Caucasus, with Armenia’s tacit support. Last fall, Armenia’s government gave up its ambitions to sign a partnership agreement with the European Union and announced that it would join Moscow’s customs union instead.

Renewed open warfare would give Russia an excuse to send in more troops, under the guise of peacekeeping. Destabilizing the South Caucasus could also derail a huge gas pipeline project, agreed to last December, that might lighten Europe’s dependence on Russian fuel.

But astonishingly, American officials reacted to the current fighting by saying they “welcome” the Russian-sponsored summit meeting. Has Washington learned nothing from Georgia and Ukraine? To prevent escalation of the Caucasus conflict, and deny Mr. Putin the pretext for a new land grab, President Obama should invite the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia to Washington and show that America has not abandoned the South Caucasus. This would encourage the leaders to resist Russia’s pressure. The United Nations General Assembly session, which opens next week, seems like an excellent moment for such a demonstration of support.

Washington should put the blame on Russia and resist any so-called conflict resolution that leads to deployment of additional Russian troops in the region.

Finally, the West needs a strategy to prevent Moscow from grabbing another bordering region. Nagorno-Karabakh, however remote, is the next front in Russia’s efforts to rebuild its lost empire. Letting the South Caucasus lose its sovereignty to Russia would strike a deadly blow to America’s already diminished ability to seek and maintain alliances in the former Soviet Union and beyond.

[Crafty_Dog]

Excellent find.

Please post here as well:  http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1673.0

[Crafty_Dog]

 Russia Refocuses on the Middle East
Geopolitical Diary
December 11, 2014 | 02:49 GMT Text Size Print

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov has maintained an active travel schedule in the Middle East recently. Bogdanov, a career Russian diplomat with decades of experience in the Middle East, coordinates closely with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and is considered a serious behind-the-scenes player in terms of Russia's diplomatic efforts in the region. (Putin named him as his special envoy to the Middle East on Nov. 1.) This is why we took note of Wednesday's announcement by the Russians that they are ready to host a meeting between the United States and Syrian President Bashar al Assad's government in Moscow if both sides request it, although serious impediments to such a scenario remain.

The announcement comes on the heels of high-level Russian moves in Turkey and Iran. Moscow's announced plans to abandon the South Stream natural gas project in favor of a pipeline running directly though Turkey, along with Russia's involvement in the P-5+1 nuclear talks with Tehran in recent weeks, reflect a resurgence of Russian diplomatic activity in the Middle East.

What is a Geopolitical Diary? George Friedman Explains.

Russia's complicated relationship with Iran limits the role Moscow can play in Iranian diplomatic efforts — a reality reinforced by Tehran's announcement on Wednesday that it would not be entering an oil bartering deal with Moscow, despite a recent flurry of Russian media reports claiming that such a deal is imminent.

Moscow understands the limits of reaching a lasting strategic accord with Iran, but Russia's primary goals in its Middle East strategy are not necessarily better bilateral relations with individual states such as Iran, Egypt or Syria. Rather, Russian activities in the Middle East are meant to augment its global strategies, especially with regard to directing U.S. attention away from areas that the Kremlin considers threatened by Washington's actions, such as Ukraine. Russia has been successful in its Middle East activities, most notably in negotiating a chemical weapons destruction plan that deterred direct U.S. military strikes against Syria in 2013.

Russia also aims to limit U.S. opportunities for building more stable relationships in the Middle East. Moscow has been successful in this regard, as illustrated most recently by Turkey and Russia's plans to transit natural gas to Europe, circumventing Ukraine, and in a more limited sense with Moscow's relationship with Tehran. A meeting between the United States and al Assad also risks alienating the United States from regional allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which strongly oppose any policy that could result in the al Assad government staying in place as part of a negotiated settlement.

Over the past month traveling across the Middle East, Bogdanov has hosted representatives from Syria in Moscow and met with the Qataris in Bahrain. Amid mounting domestic economic difficulties and ongoing tensions with the West over Ukraine, Moscow is reverting to what has become a familiar and successful tactic in recent years.

Russia's intentions in the Middle East are hardly altruistic. If Russia wants to mediate for the motley crew of combatants and foreign nations playing supporting roles in the Syrian conflict, the primary goal is unlikely to be peace. However, by refusing to be sidelined in global discussions and by continuing to draw U.S. attention and effort into the traditional quagmire of Middle Eastern conflict, Russia hopes to better secure its own interests in its strategic periphery. Moscow has faced a strong challenge to its position in Ukraine, and its energy-dependent economy will struggle to adjust to the current downtown in global oil prices. Russia is far from down for the count, however, and recent diplomatic moves in the Middle East show that Moscow is still a formidable geopolitical player.

Read more: Russia Refocuses on the Middle East | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook

[Crafty_Dog]

http://20committee.com/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/01/12/glenn-delivers-a-truly-horrifying-look-at-the-origins-of-the-russian-threat/

Is he crazy or on to something?

[Crafty_Dog]

Second post-- but please remember to comment on the first one:

 How Foreigners Can Help the Russian Military
Analysis
January 14, 2015 | 10:00 GMT Print Text Size
Russian soldiers march in Moscow's Red Square on May 9, 2014, during a Victory Day parade. (KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images)
Summary

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree Jan. 3 that will allow foreign nationals between the ages of 18 and 30 to serve in the military. The decree came with several stipulations: Foreigners must speak Russian, have no criminal record and sign contracts obligating them to serve for at least five years. This new initiative seeks to solve Moscow's difficulties in reaching its goal of maintaining a million-strong military and transitioning from a conscript-dominated system to one staffed by professional soldiers. Adding foreign troops to the mix will also help Russia tie itself more closely to the former Soviet periphery while also allowing it to engage in conflicts with less impact on the Russian public. Ultimately, however, Russia's military problems are tied to the nation's demographic challenge, which is far too great to be solved by a simple change in policy. But while including foreign servicemen in its military cannot fully resolve the major demographic constraints the Russian military is facing, the decree does provide certain benefits to Moscow.
Analysis

This initiative is not a complete departure from Russian military tradition. The armed forces have a long history of including fighters who are not ethnic Russians, providing it with the expertise necessary to incorporate and deploy foreign troops. During World War II, for example, the Soviet Union used Polish fighters. In recent history, ethnic minorities from Russia's borderlands and citizens of the former Soviet states have fought for the country. Moscow has relied on the 40,000 members of the Chechen Brigades to carry out military and policing operations in key hotspots, particularly in the Caucasus region. Russia has even established specialized Chechen units directly subordinate to the Main Intelligence Directorate, including the Vostok and Zapad units, which saw active service in the 2008 war with Georgia. Russia's new initiative, however, will expand regulations to include troops from outside Russia proper. It will also be the first time the military has institutionalized such a policy since the establishment of the Russian Federation.

Russia's military primarily relies on a nationwide draft, but Moscow has found maintaining adequate troop numbers difficult using this system. During the 1990s, Russia's birthrate dropped precipitously, and now the nation's demographics are entering a period of decline in which the number of military-age men will continue to shrink. This has already begun to have an impact. In the latest autumn draft, the government was only able to call up 154,000 men — far short of the 300,000 needed to sustain the level of 1 million service members Moscow has set. Broadening the pool of recruits will help alleviate this problem, but cannot fully resolve it.

Moscow's decision to allow foreigners to join the Russian armed forces goes beyond the drop in conscription numbers. In recent years, Russia has made considerable efforts to transition its force away from one that is reliant on conscripts toward a force with a majority of contracted soldiers. Russian conscripts only serve a one-year term — barely enough time to train to an effective level — before their service ends. Contracted soldiers, by contrast, serve multiple years as stipulated by their agreement and are, in effect, professional soldiers. Russia can rely on these more experienced soldiers to operate complex military systems such as nuclear missile launch units and to man elite paratrooper regiments.

Moscow has already stepped up efforts to recruit contracted soldiers from the Russian population, but the stigma associated with service hazing, competition from the civilian job market and underlying health problems that disqualify a large number of potential recruits have limited this initiative's success. By requiring a five-year commitment, Putin's decree allowing foreign servicemen to enter the military aims to further improve the ratio of contracted soldiers to conscripts.

But the push to recruit foreign nationals transcends demographic considerations and the desire to improve the military's ratio of professional soldiers to volunteers. Their status as foreigners — and thus not members of the Russian public as a whole — makes them useful to Moscow. For any nation, dispatching forces to achieve foreign policy objectives carries the risk of creating a public outcry. Because of this, France and Spain established their own foreign legions — France in 1831 and Spain in 1920. For Russia specifically, decreasing the number of Russian nationals in its forces will help to ease public pressure when Moscow deploys forces for dangerous missions along its periphery, helping it avoid backlash in cases of high casualty numbers. Russian action in Ukraine has already come up against this hurdle. Moscow has had to deal with embarrassing complaints from its citizens over the loss of loved ones in Ukraine — even as it continues to deny any significant involvement in the conflict.

Including foreigners in its military will also have the added benefit of forwarding Russia's continued attempts to foster links with neighboring states. Because of their proximity and the requirement that the new soldiers speak Russian, foreign-born contract soldiers will likely come disproportionately from the former Soviet periphery. These states all have considerable ethnic Russian populations, and the Russian language is widely spoken, even among the general population. Russia will see Belarusians, Armenians and Kyrgyz as prime candidates because of Russia's continued military presence and close ties to the countries. The breakaway territories that Moscow recognizes as independent — including Transdniestria and Abkhazia — will also be optimal sources of foreign nationals. Eventually, this could even extend to the large and diverse set of foreigners already present and fighting in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region.

By opening up recruitment to foreign nationals, the Russian Armed Forces can provide considerable benefits to Russia as it seeks to continue improving its military. The total number of foreign servicemen that meet Russia's specific requirements, however, is limited. Foreigners will neither dominate nor significantly alter the underlying force structure of the Russian military — they will remain a controllable minority. The decree, however, does highlight continued attempts by the Russian military to enhance its power through conventional and unconventional means despite major funding and demographic constraints.

Read more: How Foreigners Can Help the Russian Military | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook

[Crafty_Dog]

Third post.  Hope people are giving this some attention.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KuRmiXjAgg

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/13/truly-terrifying-beck-introduces-viewers-to-the-man-he-believes-is-the-architect-of-russias-geopolitical-strategy/

[G M]

Third post.  Hope people are giving this some attention.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KuRmiXjAgg

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/13/truly-terrifying-beck-introduces-viewers-to-the-man-he-believes-is-the-architect-of-russias-geopolitical-strategy/

Not on my radar until now.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/01/14/will-putin-plunge-the-globe-into-world-war-3-the-past-gives-us-a-look-at-the-future/ 

[Crafty_Dog]

Second post

http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/01/13/the-root-of-the-problem-russia-part-1-2/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.armytimes.com/story/military/2015/01/20/russia-iran-sign-military-cooperation-deal/22037329/

Russia-India nuke plants
http://rt.com/business/213411-going-nuclear-russia-india/

[Crafty_Dog]

20committee.com

Russia’s Emerging Holy War

At the beginning of this week, President Barack Obama explained that Russia, hit hard by Western sanctions, is losing in its confrontation with the West and NATO caused by Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. In his State of the Union address, Obama displayed similar swag and bluster against both the Kremlin and Congressional Republicans, seemingly without regard for any recent events. As the President explained:

We’re upholding the principle that bigger nations can’t bully the small — by opposing Russian aggression, supporting Ukraine’s democracy and reassuring our NATO allies. Last year, as we were doing the hard work of imposing sanctions along with our allies, some suggested that Mr. Putin’s aggression was a masterful display of strategy and strength. Well, today, it is America that stands strong and united with our allies, while Russia is isolated, with its economy in tatters. That’s how America leads — not with bluster, but with persistent, steady resolve.

“Every one of these sentences is, to put it mildly, a stretch,” explained one seasoned Kremlin-watcher, and the news this week from Ukraine has been grim, contra Obama’s hopeful pose. While Russia’s economy remains seriously hurt from sanctions and, even more, the sharp drop in oil prices, the notion that this is taming Putin’s baser urges is not only untrue, it’s more likely the opposite of the truth, as I cautioned a month ago.

Facts have increasingly been getting in the way of this White House’s messaging, on many fronts, so just as Obama now calls for political bipartisanship, after six years of doing the opposite, all the while ignoring the massive blowout of his own party by the Republicans in Congress that just happened again, for the second time in his presidency, Obama likewise seems to think that a bit of swag, plus a public taunt, aimed at Putin when the former KGB man is down on his luck will have the desired geopolitical effect. This White House does not seem to dwell on the fact that, while the domestic enemy may be politically obstructionist, the foreign enemy has all sorts of Special War unpleasantness in his arsenal, not to mention thousands of nuclear weapons.

If nothing else, the current crisis has demonstrated to Russians, with Kremlin prodding, that the United States remains their Main Enemy that it was for decades, now led by the arrogant and weak Obama, who is hated by the Russian public. The Chekists who run Putin’s Russia, who protested for years that America wanted to defeat Russia’s post-Cold War resurgence, that the U.S. will stop at nothing to bring Russia to heel while humiliating it, have been proved right, at least as far as most Russians are concerned.

To the shock and dismay of hopeful Westerners, including nearly all NATO leaders, the hard hit of sanctions has caused Russians to hate the West, not Putin. Most Russians view their war in Ukraine as a legitimate defense of Russians and Russian interests, certainly nothing like America’s aggressive wars of choice halfway around the world, and they are backing the Kremlin now.

Word of this defiance has even crept into The New York Times, which otherwise is a pitch-perfect expression of the WEIRD worldview. As Russian troops are advancing deeper into Ukraine, fresh from victory at Donetsk, NYT asked what on earth is going on here, why would Russians want more war now that the cost of it all to their economy is becoming obvious? The explanation was proffered by a Moscow economist: “The influence of economists as a whole has completely vanished,” he opined about the Kremlin: “The country is on a holy mission. It’s at war with the United States, so why would you bother about the small battleground, the economy?”

Once again, Westerners have imagined Putin is just like one of their leaders — cautious, timid even, obsessed with Wall Street and finely tuned to what big donors care about — when our Chekist-in-Charge is nothing of the sort. With perfect timing, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, addressed the Duma this week, for the very first time, delivering a speech long on social conservatism, including a plea to ban abortions to help Russian demographics, as well as a caution to ignore the West’s dangerous “pseudo-values.” Putin’s Russia is inching ever closer to Byzantine-style symphonia, and in the war against America and the West that is coming — and, according to many Russians, is already here — the Kremlin wants its people to be spiritually fortified for a long fight.

Bankers and oligarchs, who get much attention from the Western media, have become peripheral figures in Moscow. Months before the Ukraine crisis broke with Russia’s seizure of Crimea, Putin privately warned wealthy men whom he deemed friends and supporters to start getting their money out of the West, as tough times were coming. In the Kremlin’s view, oligarchs who failed to do this, and are now facing ruin, have nobody to blame but themselves. Any billionaires who criticize Putin too freely will meet with prison or worse.

It’s increasingly clear that the security sector, what Russians term the special services, are running the show. They are Putin’s natural powerbase, his “comfort zone” in Western parlance, plus they are the guarantor of his maintaining power as the economic crisis worsens. Current reports indicate that Putin’s inner circle now is made up entirely of siloviki, to use the Russian term, men from the special services:  National Security Council head Nikolai Patrushev, Federal Security Service (FSB) head Aleksandr Bortnikov, Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) head Mikhail Fradkov, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu.

Patrushev headed the FSB from 1999, the beginning of Putin’s presidency, to 2008, and was a previously a career KGB officer, serving in Leningrad counterintelligence just like Putin: and just like Putin, he is a Chekist to his core. Current FSB director Bortnikov, who took over from Patrushev in 2008, is another career Chekist who joined the KGB after college and, yet again, comes out of the Leningrad office. Fradkov is not officially a Chekist by background, having spent the early years of his Kremlin career in foreign trade matters, but he was “close” to the KGB during that time, and he has headed the SVR, the successor to the KGB’s elite First Chief Directorate, since 2007; it says something about Putin’s confidence in him that Fradkov survived the 2010 debacle of the exposure of the SVR’s Illegals network in the United States, which was nearly as demoralizing to the SVR as the Snowden Operation has been for U.S. intelligence. The last, Shoygu, who has headed the powerful defense ministry since 2012, is not a military man by background, yet has longstanding ties to military intelligence (GRU).

As Russia’s economic crisis has mounted, Putin has unsurprisingly turned to fellow Chekists, some of them very like himself by background. They share a worldview which is conspiratorial and deeply anti-Western; they view America as their Main Enemy and now believe Obama is on a mission to destroy Russia. That they will not allow, and they will stop at nothing to halt what prominent Orthodox clerics recently have termed the “American project” that wants to destroy Holy Russia. This volatile combination of Chekist conspiracy-thinking and Orthodox Third Rome mysticism, plus Russian xenophobia and a genuine economic crisis, means that 2015 promises to be a dangerous year for the world. The Kremlin now believes they are at war with the United States, an Orthodox Holy War in the eyes of many Russians, and that struggle is defensive and legitimate. It would be good if Obama and his staff paid attention. This is about much more than Ukraine.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10154038553947588&fref=nf

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-03-23/russia-is-weak-punching-above-its-weight-friedman

[Crafty_Dog]

Stratfor Video
 Conversation: Russia's Perfect Economic Storm — Stratfor Senior Managing Editor Ben Sheen and Senior Eurasia Analyst Lauren Goodrich discuss the economic factors that are putting pressure on the Kremlin's control over Russia.
"It seems that the media has really been focusing on the really big picture of the recession inside of Russia. However, there is a growing, even more dangerous issue economically, in that the Russian regions are really getting further and further into crisis. The Russian regions were already in crisis even before 2014. Their debts since 2010 keep on doubling and doubling and doubling, and now we've had close to 100 to 150 percent rise in debts within the Russian regions, just over the past few years. That's astonishing when you think of Russia having 83 regions. Now, the Russian economic minister has suggested that possibly 60 of those 83 regions are in crisis mode at this time, and there's even speculation that 20 of them are already defaulting on their debt, even though the government itself doesn’t want to make it really public yet.
 
 
Video: Conversation: Russia's Perfect Economic Storm

 
Remember that Russia is a country that is not a united country. It is a very regionalized, localized country, in which it's almost like 83 different countries that are all put together. That's why it is a true federation. And having dissent within the regions has always been one of the root causes that collapses Russia eventually. And Putin of everyone knows this. So he's going to ensure that those specific regions that are the most resistant to rule from Moscow are going to be taken care of first. And then those regions that are a little bit more Russified are the ones that he's going to allow to fester within their economic crisis.
 
Putin is trying to prove a point. He's trying to prove a point to the West that he can isolate Russia from the West, from Western foods, and keep Russia Russia. The problem is that in doing this, he is actually hurting the Russian people. Putin came into power with a social contract with the Russian people, on "you will always receive your paychecks; I will keep the economy growing; I will quadruple — pretty much — standard of living; you will have Western-style foods and goods inside of Russia." And now we're seeing Putin having to step back from that social contract that has kept his popularity so high for the past 15 years, just in order to counter what is happening with the standoff with the West. So Putin is pretty much struggling between two crises: Does he want to counter the West, or does he want to ensure that his social contract with the Russian people remains intact?"

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/193990/putins-great-crime-syria

In these grim times, I am afforded light relief by CNN—the only news channel offered by the treadmill of my Tokyo apartment house—as its presenters and pundits gravely debate the motives behind Putin’s investment in Syria. His own version is that he is fighting “extremism,” which oddly enough is the same dark threat that President Barack Obama also recognizes while rigorously avoiding the qualifiers Islamic, Islamist, or Muslim—although he will refer to Isol, prompting the thought that it is impossible to defeat an enemy one is afraid to name. There is no Isol or even Isis anymore, because the good old ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fi’l-ʿIraq wa-sh-Sham—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—has long since become the Islamic State of everywhere from Nigeria to Afghanistan, no doubt also including the British Isles and Michigan. Ignoring earnest declarations of its un-Islamic character solemnly issued by non-Muslim presidents, premiers, and prelates, volunteers who recognize the authenticity of the Islamic State keep pouring into its still-expanding borders, easily offsetting the casualties inflicted by the very expensive U.S. bombing campaign, now joined by the British, French, … and Putin, whose air force already claims dozens of air strikes against the common foe.

Putin’s enthusiasm for the great cause might be expected to earn him some gratitude. Instead, the Russian leader is criticized by wise CNN pundits—and by the Obama Administration—for seeking to defend his client Assad by bombing his other enemies as well, i.e., the dozens of quarreling Islamist bands that grandly call themselves Jaysh al-Fatah, “the army of conquest,” the several quarreling factions of Syrian Army defectors that call themselves al-Jaysh as-Suri al-Ḥurr, “the free Syrian army,” the unabashedly extremist al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat an-Nuṣrah, which is much stronger than both, and, above all, the brave “pro-democracy” warriors armed and trained by the United States itself, under a $500 million program.

In reality Putin’s young bombing campaign has hit very few Islamic State targets. Yes, aircraft have flown and bombs have been dropped, but the Russians have no ground intelligence in place to identify targets any more than the United States has, except in those rare occasions when black-flagged vehicles are actually seen driving around in broad daylight—which is why the Islamic State has expanded ever since the U.S. bombing started. But Putin must certainly be innocent of the accusation that his air force has bombed the U.S.-trained “pro-democracy” freedom fighters, because the trainers themselves have admitted that the first lot on which one-tenth of the budget has been spent, i.e., $50 million, are exactly five in number, the rest having deserted after receiving their big family-support signing bonus and first paycheck, or after they were first issued with weapons (which they sold), or after first entering Syria in groups, when they promptly joined the anti-American Jabhat an-Nuṣrah, whose Sunni Islam they understand, unlike talk of democracy. That guarantees Putin’s innocence: All five extant U.S.-made freedom fighters are reportedly alive and well, though one may have defected since the last count. (It would really be much cheaper to hire Salvadoran contract gunmen and fit them out in Arab head-dresses.)

On the other hand Putin is certainly guilty of defending Assad’s regime and indeed of wanting to preserve it in the capital-city area of Damascus if possible, or at least in the natural redoubt of the coastal strip from Lebanon to Turkey where Assad’s fellow Alawites outnumber the Sunni Muslims ranged against him, and which also has room for Syria’s Christians, Ismaili, Twelver Shia, and urban Druze who suffer persecution and sometimes outright massacre wherever Sunni insurgents of any kind advance (the only difference is that the Islamic State documents its killings in vivid color), and that happens to include the city of Tartus, home of a Russian ex-Soviet naval base since 1971, which happens to be the one and only overseas base of the Russian Federation anywhere in the world, and which greatly adds to the naval value of Putin’s conquest of Crimea, where his Sevastopol naval base is on the wrong side of the Dardanelles. With refueling and light repairs in Tartus, the Russian navy can operate continuously in the Mediterranean, and prevail in the eastern Mediterranean, especially now that the historic U.S. Sixth Fleet is down to a ship or two, the rest of the shrinking U.S. Navy having long since gone to the Indian Ocean or the Pacific.

So, yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, the aforementioned accused, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is guilty of a very great crime: He defends his allies and attacks his enemies—conduct particularly reprehensible in the eyes of the Obama Administration, which does the exact opposite. Obama’s America dislikes Japan’s staunchly pro-American Prime Minister Abe (deemed “insufficiently apologetic”), it spurns the calls for action of Britain’s Cameron and Hollande of France, and has missed no opportunity to denigrate Benjamin Netanyahu, even as it eagerly embraces the bleak dictators of Cuba and of course Hassan Fereydoun a.k.a. Rouhani, president of the “death to America” Islamic republic of Iran and de facto chief nuclear negotiator—for the second time. The first time, from Oct. 6, 2003 to Aug. 15, 2005, when Rouhani was the official negotiator, under the equally mellifluous President Mohammad Khatami, he boasted that he had used the talks “to buy time to advance Iran’s nuclear program”—but that is not something that would dissuade an American administration that is intensely suspicious, but only of its allies.
Side with the Americans and you will be promptly abandoned if troublemakers force the police to shoot. Side with Putin’s Russia and you will be supported no matter what.

Putin is a very peculiar character who believes that the president of a country should give a very high priority to the enhancement of its own power, which is admittedly an old-fashioned pursuit as compared to the hundreds of initiatives that the Obama Administration has deemed more important than the upkeep of American power and credibility on the global scene. The administration has a growing list of disastrous failures to show for its preoccuptions, from the Ukraine to Afghanistan. In each case, there has been neither an effective engagement nor a clean disengagement but only vapid assurances, agonizing indecision, gross policy errors by visibly incompetent officials (who keep embarrassing Obama without being re-assigned to parking duties) and really appalling execution—as in the Iran negotiation, which ended with Secretary of State John Kerry camped in Geneva, and very visibly unwilling to leave without his agreement, for which he made the most embarrassing last-minute concessions (including the amazing 24-day advance warning of inspections), acting no differently than first-time bazaar customers who buy ancient, historic, unique, imperial Persian palace carpet for a mere (“only for you”) 10,000, a nice mark-up over the 49.99 charged by its Pakistani manufacturer. When it comes to execution, even that shameful silliness is exceeded by the botched Syria operation of that Obama favorite, CIA director John O. Brennan, who thinks of himself as a great Middle East expert, yet cannot read Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, or Turkish.

Putin is different. He has two aims in Syria, both utterly realistic: Keep his Tartus base that makes Russia a Mediterranean Great Power (look at the competition) at very low cost, and demonstrate that it really pays to serve Russia. The Americans abruptly dropped Hosni Mubarak like a rotten apple after decades of obedient service because his police shot at some demonstrators: Russia still supports Assad vigorously no matter what. The message resonates with potentates across the region, none of whom happens to be democratically elected (with the exception of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan who is doing his best to undo his country’s democracy). Side with the Americans and you will be promptly abandoned if troublemakers force the police to shoot. Side with Putin’s Russia and you will be supported no matter what. So it little matters what happens to Assad in the end: Putin has already won the credibility competition, which earns him and Russia real gains.

***

Putin is also different in his understanding of the business of diplomacy. The Obama version is that the practicalities of any actual transaction are much less important than their decoration with fashionably modish principles and procedures, including genuflections to the forever useless United Nations. Hence none can expect to exchange X for Y in dealing with the Obama White House and Administration—it all has to go through its indecision machine that delays everything inordinately, at the very least.

By contrast, when Netanyahu heard that Putin was sending fighter-bombers to Syria, over which Israeli fight-bombers must operate from time to time to destroy trucks carrying Iran-supplied missiles to Hezbollah, thus opening the very real possibility of deadly aerial encounters, there were no lengthy pre-negotiation palavers to arrange for preparatory meetings that might one day lead to a meeting of the principals, in the manner of the Obama Administration. Instead Netanyahu asked for a quick meeting, Putin responded by inviting him to come to Moscow right away, where the two right away agreed that the Russians would telephone Cohen before taking off to bomb—that being Yossi Cohen, Bibi’s National Security Advisor and ex Deputy Director of the Mossad and its likely future director, yet known as “the model” as in fashion, not as “Cohen the spy” as per the very old joke (he might be the other Cohen, David S. is now Deputy Director of CIA). Israeli flights would be announced to Nikolai Patrushev, Putin’s national security adviser, and former head of the FSB foreign intelligence service—Cohen’s colleague as well as counterpart. As for verification, there will be no 24-day inspection delays for the Israelis because even if none of their airborne command centers are aloft, their mountaintop radar can see aircraft from the moment they take off from the Russian base—the operating rule being that when one side does any bombing, the other side must stay on the ground.

Important in itself, the Putin-Netanyahu agreement also illustrates a contemporary reality that continues to elude the Obama Administration. Its policies toward Israel are by no means malevolent—there may be an intense personal hostility on the part of some officials but they cannot act on it. On the other hand, from the president down, the Obama Administration obviously retains a particular vision of Israel that is not at all hostile, indeed it is even protective, but which is also thoroughly obsolete: They still imagine a small country surrounded by enemies in its own region, isolated globally as well, and utterly dependent on the United States.

That was all true enough in the 1970s, but hardly depicts current reality—except in the hollow ceremonials at the United Nations. Today’s Israel has genuine Arab allies on two of its four borders, with which it cooperates every day, and other Arab allies beyond them ready to act jointly against Iran, and not only secretly. Israel has broad relations with both China and Russia (with which it is connected by ten non-stop flights a day), and has very active strategic relations with the major European countries that would have been unimaginable in the 1970s. In other words, in treating Netanyahu so contemptuously the Obama Administration was also revealing its misreading of the balance of power, an unsurprising error in a group that seems bereft of strategic understanding in many other directions as well.

Putin by contrast may understand nothing else but he does understand strategy, and the balance of power. That is why he played no games with Netanyahu, and simply conceded Israel’s right to bomb in Syria—no small thing in the circumstances, given that Russian personnel and aircraft will be on the ground when that happens, within a total geography that is very small indeed at 500 miles per hour.

Many Americans view Putin simply as a thug but public opinion polls show that Russians disagree. His popularity is bound to decline as Putin’s own counter-sanctions are needlessly intensifying the shortages caused by Western sanctions, and by the fall in the value of the ruble, yet a majority of Russians are likely to remains responsive to his fundamental message: “You are Russian. Sanctions or no sanctions, you will never eat as well as the Italians nor dress as elegantly as the French, and you will never be rich as the Americans—but you Russians are an imperial people, masters of the largest state in the world, equally ready to rule benevolently two dozen obedient nationalities and to punish the lawless. I, Putin, for my part, will not give away parts of your empire as my feckless predecessors Gorbachev and Yeltsin did, and I will strive to recover what I can, not just Crimea but as much of the Ukraine as possible, with more gains to come elsewhere.”

Such primitive notions are no doubt incomprehensible to Obama and his officials, as well as to their intellectual milieu, for which empire can only be an embarrassment, power cannot be purposeful, peace is obtained by good will and not by assured security, war is purposeless destruction (and all warriors are merely future PTSD cases), and diplomacy should be a multilateral pursuit, having to do with Global Warming if at all possible. These are all useful stances for rank-and-file Obama officials as they prepare their future with Bill and Melinda, Bill and Chelsea, and the rest of the PC foundation universe with its light lifting and ceaseless conferencing travel to yammy destinations, but to conduct the foreign policy of the United States they are hopelessly off-target. Putin and Netanyahu, by contrast, are determined to hit their targets hard.

***

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[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/218533/russian-footprints-ion-mihai-pacepa

[Crafty_Dog]

 By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Nov. 24, 2015 6:00 p.m. ET
182 COMMENTS

Vladimir Putin is not the master strategist some make him out to be. He’s a gambler and maneuverer whose bold moves are not testaments to vision or cojones but to the unhealthiness of his domestic political situation.

His choice of words in reaction to Turkey’s downing over Syria of a Russian jet—he called it “a stab in the back”—was redolent of another leader who spoke of stabs in the back, and not one whose regime broke any records for longevity.

Mr. Putin presumably has two immediate goals: Remove sanctions so Russian companies can start rolling over their debts again, without which many may collapse. He also needs higher oil prices to stave off the eventual insolvency of his state.

The Putin regime, let’s recall, arose to loot the benefits of Russian integration in the world economy, not as a reaction against it, despite claims by some today that Russia is motivated by eternal geopolitical insecurities prompted by (largely mythical) Western expansionism.

He needs conflict with the West to justify his people’s privation and his failure to allow the diversification and modernization of the Russian economy under a rule of law. He also needs the West’s complicity, which he has mostly gotten. It’s hard to fathom, for instance, why his cheating athletes were allowed at the London Olympics, much less why he was allowed to host the Sochi Olympics. Both would have been unthinkable if the West had publicly recognized his regime’s likely complicity in nuclear terrorism on British soil in the polonium murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko.

His salvation, though he would not phrase it this way, is to become the West’s client regime, while masquerading as a superpower-equal.

Truth be told, there are Westerners who would like to accommodate him, but Western politics is not likely to allow it, especially the politics of a post-Obama America.

A related problem likely guarantees failure in any case: There is quite probably nothing that U.S. or Western appeasement can do to save the Putin regime from itself in the long run.

Which brings us to the shootdown. Whatever he woke up thinking on Tuesday morning, Mr. Putin now appears to be contemplating playing the victim of NATO aggression (Turkey is a NATO member). Where he goes from here is hard to forecast. Pathological gamblers who get themselves in holes tend to double down. KGB colleagues recall that as a youthful agent Mr. Putin was sidelined to an East German backwater because his recklessness and propensity for miscalculation were unwelcome at a time when the Soviet Union was weak and the KGB had become risk averse.

Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press aide, noted the Fuhrer’s own devolution from “domestic reformer” into a “foreign-policy desperado and gambler in international politics,” who “began to hate objections to his views and doubts on their infallibility. . . . He wanted to speak, but not to listen.”

It’s not exactly reassuring that Mr. Putin’s reaction to Turkey’s defense of its airspace seems to have emerged almost instantly, unlike the shilly-shallying that proceeded his reaction to the blowup of a Russian airliner over Sinai (perhaps partly because Mr. Putin was trying to figure out if his own security apparatus was involved).

If he’s paying attention, Mr. Putin should by now have learned his leverage is much less than he imagines. At least while Angela Merkel is around, he has only managed to turn his important German friend into a quasi-enemy. He has turned a formidable Turkish friend into an actual enemy.

On Friday the Turkish government called in the Russian ambassador for a tongue lashing over Russia’s bombing of ethnic Turks in northern Syria. Tuesday’s downing was clearly not an accident. The Turkish government doesn’t seem to find Mr. Putin quite as impressive as some of his American admirers do.

Then again, only the misguided ever did. By March of this year, Russian economist Sergei Guriev estimated that Russia had already spent half its 2015 military budget. Russia’s spending plan was premised on $100 oil. This year’s budget hopes for $50 oil. Meanwhile, capital flight is running at perhaps $100 billion a year. Meanwhile, some of Russia’s biggest companies are verging on default. The Russian army has had to cease recruiting in the fertile Caucasus region due to a worrisome overreliance on Muslim troops. Moscow also faces a growing liability in economically failing Crimea and eastern Ukraine, complicated this week by partisan sabotage of Crimea’s electricity supply.

Global stock markets dipped only modestly on the Turkish shootdown. Oil jumped a buck. This muted reaction should not be seen as a testament that Mr. Putin or his regime have much of a future.

[Crafty_Dog]

Forecast

    As it curbs spending, the Kremlin plans to limit loans to foreign countries, hindering its ability to influence countries to support its agendas.
    Russia will continue granting small loans, or large loans in small tranches over a period of time, to its critical allies.
    Moscow will be more selective in choosing recipients of large, lump-sum loans, targeting recipients based on strategic need.

Analysis

Russia's limited financial resources continue to hurt the Kremlin's ability to operate as it has over the past decade. High oil prices, and resulting energy revenues, were largely responsible for skyrocketing economic growth since Russian President Vladimir Putin's government took over in 2000 — with the exception of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Prosperity enabled Moscow to spend liberally on its military, its economic development and, more subtly, its loans to countries in exchange for influence. But oil prices have fallen, domestic industry has slowed and the West has placed sanctions on the country that have soured investor sentiment, together creating an economic crisis for Russia. The Kremlin must now make painful decisions to keep its economy afloat, and everything is open to cuts, including foreign loans.

Last year, Russia slipped into its second recession in six years, and there is little optimism that it will end anytime soon. The Russian federal budget will certainly remain strapped this year, as the government uses its National Reserve Fund to cover any deficit more than 3.5 percent. To avoid bailing out large Russian firms and banks, the Kremlin is considering a privatization scheme, but it will likely have little success under the current investor sentiment toward Russia because of its position on Ukraine. Meanwhile, the government has slashed spending in 2016 for every ministry and portfolio except pensions, forcing all sectors to be selective in how to spend their resources. For example, defense spending cuts have left enough funds for Russia's operations in Ukraine and Syria but not for the large-scale military rearmament program Russia needs to maintain a robust and modern military. The Kremlin hinted that it might cut the budget further in the weeks ahead.

Of course, Russia still has reserve funds. Currently, the central bank holds $371.5 billion in currency reserves. The rainy day funds, which overlay with the currency reserves, stand at $49.72 billion in the Reserve Fund and $71.15 billion in the Wealth Fund. But the Kremlin has already blown through half the Reserve Fund in the past year, and in the last recession it saw how quickly currency reserves were spent.

Now the Kremlin is looking at another opportunity for belt-tightening: foreign loans​. Over the past decade, it has used foreign loans from government coffers to press its agenda with and in other countries. These are loans directly from the government's VTB bank, though there are many loans from Russian companies (such as Rosoboronexport, Gazprom and Rosneft) along the same lines. In recent years, these loans were many times not investments at all but incentives to induce the countries to make foreign policy decisions in line with Russia's needs. In addition, the Kremlin often either wrote off the loans, or the terms of the agreement were skewed to become more like a bailout than a loan.
Past Financing

A primary example of this exchange of finances for influence was in Ukraine. In December 2013, Russia offered to purchase $15 billion of Ukraine's debt and give the country a 33 percent discount in natural gas prices. Kiev simultaneously froze negotiations with the European Union over its association agreement. Russia went through with a $3 billion purchase of that debt, though protests soon broke out in Ukraine, leading to the Euromaidan uprising and the collapse of the pro-Russia government. Now, Moscow and a pro-West Kiev are locked in a bitter legal battle over repayment of the $3 billion debt purchase, which Moscow would have likely ignored with the previous government. Kiev argues that the debt purchase was an outright bribe to the previous government to remain in Moscow's camp.

Russia regularly assists its closest allies in the former Soviet region with loans and postponements of repayments. In 2014, Russia granted Belarus a $2 billion loan to keep Minsk close as NATO increased its operations in the region. And in 2015, Russia aided Belarus with its debt repayments ($860 million) as the country weathered its own economic slump. Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan continually receive smaller financial aid packages (in the hundreds of millions of dollars) to stimulate their economies, modernize their militaries and overhaul industry. Kyrgyzstan received a loan of $1 billion in May 2014 in return for joining Russia's then-Customs Union.

Outside of the former Soviet states, Russia offered loans in 2013-2014 to Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian energy and construction firms in exchange for their governments agreeing to Russia's then-proposed South Stream and TurkStream pipeline projects meant to bypass Ukraine to transit natural gas. When both Cyprus and Greece were in search of financial bailouts in recent years, Moscow offered to provide funds. Russia wanted to protect Russian money being held in Cypriot banks and to persuade Greece to break rank with the Europeans and Americans on sanctions over Ukraine. But Germany and other EU countries convinced them otherwise, preventing Russia from doing more than restructuring Cyprus' past loans and giving Greece minor financial assurances through the BRICS bank.
Current Problems

But Russia's increasingly restricted cash supply will curb its previous strategy of throwing money at countries to compel their cooperation. Since mid-2015, Russia slowed doling out smaller loans to foreign countries and has pledged only a few large loans.

Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev announced that Russia would likely not provide the remaining $1.7 billion loan for its Kambarata hydroelectric plant. Atambayev nullified the 2012 agreement with Russia on Jan. 22 on the grounds that Russia had disbursed only a $300 million tranche of the loan. Nearby Uzbekistan also opposed the project because it would reduce the country's water supply. Since Kyrgyzstan already depends on Russia financially, Moscow will accept the collapse of this agreement. What Moscow will have to watch for is another country — such as China, which is steadily building clout in the region — trying to fill the financial vacuum it leaves.

The Kremlin is also reconsidering its loan to Iran. In November, Moscow and Tehran agreed to a $5 billion loan and a $2.2 billion line of credit. Though the Iranian government confirmed the agreement, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak indicated in January that the $5 billion loan was not yet finalized. The deal was seen as Russia's attempt to maintain influence with Iran as Tehran begins to open to the West. Previously, Iran had few options for alternative funding, but as Iran and Europe (and eventually the United States) begin to interact once again, Moscow's waning financial influence will diminish even more. 

Furthermore, in November 2015, Russia agreed to loan Egypt $25 billion to construct the country's Dabaa nuclear power plant, covering 85 percent of the building costs. Russia set the terms for Egypt to begin repaying the loan in 2029 and spread the payments over the subsequent 22 years — a favor to financially strapped Cairo. It was taken as a signal Egypt was trying to diversify its relationships with the United States, all while Russia increased its footprint in the Middle East after entering the Syria conflict. The large price tag and upfront costs will burden the Russian government if it fulfills the agreement, though Cairo may become a crucial partner as Moscow tries to play various regional actors and Washington for its own gain.

Finally, Russia looks intent to fulfill a large loan with Hungary. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Moscow on Feb. 17, where Putin confirmed that his country would fulfill their previous agreement for a $10.8 billion loan for the expansion of Hungary's Soviet-era Paks nuclear plant. The agreement had stalled for two years, but Russia's continued commitment looks to be used to persuade Hungary to help Russia build a coalition to end crippling sanctions. Orban said at the news conference with Putin that he did not believe EU sanctions against Russia would automatically renew after they expire in July and that EU countries were beginning to see the need for cooperation. Russia would likely trade the large sum of money for Paks if Hungary would vote against extending sanctions. A statement from General Electric proposing its involvement in the Paks project should Russia step out is probably motivating Moscow to act quickly as well as block further U.S. influence in the region.

One way to help mitigate the financial costs of these large loans could be to give them out in smaller and longer-term tranches instead of lump sums. Russia implied as much with Iran, offering the $2.2 billion credit over two years, while reconsidering the lump $5 billion loan. Russia will continue its policy of smaller loans to its key allies, such as the $200 million loan agreed to with Armenia on Feb. 19. It is unclear if the Kremlin's tradition of writing off many of these loans in gestures of goodwill can continue, but the Kremlin can always restructure the debts of the loans already issued instead of writing off the debts completely.

If Russia neglects these allied states it risks a detrimental breakdown in relations or another country replacing its influence. However, its years of wild spending have forced the Kremlin to pick and choose the countries it assists and how much the Kremlin can spend without breaking its finances.

[Crafty_Dog]

Why Putin Wants Syria
by Jiri Valenta and Leni Friedman Valenta
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2016 (view PDF)
http://www.meforum.org/5876/why-putin-wants-syria
 
 
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Russia has been largely landlocked for most of its history, and Moscow has always valued the Crimean peninsula for its coastline (see above). Catherine the Great took the Crimea, founding the port of Sevastopol, home to Russia's Black Sea fleet, and established a commercial port in Odessa. But, the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in an independent Ukraine, and Moscow lost not only the port of Odessa but its prized naval port of Sevastopol.

Russia's military intervention in Syria that began on September 30, 2015, is its first major intrusion into the Levant since June 1772 when "Russian forces bombarded, stormed, and captured Beirut, a fortress on the coast of Ottoman Syria."[1] Then as now, the Russians backed a ruthless local client; then as now, they found themselves in "a boiling cauldron of factional-ethnic strife, which they tried to simplify with cannonades and gunpowder."[2]

But why? Why did President Vladimir Putin intervene in a faraway country, hundreds of miles away from Russia proper while in the midst of his temporarily frozen proxy war with Ukraine? So far there has been no serious effort to probe the underlying causes of the Kremlin's surprise move, let alone in conjunction with Putin's three other military interventions along Russia's periphery: Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and southeastern Ukraine in 2014-15. Yet it is only by filling in these connecting dots that the key questions concerning the intervention can be addressed: Did Moscow seek confrontation with a view to dismembering NATO and weakening Europe, or did it pursue the much narrower goals of regaining the great power status lost during the Gorbachev-Yeltsin eras and protecting national security and commercial interests? And can the West engage Russia in Syria in a limited partnership against radical Islam as it did in World War II against Nazi Germany, or is any collaboration with the wily Putin simply out of the question?

Landlocked Heartland and Strategic Interests in Crimea

Henry Kissinger has eloquently posited Russia's historical expansion as pursuance of a
special rhythm of its own over the centuries, expanding over land mass ... interrupted occasionally over time ... only to return again, like a tide crossing the beach. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin circumstances have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent.[3]
Winston Churchill had a different explanation:

The Russians will try all the rooms in the house, enter those that are not locked, and when they come to one that cannot be broken into, they will withdraw and invite you to dine genially that same evening.[4]

Both Kissinger's sophisticated discourse and Churchill's analogue, however, need an important qualifier. Russia's expansion has also been the result of a major geopolitical handicap. Except for the Baltic coast, conquered by Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, Russia has been largely landlocked for most of history. In the north, its Arctic Ocean was frozen. In the east, the Pacific was also ice-covered for most of the year. In the south, its Caspian Sea was closed. The Black Sea was open but only through those tiniest of bottlenecks, the Straits of Bosporus and the Dardanelles (or the Turkish Straits), jealously guarded by its Ottoman masters. Small wonder that Russia continually lusted to possess both them and the Crimean peninsula. As early as the seventeenth century, Peter the Great tried to conquer the Crimea, then an Ottoman vassal, but failed.[5]

Putin repeatedly invokes Russia's "strategic interests" in the Crimea.

Only in the late eighteenth century did the Empress Catherine the Great and her paramour, Count Grigory Potemkin, succeed in taking the Crimea, founding the port of Sevastopol, home to Russia's Black Sea fleet, and a commercial port in Odessa. Yet despite continual wars with the Ottomans, the Turkish Straits remained beyond Russia's grasp as Britain—and to a lesser extent France and the Kingdom of Sardinia (Italy)—repeatedly came to Turkey's rescue. This culminated in the 1853-56 Crimean war and the attendant Treaty of Paris that kept Russia caged in the Black Sea. It is hardly to be surprised that Putin, an avid student of history, repeatedly invokes Russia's "strategic interests" in the Crimea.

Today, Russia is not as militarily dependent on the Turkish Straits as in the past. But throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and despite the technological revolution and Moscow's formidable air forces, the Turkish Straits have remained a factor for the Russian navy.

The Fall of the USSR

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union was an even larger setback than the Crimean war. Analysts have long focused on the loss to the empire of vast pieces of real estate with the newly-won freedom of the non-Russian republics in the Baltics and the Caucasus as well as the second largest republic, Ukraine. Yet they have not given due consideration to what else Russia lost: waterways, coastlines, and ports, in short—the power of the Russian navy.
 
Hafez Assad, Bashar's father, signed an agreement permitting Moscow to use the port of Tartus (pictured above) in return for advanced weapons for Syria, thus turning the port into a facility for maintenance of smaller ships in the Black Sea fleet. Then in 2005, Bashar succeeded in having Russia write off three-fourths of Syria's debt for arms sales. Increased Russia-Syrian military cooperation followed with upgrading of the Tartus port for larger ships.

In Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Moscow lost cold water ports acquired by Peter the Great in the eighteenth century for its Baltic fleet. In Ukraine, it lost not only its ownership of the coastline but also the commercial port of Odessa. Most of all, the Russians lost their prized warm water naval port of Sevastopol, home to Russia's Black Sea fleet for more than two centuries. Moscow was now forced to rent it from the newly independent Ukraine.

The economic collapse that followed only made things worse. Lack of resources and two bloody wars in Chechnya brought government cuts to the Black Sea fleet. Russian ships only rarely appeared in the Mediterranean. Then in 2004, Ukraine and Georgia underwent their color revolutions, bringing to their helms two pro-Western leaders—Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine and Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia—who hoped that their nascent states would join, not only the European Union, but eventually the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Worse yet for Russia, Yushchenko wanted the Russian fleet out of Sevastopol at the expiration of the lease in 2017.

Catherine the Great, Putin's most admired Romanov ruler, was shaking in her grave. One need not speculate about Putin. In 2005, who could be sure that NATO ships would not be eventually deployed in Russia's formerly principal, if not sacred, Black Sea port? If Russia lost Sevastopol, where could it go? Another port was needed, but where? Novorossiysk on the Black Sea Coast could be of help, but it is principally a commercial port.

Masters of Military Deception

Flashback to 1971, when President Hafez Assad, father of the present Syrian dictator, signed an agreement permitting Moscow to use Tartus in return for selling advanced weapons to Syria, thus turning the quiet fishing port into a logistical facility for materiel and technical maintenance of smaller ships in Russia's Black Sea fleet. Two years later, Hafez, a Soviet-trained pilot, joined Egypt in preparing an attack on U.S. ally Israel with the help of Russian advisors and arms.

What happened next explodes a decades' long interpretation that the July 1972 expulsion of Soviet advisors from Egypt by Anwar Sadat due to Moscow's refusal to provide the necessary arms for his planned war against Israel generated an unbridgeable schism between the two states.[6] As revealed in the declassified diary of Gorbachev's foreign policy advisor Anatoly Chernyaev, unbeknown to the outside world, Moscow quickly patched relations with Cairo thus turning its temporary setback into a ruse that would help lull the Israelis into the 1973 Yom Kippur surprise. As Chernyaev, then a senior official of the International Department of the Communist Party's CentralCommittee, recorded in his diary on July 15, 1972:

This [Sadat's demand for Soviet advisors withdrawal] began a turmoil. Egypt's premier Sidki was persuaded to come to Moscow, and, I think, they have settled it ... they must have given much to him, if not all he wanted. President of Syria Assad, too, a week ago ... has forced us to practically approve the "military solution" and received a lot from us.[7]

This version was reaffirmed on the first anniversary of the war by the Egyptian government-controlled Ruz al-Yusuf magazine:

The various government agencies spread rumors and stories that were exaggerated, to say the least, about deficiencies, both quantitative and qualitative, regarding the weapons required to begin the battle against Israel, at the very time that ... the two parties—Egypt and the USSR—had reached agreement [on weapons that] in fact, were beginning to arrive.[8]

The concept of military deception is a permanent feature of Russian interventionism.

Last but not least, Egyptian president Sadat himself claimed two years after the war that his 1972-73 tiff with the Soviets had been "a strategic cover—a splendid strategic distraction for our going to war."[9]

The concept of military deception, or maskirovka, is a permanent feature of Russian interventionism. But, it encompasses a broader definition than the Western one. Deception may include camouflage, disinformation, traps, blackmail, and diplomatic cunning. As such it enables strategic surprise and/or timing that will stun the enemy, thus ensuring the success of the mission.[10]

Abkhazia and Tartus

Along both its pre- and post-1991 borders, Russia has continually sought to effect regime change whenever the leaders of the non-Russian republics within Russia (e.g. Chechnya) or at its new periphery (Ukraine and Georgia) tilted toward the West. In 2005, having decisively won the second Chechen war with the complete destruction of its capital Grozny, Putin was able to focus on possible regime change in Tbilisi (Saakashvili) and Kiev (Yushchenko). Unlike with landlocked Chechnya, both Ukraine and Georgia were littoral states of the Black Sea. A main geopolitical concern of the Kremlin was regaining ports and access for its navy. But the primary issue was Sevastopol—the traditional site of the Black Sea fleet. Getting rid of Ukraine's Yushchenko and Georgia's Saakashvili, thus meant regaining essential coastlines for the Russian navy. Its lease was up in 2017, and Moscow needed to find another suitable warm water port.

Russia has sought to effect regime change whenever the leaders of the non-Russian republics within Russia tilted toward the West.

Hafez Assad's successor, son Bashar, was quick to seize the opportunity. He visited Moscow in 2005 and succeeded in having three-fourths of Syria's external debt to Russia for arms sales written off.[11] The move became an impetus for renewed Russian-Syrian military cooperation in upgrading the port of Tartus for larger ships.

At around the same time, Putin began to seriously consider plans for the invasion of Georgia with particular interest in the province of Abkhazia, occupying half of Georgia's eastern Black Sea coastline. Analysts have mistakenly viewed Georgia as just another Caucasus country, but from the Russian navy's point of view, it is precious real estate on the Black Sea littoral.

Georgia not only contained a former Russian port, Ochampchire, but an airbase, Bombura—once the largest in the Caucasus. As an ethnic enclave with Orthodox believers and many Russian speakers, the Abkhazians had not been thrilled when Georgia obtained independence, correctly fearing the loss of their special status as an autonomous republic. Like South Ossetia, another ethnic enclave in the Caucasus Mountains, Abkhazians were in repeated conflict with Georgia and sought support from Russia. Furious residents had even undertaken ethnic cleansing of Georgians.
All of this fitted snugly with Putin's plans. In 2006, the Russian army began building a railroad in Abkhazia, traditional transportation for Russian armed forces. As the Russian consulate began to distribute passports, Putin added additional "peace-keeping" troops to Abkhazia, alleging a Georgian planned attack.

The Russian Navy Invades Georgia

On August 7, 2008, President George W. Bush met Putin at the Olympic Games in Beijing where he was told about the fighting in South Ossetia: "There are lots of volunteers being gathered in the region [South Ossetia], and it's very hard to withhold them from taking part. A real war is going on."[12] What Putin did not tell his peer, however, was that he had set a trap for the Georgian army in South Ossetia, that the Russian navy would soon invade Abkhazia, and that he had ordered a cyber-attack on the Georgian government.

Within twenty-four hours, Putin had already appeared in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia's fortress, to oversee the invasion. When the Georgian army arrived to put down (supposed) riots in the South Ossetian capital, the Russian army poured through a tunnel on the Georgian military highway into South Ossetia and beyond. A classic trap was sprung. Simultaneously came the amphibious landing in Abkhazia's port of Ochampchire by 4,000 navy and army commandos under commander-in-chief of the Black Sea fleet, Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky. On August 10, a naval encounter between Georgian and Russian ships took place, and within days, Georgia's entire fleet of coast guard patrol vessels had been destroyed.[13] The Russian navy was back. Ochampchire, once restored, would provide control of Georgian waters all the way to the Turkish border.

On September 12, 2008, a month after Abkhazia's conquest, the Kremlin announced the speeding up of the Tartus port renovation and expansion as Vysotsky met with his Syrian counterpart Gen. Taleb Bari, to set the process in motion. In 2009, the value of Russian military contracts reached $19.4 billion as floating docks and coastal infrastructure facilities were repaired in Tartus. Eventually, the Russian navy deployed mobile coastal missile systems, anti-ship missiles, and boats, and built warehouse barracks. As an unnamed Kremlin official remarked in the Russian media, "Everything has changed since the war on Georgia—what seemed impossible before when our friends became our enemies and our enemies became our friends ... A number of possibilities are being considered, including hitting America where it hurts most—Iran and Syria."[14]

The Crimea Is Next

"The Crimea is next," predicted Za Za Gachechiladze, the prominent editor-in-chief of Tbilisi's The Messenger.[15] In an editorial, he wrote, "Now it is the Ukraine's turn ... all this is happening while Western countries are hesitating about creating a clear-cut strategy to stop Russia, whose appetite ... is increasing."[16]

Georgia had indeed marked a change in the Kremlin's strategic thinking, and Putin would strike in Crimea when the time was ripe. Nor did he believe that Washington would greatly protest. The U.S. administration was clearly willing to forgive him for attacking sovereign Georgia. Earlier that year, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton had pushed a big red reset button with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and Russian decision-making on a new intervention always considers the U.S. response to the last one. Also overlooked was the Russian legislature's amending of the constitution. This permitted Putin to take military action abroad anywhere to protect Russian speakers and Russian military (e.g., in Crimea or Syria). During the Yeltsin era, they could only do so to combat terrorism or participate in U.N.-sponsored international operations. Now the government could take military action against any foreign country without authorization from the Duma.[17]

But the time was not yet ripe to strike in the Crimea. In 2010, came a new Ukraine election, and the winner was Viktor Yanukovych. Coming from the eastern Ukraine, he was staunchly pro-Kremlin, so Putin could relax. In return for discounted Russian gas, Yanukovych gladly extended the lease on Sevastopol to 2046.

Follow the Russian Pipelines

In 2011, however, a problem arose with Tartus. Syria erupted in a bloody civil war and ethnic ferment that threatened more than just Russian military assets. Syria is a major energy hub of the Middle East. As Russian analyst Alexei Sarabeyev put it,

The peculiarity of the port of Tartus ... is that the major Syrian pipeline originating from the northeastern areas of the country feeds in this port. Besides, oil storage facilities are located in neighboring Banias.[18]

Syria is not just a transfer state but also has large gas deposits in its Homs field.

Bashar Assad decides whose pipelines go through Syria, another reason Putin supports him.

Seventy percent of Russia's foreign income comes from oil and gas exports. Sixty percent of the state budget is from energy export revenues. As a vacationing official economist in Sochi told these authors, "Don't follow just our navy; follow our pipelines."[19] The pipelines, of course, passed through energy transfer states Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine on their way to European markets—all states no longer under Putin's control.

Bashar Assad decides which and whose pipelines go through Syria, another reason Putin supports him. In 2009, the Syrian president refused to sign a gas agreement with Qatar—a major producer of liquefied gas (LNG)—which wanted to run a pipeline from Iran through Turkey and Syria. But the deal would have bypassed Russia, and Assad turned it down.

The Kremlin's Lessons from Libya

A number of events conditioned Russia's decision to deter a U.S. attack on Assad in 2013 and also to stage a military operation in Syria in 2015. One of these was the lesson of Libya. In 2011, Washington persuaded Moscow not to veto a Security Council resolution against Libyan dictator Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi, which launched what Secretary of State Clinton described as a "humanitarian mission" to prevent the killing of Libyan civilians by the dictator's forces. But as NATO intensified its bombing air campaign, it became clear that the international intervention was mainly focused on getting rid of Qaddafi with a view to nation building—something that had miserably failed in Iraq under the George W. Bush administration.[20]

The 2003 Iraq war, though, had a positive side. Reluctant to follow in Saddam Hussein's unfortunate path, Qaddafi abandoned his quest for a nuclear program and began working with Washington against the rising tide of Islamist terrorism. Paradoxically, the Western-supported rebels who toppled and killed the long-reigning Libyan dictator included many Islamists. To Putin, however, Qaddafi had clearly been a stabilizing force.

Putin may have also learned from Hillary Clinton's unsecured e-mail communications that U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens had met with the Turkish consul general hours before he was killed. The two were working on an arms transfer from Libya to Syria—for the purpose of overthrowing yet another dictator, Assad.[21]

The lesson of Libya for the Russians was that they should not have approved the U.N. resolution that helped the U.S.-backed NATO intervention. Convinced that they had been deliberately misled,[22] they would subsequently block any future U.N. resolution proposing military action against Assad.
Then-president Dmitri Medvedev expressed his concern about the rise of Islamic terrorism in Libya to U.S. officials.

But the situation in Libya attending Qaddafi's overthrow was worrisome to the Kremlin for other reasons. In 2011, then-president Dmitri Medvedev expressed to U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates and vice president Joe Biden his great concern about the rise of Islamic terrorism in Libya. "If Libya breaks up, and al-Qaida takes root there, no one will benefit, including us, because the extremists will end up in the North Caucasus."[23]

Medvedev could have added that extremists from the North Caucasus were also traveling to Syria with the help of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). Novaia Gazeta journalist Elena Milashina documented that the FSB had helped Chechen and Dagestan rebels to reach Syria on safe routes via Turkey.[24] Indeed, the number of terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus was halved from 2014 to 2015, from 525 to an estimated 260.[25] Russian special services, however, were and still are worried about returning jihadists.[26]

Obama's Red Line and Putin's Preemptive Diplomacy

 
In August 2013, the Syrian regime was reported to have used chemical weapons on rebel enclaves, killing some 1,300 civilians. Assad appeared to have crossed President Obama's "red line" on use of such weapons. Washington deployed four destroyers near the Syrian coast equipped with missiles, threatening the Syrian regime. But Putin helped to defuse the crisis by brokering a deal for Assad to get rid of his chemical weapons.

Another event conditioning Putin's decision-making regarding further interventions was a major crisis over Assad's reported use of chemical weapons. On August 21, 2013, the Syrian regime was reported to have used chemical warfare on rebel enclaves, killing some 1,300 civilians. With this atrocity, Assad appeared to have crossed President Obama's "red line" on chemical weapons and risked a strong U.S. response.[27] Putin and even some U.S allies, however, claimed that the attacks were carried out by anti-Assad guerillas as a "premeditated provocation."[28] In any event, on August 27, Washington deployed four destroyers near the Syrian coast equipped with Tomahawk Cruise missiles whose initial mission was to punish the Syrian regime.[29]
By then, Putin was heavily invested in the largely completed renovation of Tartus for which Russia had a 50-year lease and was also planning future pipelines for Syria. With U.S. forces so close, Putin decided not to permit regime change in Damascus as he had in Tripoli. Still, he must have understood that direct confrontation between his navy and the superior U.S. forces was not a smart choice for Russia. Rear Adm. Vladimir Komoyedov, chairman of the Russian legislature's Defense Committee and former commander-in-chief of the Black Sea fleet, confirmed this and warned that the Russian navy could not match the U.S. Navy in the eastern Mediterranean:

Unfortunately, the force we've assembled there is made up of pretty aged ships built 30 years ago. To compete with the United States, we need a fresh horse.[30]

Putin, however, also wagered that Obama would not opt for a direct confrontation with Russia. Thus, sailing to the fray were some aged Russian navy ships. But equipped with modern rocket systems and nuclear torpedoes, even an old ship can be formidable. Russia also mobilized its armed forces, as did Iran's Revolutionary Guards, while Moscow's foreign ministry warned that U.S. intervention in Syria could have "catastrophic consequences."[31]
One Russian analyst suggested that in the event of a U.S. attack on Syria, Russia should invade the Baltic states.

On August 27, as Obama met with the three leaders of the Baltic republics, Putin had one of his senior analysts, Mikhail Aleksandrov, publish an especially provocative article, which could not have appeared without Kremlin approval. Head of the Baltics section of the Moscow Institute, CIS, funded by the Russian ministry of foreign affairs, Aleksandrov suggested that in the event of a U.S. attack on Syria, Russia should invade the Baltic states, claiming that "half of the population of Latvia and Estonia will meet the Russian troops with flowers as it was in 1940."[32]

Putin's deterrence, pressures, and public diplomacy—he even went so far as to write a New York Times op-ed—must have ultimately worked. Obama backed down, as Putin foresaw. The Russian president then helped his counterpart to defuse the crisis by brokering a deal to help Assad get rid of his chemical weapons.

Regaining the Crimea

Having rescued his Syrian client, Putin now sought to save his Ukrainian protégé Yanukovych, who had narrowly won the 2010 elections with the Kremlin's support. While a kleptocratic leader could be tolerated in moderation, Yanukovych, who had been jailed twice for corruption in 2004, was a major leaguer. Eventually, the Ukrainian people could not tolerate his disregard of their inclination toward the European Union.[33] In January 2014, someone fired into a large crowd of peaceful protestors igniting an armed revolution. A further turning point came on February 22 as the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych. But what few in the West understood was that the future of Sevastopol was not secure if the pro-Western revolution in Kiev won. Having saved Yanukovych's life, Putin turned to the strategic Crimean peninsula telling his presidential council, "We will have to start work to return the Crimea to Russia."[34]

As in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, most Crimeans are Russian speakers with 60 percent ethnically Russian. Yet the peninsula's large Tartar minority of about 30 percent have never cared for Russian rule, hence their mass deportation by Stalin to Central Asia in WWII. The Ukrainian army was rag-tag, but Putin feared that the Muslim Tartars might resist the Crimea's annexation as they had Catherine's in 1784.

Once again, Putin's attendance at the winter Olympic Games in Sochi turned into perfect maskirovka. Despite large scale, nonstop Russian troop maneuvers near the Crimea, U.S. intelligence failed to anticipate the February 28, 2014 invasion. Once the Olympics ended, the invasion began, followed in short order by annexation.

What is particularly significant is how Putin justified this bold and illegal act—not only on strategic but also on historical and religious grounds. In December 2014, for example, he stretched the historical account of St. Vladimir, founder of the ancient Kievan Rus federation, by placing the saint's christening in the Crimea rather than in Kiev, saying that it gives us every reason to state that for Russia, the Crimea, ancient Korsun, the Chersonese, Sevastopol have an enormous civilizational and sacral meaning—in the same way as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is meaningful for those who confess Islam or Judaism.[35]

Whether or not Putin's evolution from a servant of atheistic communism to defender of the faith is genuine is irrelevant. After the fall of the Soviet empire, Russia returned to its Orthodox roots, and so did Putin. Hence, while authorizing a selective crackdown on human rights activists throughout Russia, Putin has been an ardent supporter of the Orthodox Church at home and of Christian minorities in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. He also met with the pope on June 10, 2015, who asked him to help the cause of peace in Ukraine and Syria.

Intervention in Southeastern Ukraine

On April 18, 2014, by way of consolidating his Crimean conquest, Putin set his sights on yet another target. He explained that the southeastern Ukrainian lands of Novorossiya ("New Russia"), also conquered by Catherine the Great, were not part of Ukraine in her time. However, Putin did not admit that his primary reason was geopolitical—a littoral corridor from Russia to the Crimea through the strategic Black Sea port of Mariupol to Odessa.
Emboldened by the passive Western response to his Crimean venture, Putin launched a new intervention by proxy through Russian eastern separatists, "volunteers," Cossacks, "vacationing soldiers," even paid criminals, as well as Russian special forces. Residents of the Russia-friendly southeastern Ukraine were propagandized into fury against Kiev. Seeking to rejoin Russia, as did the Crimeans, they declared two new people's republics: Donetsk and Lugansk. Weeks thereafter, violence erupted in Odessa.

A firm U.S. response was required, yet the Obama administration would not provide arms to Kiev because of its perceived need to have Russia's support for the Iran nuclear deal. This weak reaction, however, only added to Moscow's eventual commitment of 10,000 regular troops in the Ukraine, augmented by 40,000 at the borders. But then came Putin's miscalculation. The Ukrainian army vigorously defended important routes, strategic railroad hubs, and airports, denying Russia essential strategic surprise. With the support of Western intelligence and economic aid, this solid resistance paid a high cost in blood, but Kiev did not succumb. In July 2014, Washington finally applied tougher energy sanctions which, together with sharp declines in oil prices, halved Russia's oil and gas revenues.[36]

Charging into Syria

In the summer of 2015, Assad, like Yanukovich earlier, was fighting for his survival. Various groups of rebels, supported by the Sunni regimes of Turkey and Saudi Arabia as well as the United States, were advancing. Assad and his Alawite-based regime were on the ropes with the military losing ground by the day. In July, the regime asked for Russia's direct military intervention.[37] Using Brezhnev's 1973 Yom Kippur play book and his own Georgia and Ukraine maskirovka, Putin was giving different signals—even that of replacing Assad.[38] Whatever Putin intended, he decided to stick with the Syrian dictator at this juncture.

Though U.S. observers questioned Putin's motives, his secondary objective in Syria was fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). While terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus had declined in 2015, ISIS was metastasizing in northern Afghanistan and could, over the long run, affect Russia's Central Asian allies. Putin surely worried about North Caucasians returning to fight in Russia.

By early 2015, the term "New Russia" had virtually vanished from Putin's vocabulary. He viewed the growing, armed resistance to the Assad regime as an immediate threat to Russia's national interests. Traditionally Moscow does not fight simultaneously on two fronts. In the meantime, a Russian Defense Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that, beginning in September or earlier, the "special forces were pulled out of Ukraine and sent to Syria."[39]
 
Assam Soleimani, head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, is much respected in Moscow for his military prowess. Arriving secretly in the Russian capital, the general confirmed that the Assad regime was in serious difficulties but could be rescued through a joint Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah intervention.
Putin must have calculated that if Syria could be won and Western sanctions lifted without significant concessions, it would strengthen the eventual return to his New Russia policy and Black Sea littoral corridor, unless, of course, Washington linked resolution of both the Syrian and Ukraine conflicts. He reportedly told a visiting Iranian senior official in late July 2015, "Okay, we will intervene. Send Assam Soleimani." Gen. Soleimani, head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is much respected in Moscow for his military prowess. Arriving secretly in the Russian capital, the general confirmed that the Assad regime was in serious difficulties but could be rescued through a joint Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah intervention.[40]

Iran is an important strategic ally for Russia. Like Syria, it has been buying Russian weapons systems, engaging in cooperative pipeline projects, and buying nuclear power plants. The conclusion of the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal on July 14, 2015, in Vienna was also a game-changer. Putin, having helped Obama broker the deal, had waited to make any Syria decision until the agreement was concluded. Now, with the deal done and Iran sanctions soon to be lifted, Tehran could readily pay for Russia's long-range S-300 anti-aircraft system. Putin also hoped that, now, Iran-U.S. relations would improve, making it easier for Russia to work with Iran and Hezbollah to protect Assad.
 
Airmen inspect a Russian airplane at Syria's Latakia airfield. In September 2015, U.S. satellite pictures showed a rapid buildup of equipment at the Russian air force and naval bases in Syria, including advanced fighter jets. On November 24, 2015, a Russian fighter was downed by Turkish forces after allegedly violating Turkish air space. The plane crashed in the mountainous Jabal Turkmen area of the Syrian province of Latakia, an area contested by Assad's government and rebel forces.

Mulling his options, in September Putin invited his old friend, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, to the annexed Crimea to discuss Ukraine and Syria. Prior to the visit, Italian news sources revealed that Berlusconi planned "to include Putin in an anti-terrorist campaign, promoting a diplomatic initiative that could lift the anti-Russian sanctions and defrost relations with the U.S."[41]

Putin's diplomacy was now moving into high gear. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place for him, however, with the dramatic turnaround of de facto EU leader, Germany's Angela Merkel. The immigration crisis, including the massive exodus of migrants fleeing war torn Syria, became the final game-changer. By now, with hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants flooding Germany and thousands of others charging across Europe, Merkel was seeking to somehow put the lid on Pandora's box. To her, the United States under Obama had ceased to be the indispensable power. As she put it:

We have to speak with many actors, this includes Assad, but others as well. Not only with the United States of America, Russia, but with important regional partners, Iran, and Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia.[42]

Like the CIA, Germany's intelligence agency knew about the military buildup in Tartus and Syria's Latakia airfield. However, the CIA could not divine Putin's intentions. Merkel's remarkable turnaround did not get much notice in Washington with Obama focusing on Iran and Cuba. But getting Merkel's blessing was the final green light for Putin. The U.S. president was heading for a big surprise.

Fortune Favors the Bold

In the concluding phases of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Egyptian third army corps was surrounded by Israeli forces and faced imminent annihilation unless an immediate ceasefire was reached. Soviet leaders, with their proposed joint superpower mission to save Egypt having been declined, sent a strongly-worded message to the White House warning that they would act alone. As a result, U.S. armed forces were put on combat alert as they had been during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

However, Russia did not go it alone. In the words of eye-witness Washington ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin,
In spite of the blunt message of [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev, the Kremlin ... did not have any intention of intervening in the Middle East ... it would have been reckless both politically and militarily.[43]

In 2015, however, the man in the White House was not Richard Nixon, an experienced master of statecraft, brilliant, tough, and cunning, with his sidekick Henry Kissinger, even amidst his Watergate inferno. This time Putin's counterpart was a former community organizer-turned-junior senator-turned president, a well-meaning proponent of the "leading from behind" strategy, a man whose "strategic patience" to his critics, was a euphemism for cluelessness.

For most of September 2015, U.S satellite pictures showed a rapid buildup of equipment in the Russian air force and naval bases in Syria, including advanced Sukhoi Flanker fighter jets. Now the renovation of Tartus paid off as had the railroad built in Abkhazia.

On September 21, Putin consulted with Tehran's nemesis, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in the Kremlin, along with top Israeli military and security officials. Afterward, the Israeli leader reported that both countries had agreed to a joint mechanism for preventing military mishaps.[44]
Putin's battle against terrorism may be one of the reasons he sympathizes with and has established mutually beneficial relations with Israel.

Putin is the only Russian leader to have twice visited the holy city of Jerusalem. His own merciless battle against terrorism may be one of the reasons he sympathizes with the Jews and has established mutually beneficial relations with Israel. Small wonder that Israel abstained from arms deliveries to Georgia after the 2008 Russian invasion and to Ukraine after the Crimea incursion.

In August 2008, Putin had met with President Bush on the eve of the Georgia invasion. Seven years later, on September 28, 2015, it was Obama's turn to meet with the Russian president, this time at the U.N. Although the full details of their conversation were not disclosed, Putin apparently did not reveal the timing of the coming intervention. His contemptuous message to Obama, delivered to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on August 29 by a Russian military attaché, said it all: Moscow was launching air strikes in one hour. Washington was to stay out of the way.[45]

Putin's Strategic Challenge

Putin did not charge into Syria without thinking through the endgame. The intervention was the culmination of a chain of events that began with the 1991 fall of the Soviet empire, and Putin concentrated on only a few options. His aim seemed clear: reestablishing Russia's presence in the Black Sea and through the Turkish Straits to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and Middle East in littoral Russian Azov and Black Sea coastal areas. Unlike his Soviet predecessors, he has avoided large invasions and long occupations of landlocked countries (e.g., Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan).

The perception of Obama as a leader unwilling to use force undoubtedly whetted Putin's appetite to do just that, albeit in a limited way. In particular, the 2013 Russian deterrence of Obama's strike against Assad may have emboldened Putin to stage the almost flawless (and bloodless) 2014 Crimean invasion. That in turn likely strengthened his resolve for his unprecedented moves in eastern Ukraine and now in Syria.

Rather than seeking to dismember NATO, Russia sought to protect its national security and commercial and religious interests. The weakening of NATO became Putin's objective as he lost Kiev and finally faced tough Western energy sanctions and as NATO furnished non-lethal aid to Kiev.

Fighting Islamism Together?

A limited partnership with Russia against Islamism is feasible just as it was in World War II against the Nazis. Both Washington and Moscow have powerful incentives and common interests in stability as ISIS continues to metastasize globally.

A limited partnership with Russia against Islamism is feasible just as it was in World War II against the Nazis.

Achieving this goal, however, requires shedding the Cold War axiom that Russia cannot have naval facilities in the Middle East. Instead, Washington must do its utmost to reassert its own presence in the Middle East in collaboration with those allies alienated by the Obama administration. Clearly, any alliance with Russia will not be easy, and the West must not be starry-eyed about a new relationship with Putin and in a hurry to reduce Ukrainian sanctions in the wake of the Muslim invasion of Europe. Putin is notoriously deceptive, giving with one hand and taking with the other. He is also allied with Tehran, whose hegemonic ambitions and terror sponsorship are certain to rise following the lifting of the international sanctions. Yet U.S. policymakers can surely make the case that, in the final account, Moscow's long-term interest is more closely aligned to Washington's and America's Judeo-Christian tradition than to the Islamist regime in Tehran with its regional, and beyond, hegemonic ambitions.

Putin is right to support the sustenance of Alawite governing structures, particularly in the western part of Syria, as the only viable alternative to the country's takeover by the Islamists. But keeping Assad in power will not ease the situation. Bashar must clearly step down in favor of another Alawite ruler and any such future agreement has to be underwritten by the U.S. administration, the EU, Russia, and the leading Arab states.

The nascent partnership with Russia can be jeopardized by further internationalization of the Syrian conflict. One problem is Sunni support for the insurgents, such as the Turkish tribes in northern Syria. Another is Iran's proxy Hezbollah, which is heavily involved in the fighting. Moreover, increasing military aid to various parties can escalate the conflict and implicate other actors. Recent Russian transfers of sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah are the most palpable examples.[46] Though intended for defense of the Assad regime, they can also be used against Israel at a later stage.

Finally, the tensions between Putin and Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan following the shooting down of a Russian plane that strayed into Turkish territory are indicative of the precariousness of the situation. As prominent Russian analyst Andrey Kortunov warned the Kremlin, the attempt of "any exalted politicians" to punish Turkey is fraught with danger:

Ankara has many ways to make life harder for Moscow, ranging from changing its energy import preferences to the Gulf to utilizing its influence over the numerous communities of Crimean Tatar descendants in Turkey in ways detrimental to Russia's interests.[47]

Meanwhile Turkey, an unreliable U.S. ally at best, is more interested in containing the Kurds, faithful U.S. allies, both in Syria and Iraq, than in going after ISIS. In short, the Syrian situation is evocative of the Spanish civil war of the 1930s when the internationalization of a domestic conflict helped pave the road to a global war.

As the past is often prologue to the future, it remains to be seen whether Putin's bold Syrian venture will help to transform the Middle East inferno into a more peaceful region. One decisive factor is the dramatic decline of oil prices, very injurious to Russia. A second factor will be the statecraft of the new U.S. president, ideally, one who does not lead from behind and who possesses the proper alchemy of toughness, creativity, and patience to help accomplish the deed.

Jiri Valenta is president of the Institute of Post-Communist Studies and Terrorism, and the author, among other books, of Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968, Anatomy of a Decision (Johns Hopkins University, 1991). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Leni Friedman Valenta is a contributor to many national and international newspapers and magazines, including The National Interest, Aspen Review, and Kiev Post. She is editor-in-chief of the couple's website at jvlv.net.
________________________________________
[1] Simon Sebag Montefiore, "Putin's Imperial Adventure in Syria," The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2015.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2015), p. 52.
[4] Walter Issacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 364.
[5] For a similar geopolitical interpretation, see Efraim Karsh, The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), chap. 5.
[6] See, for example, Efraim Karsh, "Moscow and the Yom Kippur War: A Reappraisal," Soviet Jewish Affairs, Feb. 1986, pp. 3 19.
[7] Spyridon Mitsotakis, "Forty Years Later: Soviet/Arab Secret of Yom Kippur War," P.J. Media, Oct. 5, 2013.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Michele A. Berdy, "Russia's 'Maskirovka' Keeps Us Guessing," The Moscow Times, July 31, 2-14; Jiri Valenta, "Soviet Use of Surprise and Deception," Survival (London), 1982, pp. 50-61.
[11] The Daily Star (Beirut), Jan. 26, 2005.
[12] CNN, Aug. 8, 2008.
[13] Wired (San Francisco), Aug. 15, 2008; Deborah Sanders, Maritime Power in the Black Sea (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2014), p. 126.
[14] "Russia lines up with Syria, Iran against America and the West," Second Light Forums, Sept. 16, 2008.
[15] Interview with authors, Sept. 19, 2009, Tbilsi.
[16] Za Za Gachechiladze, "Russia Will Increase Its Pressure on Ukraine," The Messenger (Tbilisi), Sept. 18, 2009.
[17] "Legalizing Aggression," Geopolitics, quoted in The Messenger, Sept. 11, 2009.
[18] Alexei Sarabeyev, "Russia-Syrian, 'Present-Future': Naval Aspect," Russian International Affairs Council, Moscow, Oct. 31, 2011.
[19] Authors interview, Sochi, Russia, Aug. 14, 2010.
[20] Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2014), p. 530.
[21] Fox News, Oct. 25, 2012.
[22] Gates, Duty, p. 530.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Novaya Gazeta (Moscow), July 29, 2015; see also, Paul Goble, "FSB Helps Islamists from Russia Go to Syria, Only Worried When They Come Back, 'Novaya Gazeta' Says," Window on Eurasia Blog, July 30, 2015.
[25] Eurasia Daily Monitor, The Jamestown Foundation, Washington, D.C., Jan. 7, 2016.
[26] The New York Times, Nov. 20, 2015.
[27] Bloomberg News Service (New York), Aug. 21, 2012; The Guardian (London), Feb. 8, 2013; Haaretz (Tel Aviv), May 4, 2013; Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2013.
[28] ABC News, Aug. 22, Sept. 6, 2013.
[29] The Washington Free Beacon, Aug. 27, 2013.
[30] The Guardian, Sept. 12, 2013.
[31] ABC News, Aug. 27, 2013.
[32] Lithuania Tribune (online), Aug. 29, 2013, accessed Jan. 25, 2016.
[33] Ukraine Today TV (Kiev), Dec. 20, 2015.
[34] The Guardian, Mar. 9, 2015.
[35] Pravoslavie (Moscow), Dec. 5, 2014.
[36] The Washington Post, July 16, 2014.
[37] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Oct. 14, 2015.
[38] The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 25, 2015; Bloomberg News, Sept. 13, 2015.
[39] Headlines & Global News (New York), Oct. 25, 2014; The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 23, 2015.
[40] Reuters, Oct. 6, 2015.
[41] Russia beyond the Headlines (Moscow), Sept. 9, 2015; Freeworld and Friends World, Sept. 16, 2015.
[42] The Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2015.
[43] Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence, Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents, 1962-1986 (New York: Time Books, 1995), p. 301.
[44] Defense News (Springfield, Va.), Dec. 1, 2015.
[45] The Washington Post, Sept. 30, 2015; The Telegraph (London), Sept. 30, 2015.
[46] YNet News (Tel Aviv), Jan. 15, 2016.
[47] Andrey Kortunov, "The Russian-Turkish Crisis: a Deficit of Strategic Depth," Russian International Affairs Council, Jan. 4, 2016.

[Crafty_Dog]

Hat tip to Big Dog for this one:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2016-04-18/revival-russian-military

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian military rotted away. In one of the most dramatic campaigns of peacetime demilitarization in world history, from 1988 to 1994, Moscow’s armed forces shrank from five million to one million personnel. As the Kremlin’s defense expenditures plunged from around $246 billion in 1988 to $14 billion in 1994, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the government withdrew some 700,000 servicemen from Afghanistan, Germany, Mongolia, and eastern Europe. So much had the prestige of the military profession evaporated during the 1990s that when the nuclear submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, its captain was earning the equivalent of $200 per month.

From 1991 to 2008, during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin and the first presidential term of Vladimir Putin, Russia used its scaled-down military within the borders of the former Soviet Union, largely to contain, end, or freeze conflicts there. Over the course of the 1990s, Russian units intervened in ethnic conflicts in Georgia and Moldova and in the civil war in Tajikistan—all minor engagements. Even for the operation in Chechnya, where Yeltsin sent the Russian military in 1994 in an attempt to crush a separatist rebellion, the Russian General Staff was able to muster only 65,000 troops out of a force that had, in theory, a million men under arms.

    Russia is back as a serious military force in Eurasia.

Beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union, Russia acted meekly. It sought a partnership with the United States and at times cooperated with NATO, joining the peacekeeping operation led by that alliance in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1996. To be sure, after realizing in the mid-1990s that NATO membership was off the table, Moscow protested vehemently against the alliance’s eastern expansion, its 1999 bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, but Russia was too weak to block any of these moves. The Kremlin’s top priority for military development remained its nuclear deterrent, which it considered the ultimate guarantor of Russia’s security and sovereignty.

Those days of decay and docility are now gone. Beginning in 2008, Putin ushered in military reforms and a massive increase in defense spending to upgrade Russia’s creaky military. Thanks to that project, Russia has recently evinced a newfound willingness to use force to get what it wants. First, in February 2014, Moscow sent soldiers in unmarked uniforms to wrest control of Crimea from Ukraine, implicitly threatening Kiev with a wider invasion. It then provided weaponry, intelligence, and command-and-control support to the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region, checking Kiev’s attempts to defeat them. And then, in the fall of 2015, Russia ordered its air and naval forces to bomb militants in Syria fighting President Bashar al-Assad, intervening directly in the Middle East for the first time in history.

These recent interventions are a far cry from the massive campaigns the Soviet Union used to undertake. But the fact is, Russia is once again capable of deterring any other great power, defending itself if necessary, and effectively projecting force along its periphery and beyond. After a quarter century of military weakness, Russia is back as a serious military force in Eurasia.

MAXIM SHEMETOV / REUTERS Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, June 2012.

GEORGIA ON ITS MIND

The story of Russia’s military modernization begins with its 2008 war in Georgia. In August of that year, Russian forces routed troops loyal to the pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and secured the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as Russian protectorates. The five-day campaign was a clear success: Moscow prevented NATO from expanding into a former Soviet state that was flirting with membership, confirmed its strategic supremacy in its immediate southern and western neighborhood, and marked the limits of Western military involvement in the region. By increasing its military footprint in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russia also bolstered its control of two strategically important areas in Transcaucasia—securing the approach to Sochi, the location of the Russian president’s southern residence and Russia’s informal third capital, in the former, and placing Russian forces within striking distance of Tbilisi in the latter.

Yet for all these gains, Russia fought its brief war against Georgia with unreformed, bulky remnants of the Soviet military. Russian soldiers were forced to use outdated weaponry, and Russian officers, overseeing troops who were insufficiently prepared for combat, even had to give orders using civilian cell phones after their military radios failed. By the end of the conflict, Russia had lost five military aircraft, including a strategic bomber. Moscow won the war against a much weaker enemy, but the flaws in its own military were too glaring to ignore.

And so two months after its war with Georgia, the Kremlin embarked on an ambitious program of defense modernization and military restructuring. These efforts, which Russian officials have projected will cost some $700 billion by 2020, are intended to transform the Russian military from a massive standing force designed for global great-power war into a lighter, more mobile force suited for local and regional conflicts. Moscow has pledged to streamline its command-and-control system, improve the combat readiness of its troops, and reform procurement. And in a radical break from a model that had been in place since the 1870s, Russia adopted a flexible force structure that will allow it to quickly deploy troops along the country’s periphery without undertaking mass mobilization.

Russia’s defense industry, meanwhile, began to provide this changing force with modern weapons systems and equipment. In 2009, after a hiatus of about two decades, during which the Kremlin cut off funding for all but company- or battalion-level exercises, Russian forces began to undertake large-scale military exercises, often without prior warning, to improve their combat readiness. Perhaps most important, Russian soldiers, sailors, and airmen came to be paid more or less decently. By the time the Ukraine crisis broke out, Russia’s military was far stronger than the disorganized and poorly equipped force that had lumbered into Georgia just five and a half years before.

EUROPE GOES BIPOLAR

The Russian military executed the Crimea operation brilliantly, rapidly seizing the peninsula with minimal casualties. Blueprints for the takeover must have existed for years, at least since Ukraine expressed interest in joining NATO in 2008. But it took a reformed military, plus a remarkable degree of coordination among Russia’s various services and agencies, to pull it off.

The operation in Crimea was not a shooting war, but actual fighting followed a few weeks later in the Donbas. Instead of ordering a massive cross-border invasion of eastern Ukraine, which Moscow had implicitly threatened and Kiev feared, the Putin government resorted to a tactic known in the West as “hybrid warfare”: providing logistical and intelligence support for the pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas while undertaking military exercises near the Ukrainian border to keep Kiev off balance. Moscow did send active-duty Russian officers to eastern Ukraine, some of whom were ostensibly on leave. But the bulk of the Russian-provided manpower in the country was made up of volunteers, and regular Russian units operated there only intermittently.

The story of Russia’s military modernization begins with its 2008 war in Georgia.

At the same time, Russia put NATO countries on notice: stay out of the conflict, or it may affect you, too. Russian warplanes—which in 2007 had resumed Cold War–era patrols around the world—skirted the borders of the United Kingdom, the United States, and several Scandinavian countries and got close to Western planes over the Baltic and Black Seas. Putin later admitted on Russian television that he had even considered putting Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert to defend its interests in Ukraine.

Russia benefited from its Ukraine campaign in several ways. The gambit allowed Moscow to incorporate Crimea, and it kept Kiev fearful of a full-scale invasion, which made the new Ukrainian leadership abandon the idea of using all of the country’s available forces to suppress the separatist rebellion in the Donbas. It also directly challenged U.S. dominance in the region, terrifying some of Russia’s neighbors, especially the Baltic states, which feared that Moscow might pull off similar operations in support of their own minority Russian populations. By provoking even deeper hostility toward Russia not only among Ukraine’s elites but also among its broader population, however, Russia’s military actions in Ukraine have also had a major downside.

Moscow’s use of force to change borders and annex territory did not so much mark the reappearance of realpolitik in Europe—the Balkans and the Caucasus saw that strategic logic in spades in the 1990s and the early years of this century—as indicate Russia’s willingness and capacity to compete militarily with NATO. The year 2014 was when European security again became bipolar.

PUTIN BREAKS THE MOLD

For all its novelties, the Russian offensive in Ukraine did not end Moscow’s tendency to project force only within the borders of the former Soviet Union. Russia broke that trend last year, when it dove into Syria’s civil war. It dispatched several dozen aircraft to Syria to strike the self-proclaimed Islamic State (also known as ISIS) and other anti-Assad forces, established advanced air defense systems within Syria, sent strategic bombers on sorties over the country from bases in central Russia, and ordered the Russian navy to fire missiles at Syrian targets from positions in the Caspian and Mediterranean Seas. By doing so, Russia undermined the de facto monopoly on the global use of force that the United States has held since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

MAXIM SHEMETOV / REUTERS Russian military vehicles before a rehearsal for a Victory Day parade in central Moscow, April 2015.

Moscow’s immediate military objective in Syria has been to prevent the defeat of Assad’s army and a subsequent takeover of Damascus by ISIS, a goal it has sought to achieve primarily through the empowerment of Syrian government forces and their Hezbollah and Iranian allies. Its political objective, meanwhile, has been to engineer a peace settlement that protects Russian interests in the country and the wider region—above all, by ensuring that Syria’s postwar, post-Assad government remains friendly to Russia; that Moscow is able to retain a military presence in Syria; and that Russia’s wartime partnerships with Iran, Iraq, and Kurdish forces produce lasting political and economic ties.

Even more important, Putin seeks to confirm Russia’s status as a great power, in part by working alongside the United States as a main cosponsor of a diplomatic process to end the war and as a guarantor of the ensuing settlement. Putin’s historic mission, as he sees it, is to keep Russia in one piece and return it to its rightful place among the world’s powers; Russia’s intervention in Syria has demonstrated the importance of military force in reaching that goal. By acting boldly despite its limited resources, Russia has helped shift the strategic balance in Syria and staged a spectacular comeback in a region where its relevance was written off 25 years ago.

The operation in Syria has had its dis­advantages for Moscow. In November 2015, a Turkish fighter jet downed a Russian bomber near the Syrian-Turkish border, the first such incident between Russia and a NATO country in more than half a century. Russia refrained from military retaliation, but its relations with Turkey, a major economic partner, suffered a crushing blow when Moscow imposed sanctions that could cost the Turkish economy billions of dollars. By siding with the Shiite regimes in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, Russia could also alienate its own population of some 16 million Muslims, most of whom are Sunni. Faced with this risk, Moscow has attempted to improve ties with some of the Middle East’s Sunni players, such as Egypt; it has also wagered that keeping Assad’s military afloat will ensure that the thousands of Russian and Central Asian jihadists fighting for ISIS in Iraq and Syria will never return to stir up trouble at home. Thus, Moscow’s war in support of Assad and against ISIS has also been an effort to kill individuals who might threaten Russia’s own stability.

NOT IN MY BACKYARD

Where will the Russian military go next? Moscow is looking to the Arctic, where the hastening retreat of sea ice is exposing rich energy deposits and making commercial navigation more viable. The Arctic littoral countries, all of which are NATO members except for Russia, are competing for access to resources there; Russia, for its part, hopes to extend its exclusive economic zone in the Arctic Ocean so that it can lay claim to valuable mineral deposits and protect the Northern Sea Route, a passage for maritime traffic between Europe and Asia that winds along the Siberian coast. To bolster its position in the High North, Russia is reactivating some of the military bases there that were abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is also building six new military installations in the region. Tensions in the Arctic remain mild, but that could change if there is a major standoff between NATO and Russia elsewhere or if Finland and Sweden, the two historically neutral Nordic countries, apply for NATO membership.

    In the coming years, Russia’s military will continue to focus on the country’s vast neighborhood in greater Eurasia.

More likely, Russia will take military action near its southern border, particularly if ISIS, which has established a foothold in Afghanistan, manages to expand into the Central Asian states, all of which are relatively fragile. The countries with the region’s largest economies, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, will soon face leadership transitions as their septuagenarian presidents step down or die. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, where Russia keeps small army and air force garrisons, will not prove stable in the long term; like Turkmenistan, they are home to high unemployment, official corruption, ethnic tension, and religious radicalism—the same sort of problems that triggered the Arab Spring.

The memory of the Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan is still too fresh for the Kremlin to seriously contemplate invading the country again to put down ISIS there; instead, it will continue to support the Afghan government and the Taliban’s efforts to take on the group. But that is not the case in Central Asia, which Russia considers a vital security buffer. If the government of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Tajikistan faces a major challenge from Islamist extremists, Russia will likely intervene politically and militarily, perhaps under the mandate of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, an alliance to which all four states belong.

In the coming years, then, Russia’s military will continue to focus on the country’s vast neighborhood in greater Eurasia, where Moscow believes using force constitutes strategic defense. If Russia’s venture in Syria fails to achieve Moscow’s political objectives there, or if Russia’s economy significantly deteriorates, that instance of intervention beyond the country’s near abroad may prove to be an exception. If not, Russia might learn to efficiently use its military force around the world, backing up its claim to be one of the world’s great powers, alongside China and the United States.

A NEW STANDOFF?

Even as Moscow has reformed its military to deal with new threats, Russian defense planning has remained consistently focused on the United States and NATO, which the Kremlin still considers its primary challenges. Russia’s National Security Strategy for 2016 describes U.S. policy toward Russia as containment; it also makes clear that Russia considers the buildup of NATO’s military capabilities a threat, as it does the development of U.S. ballistic missile defenses and the Pentagon’s ongoing project to gain the ability to strike anywhere on earth with conventional weapons within an hour. To counter these moves, Russia is modernizing its nuclear arsenal and its own air and missile defenses. Moscow is also revising the deployment pattern of its forces, particularly along Russia’s western border, and it will likely deepen its military footprint in the Baltic exclave of Kali­ningrad. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland are safe, however, even if they do not feel that way: the Kremlin has no interest in risking nuclear war by attacking a NATO member state, and the sphere of Russian control to which Putin aspires certainly excludes these countries.
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At the same time that Russia is rebuilding its military, NATO is ramping up its own military presence in eastern Europe. The result will likely be a new and open-ended military standoff. Unlike during the Cold War, however, there is little prospect for arms control agreements between Russia and the West anytime soon because of the many disparities in their conventional military capabilities. Indeed, the Russian armed forces are unlikely to become as powerful as the U.S. military or threaten a NATO member state with a massive invasion even in the long term. Although Moscow seeks to remain a major player on the international stage, Russian leaders have abandoned Soviet-era ambitions of global domination and retain bad memories of the Cold War–era arms race, which fatally weakened the Soviet Union.

What is more, Russia’s resources are far more limited than those of the United States: its struggling economy is nowhere near the size of the U.S. economy, and its aging population is less than half as large as the U.S. population. The Russian defense industry, having barely survived two decades of neglect and decay, faces a shrinking work force, weaknesses in key areas such as electronics, and the loss of traditional suppliers such as Ukraine. Although Russia’s military expenditures equaled 4.2 percent of GDP in 2015, the country cannot bear such high costs much longer without cutting back on essential domestic needs, particularly in the absence of robust economic growth. For now, even under the constraints of low energy prices and Western sanctions, Russian officials have pledged to continue the military modernization, albeit at a slightly slower pace than was originally planned.

Putin and other Russian officials understand that Russia’s future, and their own, depends mostly on how ordinary citizens feel. Just as the annexation of Crimea was an exercise in historic justice for most of the Russian public, high defense spending will be popular so long as Russian citizens believe that it is warranted by their country’s international position. So far, that seems to be the case. The modernization program could become a problem, however, if it demands major cuts to social spending and produces a sharp drop in living standards. The Russian people are famously resilient, but unless the Kremlin finds a way to rebuild the economy and provide better governance in the next four or five years, the social contract at the foundation of the country’s political system could unravel. Public sentiment is not a trivial matter in this respect: Russia is an au­tocracy, but it is an autocracy with the consent of the governed.

[Crafty_Dog]

From Red to Silver: The 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Soviet Union
Analysis
December 25, 2016 | 14:01 GMT Print
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A crowd watches as a statue of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky is lowered in Moscow's Lubyanka Square on Aug. 22, 1991. (ANATOLY SAPRONENKOV/AFP/Getty Images)
Analysis

Russian President Vladimir Putin once remarked that anyone who "does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart," while anyone who "wants it back has no brain." For nearly 70 years, the Soviet Union's founding communist ideology held the disparate peoples of its constituent socialist republics together. This ideology, antithetical as it was to the tenets of U.S. capitalism, also set the stage for the decadeslong war of worldviews that the United States and Soviet Union waged against each other through the latter half of the 20th century. The Cold War was a conflict unlike any other in history, an indirect battle between two superpowers in which the rest of the world was caught and maneuvered in for nearly half a century. On Dec. 26, 1991, the United States claimed its victory at last when the Kremlin lowered the iconic red flag that had flown over the Soviet Union. Twenty-five years later, the anniversary of the Soviet Union's collapse invites a reflection on the Cold War, its history and its legacy.

Laying the Foundation

No sooner had World War II ended than the preparations for the Cold War began. Before the ink had even dried on the various peace treaties that concluded the Second World War, the Soviet Union and the United States were already shoring up their positions, and their opposition, in Europe. As the Soviets, battered and nearly broken by the war, consolidated control over the so-called Eastern Bloc states, U.S. President Harry Truman said the United States and its allies needed to "show [them] how to behave." Just 25 years into its existence at the time, the Soviet Union was, after all, a young country. What Truman failed to understand, however, was that Moscow was following a strategy that had served it well for centuries under the Russian Empire, seeking security through expansionism. The United States and Western European nations quickly caught on to the Soviet agenda and formed their containment strategy, which evolved in time from the 1947 Truman Doctrine into the NATO military alliance. Even before the United States and Soviet Union formally drew their line between East and West in Europe, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pronounced that an "iron curtain ha[d] descended across the Continent."

The two nations spent the ensuing decades embroiled in war. But they managed it without ever fighting each other directly. Instead, the conflict played out in proxy battles across nearly every continent; through trade wars; in the perpetual worries of leaders and citizens in each country over the looming threat of nuclear war; and, of course, in an ideological war.

The Soviet Union's Collapse, 25 Years Later


The Soviet system was built on the socialist concept of equality — legal, social and economic — for all people (beginning with workers), a strategic move by the Union's founders more than a reflection of their convictions. The Communist Party presided over this system, directly overseeing the Soviet Union's political apparatuses, economies, industries, press and societies. In its principles and functions, the Soviet model stood in direct opposition to that of the United States, which espoused self-determination, democracy and capitalism. Neither belief system was as ironclad as its champions in Washington and Moscow perhaps imagined, and some ideals inevitably fell by the wayside, unrealized. War, moreover, makes for strange bedfellows; in the course of their conflict, the United States and Russia each supported states that held diverging — if not contradictory — views. Still, the United States saw the Soviets as godless oppressors of freedom and hope, depriving their citizenry of the right to pursue a better life. The Soviet Union, in turn, considered the United States an imperialist superpower trying to become a global hegemon. The Cold War struggle became a moral contest to determine which worldview was correct.

The Beginning of the End

Toward the end of the 1970s, after proxy conflicts and threats of nuclear war by the dozen, it seemed to Washington that Moscow would prevail. In its estimation of the apparently unstoppable Soviet Union, though, the United States failed to appreciate just how unwieldy an entity it was. Whether governing the Russian Empire or today's Russian Federation, Moscow has faced the same geographic constraints and vulnerabilities throughout its long history. With an economy dependent on oil (and, at times, grain), a highly diverse population and competitors beyond its indefensible borders, each variation of Russia behaves at its strongest and weakest much as its predecessor did. The question, then, was never whether the Soviet Union would fall to the West but rather when it would inevitably collapse under its own weight.

The Soviet Union had already shown signs of faltering. When Nikita Khrushchev assumed the Soviet premiership a few years after longtime leader Josef Stalin's death, he proclaimed a "thaw" throughout the Soviet Union. Khrushchev proceeded to relax censorship somewhat, liberalize political and economic policies, and release political prisoners, all the while decrying Stalin's often brutal tactics. (Even the nearly ubiquitous likenesses of the late leader were destroyed or cached away during Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign.) He and the rest of the Party elite knew the Soviet Union would fall apart if it did not evolve. In the decades that followed Khrushchev's shake-up, the country moldered in a cycle of alternating consolidation and liberalization schemes under a string of leaders.


Not With a Bang, but a Whimper

By the 1980s, a perfect storm of political pressures had converged on the Soviet Union. The Soviet political system was atrophying. Three elderly leaders — Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko — died in office in a span of three years as the country fought a bloody and expensive war in Afghanistan. Independent labor unions were sprouting up and gaining political traction across the Eastern Bloc. Meanwhile, oil prices — which made up more than half the country's revenues — plummeted, plunging the mostly hollow Soviet economy into ruin. The Soviet Union was starting to give under the weight of its own problems, a process the United States helped speed along. Washington set off an arms race in the early 1980s with its decision to take an active military position against the Soviets. Between 1980 and 1989, the United States nearly doubled its defense spending, armed mujahideen forces against the Soviets in Afghanistan and flaunted its advanced military capabilities by launching the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars." The Soviets' efforts to keep up only exacerbated the pressures on their country.

Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, commemorating the 750th anniversary of Berlin, addresses on June 12, 1987 the people of West Berlin at the base of the Brandenburg Gate, near the Berlin wall. (MIKE SARGENT/AFP/Getty Images)

Mikhail Gorbachev tried to stave off the Soviet Union's demise when he came to power in 1985 by bringing a younger generation of leaders to the Kremlin and introducing a series of liberal political and economic reforms. Gorbachev permitted the countries of the Eastern Bloc to establish independent political systems and struck an arms control agreement with the United States. But the measures were not enough to save the Soviet Union; the seeds of dissolution had already been sown. Just a few days shy of its 69th anniversary, the Soviet Union dissolved, ending the Cold War without so much as a bang. Instead, the Kremlin quietly lowered the Soviet flag — the symbol of one of history's most formidable forces. 

In the Wake of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union's collapse was hailed in the West as a victory for the United States and its allies, proof that the American system and its governing ideology were morally, ethically and technically superior. Perhaps the clearest illustration of Western views toward the end of the Cold War was the Berlin Freedom Concert, which commemorated the opening of the border between East and West Germany in 1989. Televised in more than 20 countries around the world, the concert brought orchestral musicians from both sides of the Berlin Wall together to play Beethoven's 9th Symphony. But instead of "ode to joy," the choir sang "ode to freedom." As the West saw it, the end of the German Democratic Republic represented a triumph for freedom, and the demise of the Soviet Union liberated the world from the so-called Evil Empire.

Without an equal adversary, the United States became a global hegemon, just as the Soviets had feared, and the Western institutional, economic and democratic models spread across many parts of the world. But the fall of the Soviet Union yielded some more unexpected outcomes as well. Despite the proxy wars that had raged throughout the Cold War, the U.S.-Soviet dichotomy kept other conflicts in check. In the waning years of the Soviet Union and for decades after its collapse, wars broke out across the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and the former Soviet states. Many of these conflicts tested the United States' hegemony. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War facilitated the rise of regional powers such as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Germany and France — some of which diverge from the United States' worldview. Alternative regional coalitions formed or expanded in the wake of the binary alliance system that the Cold War had built, creating competition for the United States.

Though the Soviet Union's dissolution seemed to suggest that Moscow could never again challenge Washington, Russia eventually regained its footing. Now, the Russian Federation is following the same strategy, however flawed, that its Soviet and imperial forerunners pursued. Much as it did in previous eras, Moscow is once again resorting to authoritarian and expansionist tactics to overcome its inherent fragility — this time under the guise of a democratic system and a market-driven (albeit state-influenced) economy. This resurgence has in some ways echoed the rise of the Soviet Union, but having learned from its mistakes, Moscow will not attempt to match the Soviets' global reach. Nonetheless, Russia's comeback has proved that 25 years after the Cold War's end, a stable world order is as elusive as ever.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/putins-real-long-game-214589

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439060/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.hoover.org/research/russias-borders-thirty-years-vision-not-certainty

[Crafty_Dog]

Trump-Putin Will Talk Against Backdrop of Broader Russian Mischief
Debate over Russia’s role in 2016 election blurs larger picture
Four Things to Watch for During Trump-Putin Meeting

The biggest event on the international stage this week will be the meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib sees four things to watch out for: their personal interactions, sanctions, Syria and Ukraine. Photo: AP
By Gerald F. Seib
July 3, 2017 10:59 a.m. ET
647 COMMENTS

When President Donald Trump meets Russian leader Vladimir Putin late this week, many will be watching to see whether they discuss alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

That much is obvious. Less obvious, but more important, is how any Russian meddling in the American presidential-election season—whatever form it may have taken—fits into a much larger tale. This is the tale of a systematic Russian effort to disrupt democratic and capitalist systems internationally, using an updated version of tactics Mr. Putin learned in the bad old days of the Soviet KGB.

In fact, one of the dangers in the current hyperpartisan American debate over Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election is that it is blurring this larger picture. If the 2016 election was the tip of an iceberg, the rest of the iceberg warrants serious attention.

A useful reminder of the breadth of the problem comes in the form of “The Kremlin Playbook,” a publication released last October by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist American think tank, and the Center for the Study of Democracy, a European public-policy institute. In retrospect, it was a remarkably prescient look at the controversies that have mushroomed since the American election that came a month later.

The Playbook is an in-depth study of Russian efforts to use overt and covert tactics over a period of a decade to expand its economic and political influence in five Central and East European nations. A group of regional leaders from such nations warned President Barack Obama in a 2009 letter—which also looks prescient now—that Russia was conducting “overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation in order to advance its interests….”

The Russian strategy, the study finds, isn’t ad hoc. Rather, it is the implementation of a doctrine developed by Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov called “new generation warfare.” One European analyst called that “primarily a strategy of influence, not of brute force” aimed at “breaking the internal coherence of the enemy system.”

The strategy, as it has unfolded in Central and Eastern Europe, proceeds along two parallel tracks, the study found. The first track is economic. Russia seeks to find business partners and investments that allow it to establish an economic foothold, which in turn produces economically influential patrons and partners who have a vested interest in policies friendly to the Kremlin. That is a particularly fruitful endeavor in Europe, where many nations depend on Russian energy supplies.

The goal on this track is to cultivate “a network of local affiliates and power-brokers who are capable of advocating on Russia’s behalf.”

The second track, perhaps more relevant to the U.S., is designed to disrupt prevailing democratic political patterns. The goal, the Playbook says, is “to corrode democracy from within by deepening political divides and cultivating relationships with aspiring autocrats, political parties (notably nationalists, populists and Euroskeptic groups), and Russian sympathizers.”
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On this track, the effort is designed in part to advance parties and figures sympathetic to Russia. But the broader goal is simply to disrupt the process, create confusion and discord, and discredit democratic systems both in targeted countries and in the eyes of Russian citizens, who are told the chaos to their West shows they shouldn’t long for a Western-styled democratic system at home.

A key tool in this effort, the report says, is a “war on information” campaign that uses disinformation and propaganda to disable opponents and foment nationalist and anti-Western sentiment. “Toward this end, Russia exploits existing political pressure points such as migration and economic stagnation, blames Western and U.S. operations for all negative international dynamics (such as the attempted July 2016 coup in Turkey), and discredits the current state of Western democracy,” the report says.

Remember that this was written before Mr. Trump won the American presidency and the investigations into Russian influence went into high gear. The findings are about a broader pattern of Russian behavior, not about what it might have done in the U.S. political system.

Yet these findings present a backdrop for both the current debate over Russia’s 2016 U.S. activities, as well as Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Putin on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting in Germany this week.

Heather A. Conley, a senior vice president of CSIS and one of the authors of The Kremlin Playbook, says the months since its publication have brought “an acceleration” of Russian influence-seeking, ranging from a plot against the prime minister of Montenegro to interference in the French election to cyberattacks in Ukraine.

The goal, she says, “is disruption, to create governmental policies that accommodate Russian interests,” first in ending Western economic sanctions and then in building a broader sphere of influence. She adds:  “We continue to be unprepared.”

[Crafty_Dog]

What Russia’s Middle East Strategy Is Really About
Oct 11, 2017
By Xander Snyder

A new balance of power is solidifying in Syria. Iran, Turkey and Russia have all played a role in the conflict there – jockeying for position and even agreeing in September to set up zones of control. But Russia in particular has deftly managed the game up to this point, and it is emerging from the Syrian civil war with a strong hand. Ultimately, Russia’s goal is to parlay its position in the Middle East into advantages in areas that matter more to Moscow. To some degree, it has achieved this, but it’s still unclear whether its strategy will be successful enough to score Russia an advantage in the area it cares about the most: Ukraine.

Russia intervened in Syria for two reasons: to gain enough clout in the region that the U.S. would offer some concessions in negotiations elsewhere in exchange for cooperation in Syria, and to show its public that Russia is still a strong power. Russia’s support for Bashar Assad was instrumental in preventing the regime’s demise. Now, the Islamic State is in retreat, and some version of the Syrian regime, led by Assad, will remain in power. Russia’s role in this outcome gives the Kremlin influence with the Assad regime. The regime’s biggest challenge now is eliminating what remains of the Sunni insurgency, including groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which took control of much of Idlib province from the Turkish proxy Ahrar al-Sham in July.
 
Turkish soldiers stand during a demonstration in support of the Turkish army’s Idlib operation near the Turkey-Syria border on Oct. 10, 2017. ILYAS AKENGIN/AFP/Getty Images

Over the past week, we’ve seen two seemingly anomalous events that are part of a strategy to eliminate the Sunni insurgency. First, King Salman of Saudi Arabia visited Moscow and signed multibillion-dollar energy deals with Russia that will involve both Russian investment in Saudi Arabia and Saudi investment in Russia. Then, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – a group that the Saudis have been accused of backing and that, as of a few months ago, was an enemy of one of Turkey’s proxy groups – reportedly escorted Turkish officers into Idlib as Turkish reconnaissance forces surveyed the territory in preparation for a greater deployment of forces. Both these events indicate that the Saudis may be willing to work with Russia in Syria by applying pressure on radical Sunni insurgent groups. In exchange, the Saudis will get some much-needed financial help in the form of investment deals. They will also get reassurance that Iranian influence in Syria will be limited. Turkey’s deployment in Idlib is one way of achieving this.

Russia needed to isolate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib so that Turkey could establish control of the territory as part of the de-escalation agreement that Russia, Turkey and Iran reached in September. Idlib, which is close to the Turkish border as well as Aleppo and Latakia – two key provinces for the Syrian government – is not the only territory still held by rebels, but it is the last major rebel bastion. Russia is hoping that investment deals like the one it made last week will compel the Saudis to put more pressure on the group. The Saudi regime hasn’t directly funded Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, but it has looked the other way as individual Saudis gave it financial support.

Russia is cooperating with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey to gain ground in the region in the short term, even though its interests don’t align with these countries’ interests in the long term. Moscow is, therefore, establishing a balance that lets Russia play one country off the other so that no single power gains too much influence in the region.
Turkey has historically been a potential threat to Russia because Ankara controls the Bosporus, a narrow passage that, if blocked, would obstruct Moscow’s access to the Mediterranean. Iran is less dangerous to Moscow, but Russia still wants to limit Tehran’s influence in the Caucasus and prevent it from gaining too much control in Syria. Russia will thus work with both countries to make sure that they can counterbalance each other. An additional benefit of working with Turkey is that it can help isolate the remaining radical Sunni groups and prevent any interference from Saudi Arabia.

Russia’s strategy in the Middle East is to stay closer to all other players in the region than they are to one another. Russia, however, is pursuing this strategy not because it wants to be a major leader in the Middle East, but because it wants to accumulate as much influence as possible. This would allow it to offer to cooperate with the U.S. in the Middle East in exchange for concessions elsewhere. If the U.S. declines this offer, Russia will have at least made the situation more difficult for the U.S. and kept it bogged down and distracted. Russia’s main priority is Ukraine, and it perceives U.S. involvement there over the past several years as a threat. Moscow hopes that, as long as the U.S. is focused on the Middle East, it will be more willing to budge on the Ukraine issue.

Signs that a short-term alignment is emerging between Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia plays into Russia’s strategy. All three of these countries have an interest in cooperating to a degree in Syria. Turkey needs to expand into Syria to eliminate radical Sunni insurgent threats on its border, to check Iran’s power in Syria and to keep the Syrian Kurds weak in the north. Iran wants to further limit the threat of Sunni groups in Syria and consolidate its power in Syria and Iraq. And Saudi Arabia has a financial incentive to cooperate, as it needs all the money it can get. For Russia, however, its main focus is not in the Middle East but in Ukraine. It has so far seen success in one part of its Middle East strategy – gaining influence in an area the U.S. cares deeply about – but it remains to be seen whether this will translate into concessions on Ukraine.

[Crafty_Dog]

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Forecast Update

In Stratfor's 2017 Fourth-Quarter Forecast, we said Russia and Iran would work in tandem through the Syrian peace talks and in negotiations with other regional players. We are currently seeing that cooperation occur not only in Syria, but other areas as well.

The relationship between Russia and Iran is reigniting. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Iran on Nov. 1 to meet with his Azerbaijani and Iranian counterparts in the second summit between the three countries. The trilateral format was set up last year by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to discuss shared concerns and projects in the region. But increasing alignment between Russia and Iran over the last year will give the two countries plenty to discuss.

Moscow and Tehran found themselves aligned in the mid 2000s as the United States and Western powers were increasing pressure on Iran for its nuclear program and on Russia through the Western containment strategy. Russia spearheaded construction on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor and supplied it with fuel, enabling Moscow to use the so-called "Iran card" in negotiations with Washington over issues such as NATO expansion, missile defense, and support for Russia's political opposition. Tehran reveled in the rivalry between Russia and the United States, not only because it helped Iran's nuclear program, but also because Moscow regularly interfered with the broader coalition against Iran. The usefulness of their relations, however, dwindled after Iran, Russia, the United States and other countries finalized the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iranian nuclear deal.

Yet Tehran and Moscow have rekindled their alignment in recent years. Increased pressure on Russia from Western sanctions in 2014 and the looming threat of expanded sanctions against Iran from U.S. President Donald Trump's administration have given both countries cause to deepen their relationship. Russia's entrance into the Syrian conflict in 2015 also helped solidify their alignment. Recent developments in Syria favor loyalist forces backed by Iran and Russia, helping both countries preserve their influence in the region. Moscow and Tehran have ensured that negotiations with outside parties — including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel and Lebanon — over the next phase of the Syrian conflict largely exclude the United States.

Meanwhile, Russian companies are actively looking for opportunities to invest in Iran's energy sector. Lukoil, Rosneft and Gazprom Neft — along with several other Russian energy companies — are in talks to invest an estimated $1.5 billion in the country through oil and natural gas projects. Iran and Russia are also still finalizing their oil-for-goods barter scheme to allow Iranian crude oil to be traded for Russian equipment and goods. The deal was pared down from 500,000 to 100,000 barrels per day, but both countries may be open to increasing that number to counter looming U.S. sanctions.

Russia and Iran have flirted with greater cooperation on defense as well. Russia transferred its S-300 air defense missile system to Iran last year, and is negotiating the sale of $10 billion worth of weapons, including T-90 tanks and Sukhoi Su-30SM fighter jets. The United Nations holds a memorandum on Iranian weapons acquisitions — slated to be lifted in 2020 with any weapons transfers requiring U.N. approval — and the United States has vowed to stop any weapons transfers from Russia to Iran. The demand gives Moscow another point it can use in talks with Washington, and another reason to maintain its partnership with Iran despite U.S. pressure.

Both Russia and Iran seem to have been lumped in with North Korea as primary foes in the eyes of the Trump administration. The current U.S. foreign policy posture gives Moscow and Tehran cause to cooperate not only so they can advance their objectives, but also so they can counter Washington's.

[Crafty_Dog]

Nov. 16, 2017 Iran has been quiet about Moscow and Riyadh’s newfound friendship – and the weapons that friendship has procured.

By Jacob L. Shapiro

Last month, well before Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman purged the government of potential rivals, his father, King Salman, did something unprecedented as well: He visited Russia, Saudi Arabia’s erstwhile enemy. After the visit came the usual slew of announced business deals that promise a lot but deliver little. On Nov. 13, however, Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation announced that it would provide Saudi Arabia with its sophisticated S-400 air defense missiles. King Salman’s visit appears to have delivered real cooperation.

A Relationship Redefined

That Saudi Arabia and Russia would redefine the nature of their relationship is surprising in its own right. These were two countries firmly on opposite ends of the Cold War. But even more jarring is that Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, has been silent. Iran and Russia have a complicated relationship in their own right, one marked for centuries by suspicion and distrust. But in recent years they had set aside their differences, becoming military allies to save Bashar Assad and destroy the Islamic State. Now, Russia is promising to supply Iran’s biggest enemy with air defense missiles – and Iran hasn’t made a peep. Something doesn’t add up.

Consider Russia’s position in the Middle East. Most observers claim that by partnering with Iran to save the Assad regime, Russia enhanced its influence in the region at the expense of the United States. This is a misunderstanding. Russia’s intervention was actually pretty limited. At the height of its involvement, it had only 30-75 fighter jets and helicopters operating in the country. Its commitment was small but successful, insofar as it prevented the Syrian government from falling and the Islamic State from rising.

But it did not undermine U.S. strategic goals in the Middle East. If anything, it enhanced them. When the Syrian civil war started, the U.S. was determined to remove Assad. Yet there weren’t enough moderates for it to train and arm, and in any case, the Islamic State looked as though it may take Damascus for itself. And so the United States prioritized its fight against IS over its fight against Assad. Russia was, in effect, helping the U.S. do its dirty work. For all the bluster surrounding their relations, the U.S. and Russia have been coordinating their efforts in Syria in pursuit of a common goal for years.
Russian S-400 Triumph medium-range and long-range surface-to-air missile systems ride through Red Square during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2017. NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

Now that Assad has been saved and the Islamic State’s caliphate vanquished, the question is: What comes next? With IS out of the picture, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, Turkey and Iran – which had if nothing else a common enemy – no longer have a reason to cooperate with one another. Life after IS is actually more difficult for Russia than life with it. Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are all competing to fill the power vacuum left by the group’s departure, and Russia’s long-term interests don’t align with any of theirs.

Unlike the Islamic State, all three countries have the power to threaten Russian interests directly. Take Turkey, for example. It can cut off Russia’s access to the Mediterranean by closing the Bosporus. It competes with Russia in the Caucasus. And as it strengthens, it will begin to project power into the Balkans, another region in Russia’s sphere of influence.

Iran, like Turkey, has interests in the Caucasus. It also shares a border with Central Asia and Afghanistan – another Russian sphere of influence where Iran can cause serious problems for Moscow.

And Saudi Arabia, for its part, poses two challenges of its own. First, Saudi Arabia can still influence global oil prices, where even small fluctuations can hurt the Russian economy. Second, Saudi Arabia is the worldwide leader in exporting jihadism, a threat to a country like Russia, which has a large minority Muslim population that is fast increasing.

Russia has met these challenges not by choosing one country to align with but by trying to forge better relationships with all of them. Its relationship with Turkey is rocky but sustainable. (In fact, in September, Turkey signed its own agreement to receive S-400s from Russia.) Its relationship with Iran is solid but not without drama. A Russian announcement in August 2016 that it was using an Iranian air base for attacks in Syria set off a short-lived political controversy in Iran, sparking backlash from Iranian politicians who felt Russia’s use of the base violated Iran’s Constitution. Now Russia is reaching out to Saudi Arabia, and besides the agreements on military cooperation, Moscow secured a promise from King Salman during his visit last month to stop Saudi proselytizing to Muslims in Russia.

Russia is cultivating other ties too. Officials from Moscow have met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu several times this year and have kept lines of communication open over Hezbollah’s potential acquisition of advanced weaponry. Russia has also expressed some support for various Kurdish groups vying for independence in the region. Moscow has, for example, kept open its embassy in Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, throughout the contentious independence referendum.

And while Russia has said it does not support the PYD, the Kurdish political party in northern Syria, in its push for independence, it nonetheless invited the group to a congress comprising all relevant parties to discuss Syria’s future – much to the chagrin of Turkey, Iran and anti-Assad Syrian opposition groups.

Silence and Blindness

Russian foreign policy can be disruptive, but it would be a mistake to think of it as monolithic or unchanging. The Cold War, for all its faults, simplified foreign policy. (Simple doesn’t mean easy.) It was unclear whether the U.S. or USSR was more powerful. Regions like the Middle East became battlegrounds to see which one was. The U.S. had its allies (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey) and the USSR had its allies (Egypt, Syria, Iraq). Sometimes countries switched sides, but ultimately it was a zero-sum game, with each side trying to weaken the other.

But the Cold War has been over for more than two decades. Today’s Russia is not yesterday’s Soviet Union. The U.S. and Russia actually share some long-term interests in the Middle East. Neither wants to see any one country dominate the entire region. Washington and Moscow want parity; they prefer that the region’s countries compete with one another rather than cause problems for them. In a perfect world, the U.S. would be embroiled in the Middle East and Russia would be free. But theirs is not a perfect world, so Moscow’s primary objective is to make sure the problems and ambitions of the Middle East stay in the Middle East.

This altogether different strategy of containment brings us back to Iran – and its silence on the budding Saudi-Russia friendship. Iran does not think it needs to attack Saudi Arabia head on. The government in Tehran believes Saudi Arabia will eventually collapse under the weight of its own problems, and that, in the meantime, the best thing Iran can do is engage Saudi Arabia in expensive and time-consuming proxy wars. Iran may not particularly like Russia’s providing Saudi Arabia with S-400s, but it can look past this particular issue because none of its red lines have been crossed. Russia is, after all, still playing an important role in helping the Assad regime – a key Iranian ally – retake the parts of Syria it has lost in the war. That is worth more right now than a public denunciation of some missile acquisitions.

But just because Iran is silent doesn’t mean it is blind to what’s happening. And just because Iran and Russia have cooperated in recent years doesn’t mean their relationship is ironclad. Russia cannot be everything to everyone in the region, and at some point it will be forced to make difficult decisions. In the meantime, pragmatism reigns. By improving relations with Saudi Arabia, Russia is hedging the bets it placed on Iran. By keeping quiet, Iran continues to reap what benefits it can from Russia’s moves. News about the S-400s doesn’t change much, but it underscores just how quickly change can come

[Crafty_Dog]

Will Putin Ever Leave? Could He if He Wanted?
A Stalin biographer contemplates Russia’s weakness today, which makes its current ruler such a threat to the West.
By Tunku Varadarajan
March 9, 2018 5:37 p.m. ET
29 COMMENTS

Russia votes on March 18 in a presidential election that is, let’s agree, lacking in any competitive tension. In fact, says Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Putin’s re-election is “preordained, a superfluous, if vivid, additional signal of Russia’s debilitating stagnation.”

Few Americans understand Russia better than Mr. Kotkin, who late last year published “ Stalin : Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second of an intended three-volume biography of the Soviet dictator Mr. Kotkin describes as “the person in world history who accumulated more power than anyone else.”

President Putin, by comparison, is a dictatorial lightweight. “We wouldn’t want to equate Putin with Stalin,” Mr. Kotkin says. The Soviet Union—which Stalin ruled for three hair-raising decades, until his death in 1953—had “one-sixth of the world’s land mass under its control, plus satellites in Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.” There were also communist parties in scores of countries, which did Russia’s bidding. “We talk about how Russia interferes in our elections today,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but Stalin had a substantial Communist Party in France, and in Italy, inside the Parliament. And when Stalin gave instructions to them, they followed his orders.”

The Soviet economy, at its peak in the 1980s, reached about a third of the size of the U.S. economy. Russia’s economy today, Mr. Kotkin points out, “is one-15th the size of America’s. Russia is very weak, and getting weaker.” Not long ago, Russia was the eighth-largest economy in the world. Today, Mr. Kotkin says, “you’re lucky to get it at 12th or 13th, depending on how you measure things. Another two terms of Putin, and Russia will be out of the top 20.”

But don’t be reassured by Russia’s feebleness. Mr. Kotkin says this weakness is what makes Mr. Putin such a threat to the West.


Mr. Kotkin, a professor at Princeton and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is the sort of historian who’s gone out of fashion at American universities. He readily admits that the subject that interests him most is power: “Where does power come from, how does it work, how does it accumulate and dissipate?” He is a historian of politics and international relations at a time when history faculties everywhere are recoiling from big themes and grand strategy, embracing instead an increasingly narrow social and cultural historiography.

“We have more than 60 professors in the history department at Princeton,” Mr. Kotkin says. “I consider that a very substantial number. We don’t have a single one whose specialty is U.S. diplomatic history.” He stresses that he’s not against the other types of history being taught at universities, just that he’s saying that there “should be room for straightforward, old-fashioned, political-diplomatic history, about foreign policy and current events.”
Will Putin Ever Leave? Could He if He Wanted?
Illustration: Ken Fallin

Mr. Kotkin became a historian by messy accident. He was a pre-med student at the University of Rochester, in upstate New York, where he boasts that he had “the highest average in organic chemistry, the most difficult course.” He was in the operating room one day with a professor—“a bit of a showman”—who’d opened a carotid artery in a way that made blood spurt. “I’d never seen anything like this,” says Mr. Kotkin—his face faintly green even in the remembering—“and I began to feel woozy.” The callow Mr. Kotkin threw up and passed out. “That ended my medical career.”

A switch to English literature followed, with a minor in history, which put Mr. Kotkin into contact with the legendary Christopher Lasch. A moralist as well as a historian, Lasch was writing “The Culture of Narcissism” at the time. “He was a kind of Midwestern, prairie populist,” Mr. Kotkin says, “and his critique of American progressivism was something you cannot now hear on American campuses.”

Attracted to history, and away from literature, Mr. Kotkin ended up at the University of California, Berkeley for his doctorate, specializing in Russia. “I started learning the Russian language in the third year of my Ph.D., and then four years later I was assistant professor of Russian history at Princeton.” That was 1988, Mr. Kotkin was 29, and the Soviet state was withering away. There couldn’t have been a better time, one imagines, for a historian of Russia to find a wide and hungry audience.

Mr. Kotkin was drawn to Stalin because “the history of Stalin was a history of the world.” He was also “the gold standard of dictatorship.” With Soviet nostalgia sweeping Russia today alongside a revival of Stalin as a paragon, Mr. Kotkin welcomes my asking him how much of Stalin we should see in Mr. Putin today—and how much of Stalin Mr. Putin sees in himself.

Old-school historian that he is, Mr. Kotkin responds with a narrative. “The way you have to begin with this is with Russia’s place in the world. How do you get a figure like Stalin or Putin in the first place?” The answer lies in Russia’s aspiration “to have a special mission in the world—something that most people attribute to its Byzantine heritage.” Russia, in Russian eyes, is “not a regular country, it’s a providential power that’s ordained by God.”

This is where the threat from Mr. Putin springs. It’s very difficult to manage the proposition of Russian power in the world, says Mr. Kotkin, when the “capacities of the Russian state today, like the Soviet state before, are not always of the first rank.” They’re economically modest and technologically mediocre, so they “look for ways to compensate,” and subversion of competitors is an obvious, low-cost strategy.

Mr. Kotkin invites us to ponder Mr. Putin’s options. “We have a situation where a desire for a special mission in the world is the overriding organizational framework of Russian national culture, and the Putin regime is the inheritor of this.” Mr. Putin couldn’t possibly abandon Russia’s self-image and decide that his is going to be “just another country,” the way France and Britain did, and Germany and Japan were forced to do. Among major world powers today, Mr. Kotkin says, “those countries that feel they’re destined under God to be special are really only the U.S., China and Russia.”

Russia, it would seem, is providential yet impotent. “That’s why the Russians love the U.N.,” Mr. Kotkin says. “They have a veto on the Security Council.” It is also why Russia today retains a state-led economy: “You use the state to beat your people up, and the state also picks the winners and losers in the marketplace.” Russia is beggaring itself, Mr. Kotkin believes, in relation to China, but it’s staying afloat strategically “vis-à-vis the West because the West itself is in disarray in a way that China is not. The United States is in a period you can describe any way you wish, but it’s not one of vigorous global leadership.”

Russia appears to have resigned itself to China’s inexorable rise. It has therefore turned its competitive focus entirely on the West. “Russia’s grand strategy,” says Mr. Kotkin, “is Western collapse. Just wait it out. If the European Union breaks up, if the U.S. withdraws into itself and gives up all of its alliances around the world, Russia has many fewer problems, and its relative-power gap can narrow substantially.”

Mr. Putin’s modus operandi, Mr. Kotkin suggests, is to “enhance the process of Western collapse. You can try to interfere in Western elections and support disarray in the West, but ultimately only the West can destroy itself.”

Mr. Putin did not “hijack the U.S. election,” Mr. Kotkin says. “He hijacked American public discourse.” Moscow conducted an intelligence operation to discredit Hillary Clinton and U.S. democracy by obtaining compromising material, “of which there was plenty.” This evolved into “an operation to obtain compromising material on Donald Trump as well, with the aim of getting sanctions lifted and a whole lot more.”

Mrs. Clinton and her campaign were, says Mr. Kotkin, “unwilling victims; Trump and his campaign were willing ones.” As a result, “America’s counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s intelligence activities morphed into a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign. And then, sadly, into an attempted manipulation to derail that investigation.” Russia’s actions, Mr. Kotkin says, “failed to decide the election, or to have the sanctions against Russia removed, but succeeded in stealing America’s attention.”

As Mr. Putin bets on Russia’s survival at the expense of the West, one wonders what his own ideology is beyond an obvious belief in Russian exceptionalism. “He is a Russian patriot in his own way,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but I don’t think his version of Russian patriotism is enhancing the long-term interests of that country.” Like other authoritarian rulers, Mr. Putin believes that “the survival of his personal regime and the survival of his country as a great power in the world are the same question.”

That conflation has put Russia “in a downward spiral,” and Mr. Kotkin lists several measures that show how poorly Russia has fared under Mr. Putin. Most striking is the “hemorrhage” of Russia’s human capital. “It’s hard to measure,” as “there’s no census,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but anywhere between five and 10 million Russians are now living beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union.” The brain-drained Russians average about 20% above the mean income in the countries where they live, “which tells you that they’re a talented group, an educated, entrepreneurial, dynamic population. We have them at Princeton University—in our laboratories, our math department. You name it, they’re all over the place.”

With Mr. Putin a shoo-in for re-election, one wonders if he may, like Stalin, have a job for life in the Kremlin. Mr. Kotkin says he has “self-assigned tenure, meaning he can be there as long as he wants unless he’s assassinated in a palace coup.”

He may not have any choice in the matter: “It’s not clear he can leave if he wants to leave, because of the fact that he has narrowed the regime so considerably.” Authoritarian regimes tend to become victims of their own success. “The better they get at surveillance and suppression of dissent,” Mr. Kotkin says, “the less they know about their own society and what the people really think.” When authoritarian rulers first come to power, “they’re kind of like umpires. There are many different powerful groups that have disputes among themselves, and they turn to the leader to adjudicate.”

About to enter his fourth term as president, Mr. Putin is no longer the arbiter over a “scrum of competing interests, but is, instead, the leader of a single faction that controls all the power and all the wealth,” Mr. Kotkin says. This faction needs its protector to stick around so it can stay rich—and stay alive. “There’s really no way for Putin to retire peacefully.”

Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

[Crafty_Dog]

    Though Russian President Vladimir Putin is assured an election win on March 18, his fourth term will usher in a period of deep challenges for Russia and his continued rule.
    Putin's pledge to maintain stability is facing economic and demographic shifts that will ripple throughout society and test compliance with Putin's government.
    Thinking of the longer term, the Kremlin is considering a spate of reforms and has allowed political discourse to return to Russia, though each maneuver is not without its risks.
    Putin, his cultlike government and the Russian people are starting to consider what life in Russia will look like after he leaves the political stage.

The predictable re-election of Vladimir Putin on March 18 will usher in an unpredictable fourth term for the longtime Russian president. All but assured a victory, Putin could remain in office through 2024, which would make him the longest-serving leader since Josef Stalin. In the West, Putin is labeled a narcissist, despot and would-be king for holding onto power for 18 years. But rebuilding an empire out of the wreckage of the Soviet Union took time, and now he faces a string of pressing challenges that threaten his legacy and the future stability of Russia. His next term will look qualitatively different from his previous terms, as he maneuvers varying chess pieces for Russia's long game.

The Big Picture

The 2018 Annual and Second-Quarter forecasts covered a number of the domestic and international challenges facing Russia, from Moscow's standoff with the West to growing Russian discontent over corruption and the economy. President Vladimir Putin's ongoing moves to insulate Russia from the West and bring social and economic reforms to the forefront will mark his fourth term after his expected re-election on March 18.



At his core, Putin is a patriot. He understands Russia's strengths and pitfalls, and its historic cycles and likely future. A former KGB agent, Putin rose to power after the Soviet collapse and chaotic 1990s under former President Boris Yeltsin. Backed by a savvy, though brutal network in St. Petersburg and the Federal Security Services (the KGB's successor), Putin officially claimed power in 2000, inheriting a politically divided country plagued by a broken economy and rampant regionalism, and bloodied by war in the Caucasus. His first and second terms in office were focused on containing and reversing the anarchy. He dismantled regional dissent, cracked down on the oligarchs, nationalized strategic assets, weeded out political challenges and rallied nationalism. By establishing an authoritarian-based system, Putin micromanaged and mediated the consolidation of the country under his rule.

By the end of his second term in 2008, Russia was relatively stable financially and unified socially and politically, and it was surging back onto the global stage. Putin benefited from high global energy prices, which enabled him to stuff the Kremlin's coffers and allowed his government to finance Russia's restabilization. Putin's system owed its success to more than cash though. It also succeeded because he exercised a gritty craftiness that stemmed from a deep knowledge of the constraints to Russian cohesion and of the challenges that befall every strong Russian leader. Despite certain re-election on March 18, he is thinking of a world and a Russia post-Putin.

Looming Challenges

Even at its most bellicose, Russia is an inherently weak country. Geographically, it is the largest state in the world, and transporting energy, food and resources across it is daunting. Throughout its history, the country has maintained a dependency on commodity exports. Russia is home to 160 distinct ethnic groups and indigenous peoples. And strong rival powers sit on or near its long borders. For these combined reasons, Russian leaders, like Putin, are forced to hold onto stability with an iron fist. Going into his fourth term, two large shifts — economic and demographic — threaten Putin's ability to maintain stability and his hold on power.

Even at its most bellicose, Russia is an inherently weak country.

Putin's Social Contract. When he came to power, Putin brokered an informal social contract with the Russian people to maintain financial and economic stability. The contract includes dependable paychecks, secure pensions, a reliable banking system, state backing of strategic assets, and opportunities for the next generation. Russia's economic position shapes the loyalty (or at least the compliance) of the elites, the general population, and the military and security services. Under Putin, Russia has bounced back relatively well from economic hiccups; however, the country currently is settling into a prolonged period of post-recession stagnation that is reverberating across the country.

Russia's poverty level is rising at its fastest pace in two decades, and its minimum wage is below subsistence levels. Average Russians are spending half of their paychecks on food, and more than 25 percent report regular interruptions or cuts to their salaries. The Kremlin blew through its Reserve Fund at the start of the year, and it is now dipping into the National Welfare Fund, which is intended to secure pensions. The Russian banking system also is rapidly shrinking, with the Central Bank having closed one-third (or 300) of the country's struggling banks over the past three years.

The economy is overwhelmingly the top concern among Russians. Of the more than 1,100 protests in 2017, two-thirds were related to the economy. Signs held by protesters during widespread demonstrations in June 2017 called on the Kremlin to pay for bread, not bombs — a jab at Moscow's high-profile military interventions in Syria and Ukraine.

Corruption also is driving disaffection in Russia, which ranks in the bottom 45 countries on Transparency International's corruption index. The Russian people largely ignored the rampant corruption of Putin and his cronies while the country thrived, but calls for an anti-corruption campaign against the Kremlin have grown, helped along by the popularity of opposition heavyweight Alexei Navalny and his anti-corruption exposes.

2018 Russian presidential candidates

A similar discontent is developing among the Russian elites, both within the Kremlin and among the oligarchy. The elites supported Putin as long as their fiefdoms were protected and growing. But now their business and financial opportunities are shrinking because of the stagnant economy and because of increased pressure from Western sanctions stemming from Moscow's foreign activities. Many elites have lost or fear losing their financial support systems (personal banks at home or the safety of cash abroad), and the Kremlin is increasingly taking on responsibility for those systems.

This has sparked increased competition among the elites and diminished Putin's ability to curb or intervene in the battles. The most prominent example is Rosneft chief Igor Sechin's takedown of Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev last year for attempting to prevent the oil czar from snatching up assets — a move Putin forbade without effect. Other examples are the revived battles for the control of assets by the metals oligarchs and the unchecked transformation of Chechnya into a mini-fiefdom based on conservative Islamic values under Ramzan Kadyrov. Additionally, the large security services are flexing their muscles over key assets and portfolios, leading to a likely challenge in Putin's fourth term over the power to target other elites.

Demographics. Putin's fraying contract with his people and elites comes as he faces another distinct challenge: demographics. The country's ethnic Russian population is in steep decline, with United Nations estimates predicting an overall decline of 10 percent by 2030. The decline is despite a sharply rising ethnic Muslim population, from 13 million in 1990 to a projected total of more than 20 million in 2030. This trend exacerbates social tensions between ethnic groups, particularly because many Russian Muslim regions, such as Chechnya and Dagestan, are heavily subsidized by the Kremlin, and many Russian Muslims are flooding the more ethnically Russian cities for jobs. This demographic shift also heightens the prominence of Muslim leaders, such as Kadyrov, and their ability to wield power.

A generational change is gripping Russia as well, with nearly one-third of the country's population born after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. This demographic class has largely known only Putin as the country's leader, and it holds nearly no memory of the chaotic 1990s. The Russians currently coming of age are not anti-Putin per se, though they largely want leadership options instead of a blanket expectation of continued rule by Putin. A recent survey by independent pollster Levada found that only 15 percent of Russians ages 18-24 believe Putin serves the interests of the Russian people, and 74 percent believe Putin is responsible for Russia's problems. This new generation is social-media savvy, diluting the Kremlin's messaging to its people. Young faces have overwhelmingly populated protests in recent years, compared with the more middle-aged appearance of the 2011-12 protests. Demonstrations are increasingly organized on social media, making them difficult for the Kremlin to curb or disrupt.

External Challenges. The deepening internal challenges facing Russia are juxtaposed with its efforts to maintain its position in the greater world. Russia faces an enduring standoff with the West, which only exacerbates the economic situation at home brought by U.S. sanctions. Russia is expanding its ambitious rearmament program, as a new arms race speeds up and existing arms control treaties are undermined. The country's national defense is an issue Putin repeatedly has refused to bend on, and he is injecting even more capital into the defense sector, despite a tight budget at home. The state is taking over responsibility for many of the defense firms so it can easily surge cash into their programs.

As relations with the West continue to sour, Russia is shoring up ties with China and many Middle Eastern countries. Besides arms, Russia is investing in expensive energy links with Turkey, China and others to give it flexibility when depending on the Western energy market. Putin is attempting to position Russia strongly abroad to insulate the country from shocks at home. However, greater exposure on the world stage increases the attention of foreign players who can meddle in Russia in return. The Kremlin has tried to crack down on foreign attempts to reach into Russia via media and social media, but the government's heavy hand risks further inflaming discontent at home.

Politics and Putin

The longer a leader stays in power, the more resourceful he or she must be to retain such power. One strategy that Putin is employing allows a degree of political debate to return to Russia after a decade in which debate was stifled by the censure of independent and foreign media, the assassinations and arrests of journalists and opponents, and the spread of state-controlled messaging. Questioning and dissenting points of view have started to surface over the past few years, even in state-backed media.

The Kremlin understands that the Russian people — at all levels — require an outlet to voice their discontent and to promote their agendas. Relatively progressive political discourse can be heard from the protesters, the media, think tanks, business leaders and politicians, spreading across class and faction. This dialogue comes with a risk, and Putin's regime is tinkering with how far it allows these voices and views to resonate without backlash. The Kremlin is also toying with a plan to include various opposition leaders in government debates on both domestic and foreign policies to create a less antagonistic and more constructive opposition scheme.

The longer a leader stays in power, the more resourceful he or she must be to retain such power.

Discourse with opposition and independent factions comes as the government faces difficult decisions about how to address a spate of Russian woes. The Kremlin is considering a series of difficult reforms to the state budget, energy sector, security services and banking system. Which direction such wide-ranging reforms will go is not clear, but the Kremlin appears to be taking conflicting views into account.

The return of political debate does not mean Putin faces a real challenger or formidable opposition yet. Instead, his true rivals are the challenges facing the country and the cultlike system he has built around himself. This has Putin — and much of the country — thinking of the future of Russia without him — a topic previously barred from most Russian media. Over the past year, a string of Putin-picked officials in their 30s and 40s have churned through key posts, from governors to ministers, in what is seen as Putin's tests for future leadership and higher office. Some notable standouts are Economic Development Minister Maxim Oreshkin, 35; presidential chief of staff Anton Vaino, 40; and Russian Agricultural Bank CEO Dmitry Patrushev, 40, whose father is also head of the Russian Security Council.

In the Soviet period, Kremlin watchers studied the order of seating in the Politburo's boxes at the Bolshoi Ballet to gauge prominence and favor among the elites. Today, Kremlinologists watch Putin's hockey matches on Red Square or video of the elites' macho antics, such as footage from October that showed regional officials diving from cliffs. The appointments and exhibitions are Putin's way of tutoring this next generation for fitness for office and public appeal. It's unlikely Putin will choose a sole successor, but he may attempt to turn the personalized system into more of a collective, much like a latter-day Soviet Politburo.

Attempting to create a post-Putin system with Russia facing so many domestic and international challenges looks to become Putin's greatest test. Aware of Russia's recent history, Putin will attempt to succeed where other Russian leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev failed. The extent of his success will become clearer in the coming years, which will show the viability of Russia's continued stability and ability to maintain its place in the world.

[Crafty_Dog]

Sent to me by someone of background for whom I have high regard:

PS:  Note the references to "uni-polar" and "multi-polar".
==========================

https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/raiding-and-international-brigandry-russias-strategy-for-great-power-competition/
Raiding and International Brigandry: Russia’s Strategy for Great Power Competition
 
No one knows if the next six years of Vladimir Putin’s reign will be his last, but signs suggest they will be the most difficult for Washington to navigate in what is now widely acknowledged on both sides as a long-term confrontation between Russia and the West. Moscow has weathered an economic crisis brought on by low oil prices and Western sanctions, domestic political scandals, and international setbacks. More importantly, just as America’s own national security documents begin to frame great power competition as the defining challenge to U.S. power, Russia is yet again adapting its approach based on the experience of the past three years. Russian leaders may not have something that would satisfy the Western academic strategy community as a deliberate “grand strategy,” but they nonetheless possess a strategic outlook and a theory of victory for this competition. That theory is based less on direct competition and more on raiding, a stratagem that holds promise for revisionist ambitions and the weaker side in the conflict.

Raiding is the way by which Russia seeks to coerce the United States through a series of operations or campaigns that integrate indirect and direct approaches. Modern great power competition will thus return to forms of coercion and imposition reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but enacted with the technologies of today. Although raiding will be Moscow’s principal approach to competition, international brigandry may be the best term to describe elements of Russian behavior that the West considers to be “bad” or “malign.” These are acts of indirect warfare, both centrally planned and enacted on initiative by entities within the Russian state empowered to shape policy – often in competition with each other. Brigandry may come with negative legalistic connotations, a byword for outlaw, but here the term is meant to define a form of irregular or skirmish warfare in the international system conducted by a partisan.

Russia is, at times, miscast as a global spoiler or retrograde delinquent. Delinquents commit minor offenses and have no plan. Spoilers react to plans, but have little strategy of their own. Raiders, by contrast, launch operations with a strategic outlook and objectives in mind. And while often weaker than their opponents, raiders can be successful. The structure of the international system and the nature of the confrontation lends itself to the use of raiding, which increasingly appears to be the chosen Russian strategy. By focusing on deterring the high-end conventional fight and restoring nuclear coercive credibility, both important in and of themselves, the United States national security establishment may be fundamentally overlooking what will prove the defining Russian approach to competition.

Raiding as a tactic is not a new experience for the United States, but considered in a strategic context, the concept may lend itself more useful than the hodgepodge of gray zone, and other neologisms the community is often stuck referencing to explain the modern character of war. More importantly, raiding is a long established concept at the operational and strategic level of warfare, unlike “Russian hybrid warfare,” which has devolved into a kitchen sink discussion about Russian bad behavior. Indeed, raiding was once the principal form of warfare throughout Europe. Raiding is new in the sense that it is actually quite old as a strategy for competition between powers before the prominence of industrial scale warfare. Today, in our manuals, a raid is viewed as an operational tool rather than strategic concept, as can be seen in Joint Operations (JP 3-0), which describes a raid as “an operation to temporarily seize an area in order to secure information, confuse an adversary, capture personnel or equipment, or to destroy a capability culminating in a planned withdrawal.”

Raids are often conducted over phases, including infiltration, denying the enemy the opportunity to reinforce, followed by surprise attack and withdrawal. Raiding plays much more to Russian strengths, leveraging agility and a simplified chain of command ( i.e. deinstitutionalized decision making, and a strong desire to achieve political ends, but not to get stuck with the costs of holding terrain). This is a strategy of limited means and it is also lucrative. Thus, raiding is not about territorial expansion or global domination. We should consider this term when seeking to understand how classical great powers like Russia use their toolkits in strategic competition.

Great Power Spoiler or Great Power Raider?

Once the Cold War ended, Washington became accustomed to seeing Russia as a largely irrelevant power, unable to contest American foreign policy and too weak to effectively pursue its own interests. However, the 1990s and early 2000s were an anomalous period of time, with Russia missing as an actor in European politics, and taciturn on the international stage. In truth, it was not simply Russia’s absence from international politics, but the dearth of other powers in general that made this a period of unipolarity and the primacy of one state in international affairs well above and beyond the power of others. Denizens of Washington tended to forget or ignore the second word in the term Charles Krauthammer coined in 1990 to describe American primacy in the post-Cold War period: the “unipolar moment.”

He wrote:

The most striking feature of the post-Cold War world is its unipolarity. No doubt, multipolarity will come in time. In perhaps another generation or so there will be great powers coequal with the United States, and the world will, in structure, resemble the pre-World War I era. But we are not there yet, nor will we be for decades. Now is the unipolar moment.

That moment lasted longer than many had expected, but the decades did pass, and great power competition has reemerged.

The Russo-Georgian War in 2008 led to a turning point in bilateral relations. There was a sense in Washington that somewhere things had gone awry in Russia policy, and a desire emerged to reset relations with Moscow, in the hope that successful cooperation on areas of mutual interest would demonstrate the benefits of integration with the West, and into a U.S.-led international order. Suffice it to say that dream did not come to fruition.

Around 2015, after its intervention in Syria, Russia became increasingly seen as a global spoiler. Still the view prevailed that Moscow was resurgent, but brittle in terms of the foundations of power. This is a hubristic and overly optimistic interpretation. Such a vision is borne of the consistent mythos in America’s outlook that Russia is dangerous, but no more than a paper tiger that will eventually fade from the global stage. The endless trope that Russia doesn’t have a long game is a self-serving delusion. As Russia seeks to navigate through mounting international challenges posed by its confrontation with the United States it is increasingly forcing Washington and its allies to respond to a series of operations, campaigns, and calculated and not so calculated gambits.

Effective nuclear and conventional deterrence has long resulted in what Glenn Snyder described as a stability-instability paradox. This holds that the more stable the nuclear balance, the more likely powers will engage in conflicts below the threshold of war. If war is not an option and direct competition is foolish in light of U.S. advantages, raiding is a viable alternative that could succeed over time. Therefore, Russia has become the guerrilla in the international system, not seeking territorial dominion but raiding to achieve its political objectives. And these raids are having an effect. If Moscow can remain a strategic thorn in Washington’s side long enough for Beijing to become a global challenge to American leadership, Washington may have no choice but to negotiate a new great power condominium that ends the confrontation , or so Moscow hopes.

At the heart of a raid is the desire to achieve a coercive effect on the enemy. Even if unsuccessful, a raid can positively shape the environment for the raider by the damage and chaos it can inflict. At the tactical level, it is about military gains, but large raiding campaigns in the past sought political and economic impact on the adversary, typically ending with a withdrawal. The French word for this form of warfare was chevauchee, or mounted raid, describing an approach to conflict that eschewed siege warfare. The chevauchee was prominent in the 14th century, and the quintessential raider of that time was the English Black Prince, Edward III’s son. The Black Prince led two extensive raiding campaigns in 1355 and 1356 during the Hundred Years War, looting, burning and pillaging the French countryside. He was forced to adopt this form of warfare in part because the English lacked the means to siege French cities. Thus, the goal became to destabilize France to convince its feudal sovereigns that they were on their own. He did this with raids that targeted economic resources and thereby destroyed the political credibility of the French monarchy.

In Spain, the term for this form of warfare was cabalgadas, prolonged raiding operations conducted by infantry, a common feature of the War of the Two Pedros (1356 to 1379). In North Africa, raids were called razzia. America’s martial traditions are also rooted in raiding, from Roger’s Rangers during the French and Indian War, to the Revolutionary War, or the famous cavalry raids of the Civil War.

Russia has extensive experience in raiding as a form of warfare. The Russian term for raiding is nabeg. Long before the Mongol invasion in 1237 to 1240 and the formation of the Russian Empire, the first raids by the Rus began in 860 against the Byzantine Empire. These raids went on until 1043. Peter the Great was also no stranger to raiding operations in wartime. Hundreds of years later, during the latter years of the Great Northern War, Russian galley fleets with thousands of raiders successfully attacked Sweden, including Gotland, Uppland, and the Stockholm archipelago. The Red Army had its armored raids of World War II, like the 24th Tank Corps raid on Tatsinskaya during the last stages of the Battle of Stalingrad in December 1942.

Raiding is an effective riposte to a strong but distracted opponent, and becomes popular when the technologies of the time create a rift between the political objectives sought and the means available to attain them. This makes traditional forms of warfare too costly, too risky, or unsuitable to the goals desired. Raiding proved prevalent before the modern nation-state system was formed in 1648 and subsequently exported by Europeans to the rest of the world. However, today the modern nation-state construct is weak. Do states truly have economic, information, or cyber borders? How do you demark these borders, defend them, and deter adversaries from crossing them? Much of the infrastructure for this digital age lives in exposed global domains, lies under the sea in international waters, in space, and cyberspace. All of it is vulnerable and ripe for exploitation.

The Modern Chevauchee

Russia will continue to use other instruments of national power to raid the West as part of a coercive campaign intended to at minimum weaken and distract Washington and, at maximum, coerce it into concessions on Russian interests. This is not a short-term strategy for victory, and it would be wrong to assume that these raids are centrally directed given the diverging security factions, clans, and personalities seeking to shape Russian foreign policy. Mark Galeotti cleverly coined “adhocracy” to describe this system. The image of Putin sitting in the Kremlin pulling knobs and levers, or the mythical Gerasimov Doctrine (a linguistic invention that its author has forsworn), have become tragic caricatures in the current zeitgeist. On the contrary, raiding has historically been conducted by detachments with a simplified chain of command, pre-delegated authority, and substantial leeway in how to prosecute their campaign. Raiding is not for deliberate strategists, but for those able to capitalize on leaner, fail fast, and fail cheap approaches.

Russia is not raiding to erode the liberal international order, at least not intentionally. That is the inevitable consequence of Russian behavior from a Western perspective, but not its objective. Such evaluations are frankly expressions of Anglo-Saxon political ideology more so than astute analysis of how Moscow actually tries to influence the international system. Russia does not believe there is any such thing as a liberal international order, nor does it see NATO as anything other than America’s Warsaw Pact, an organization structured around the projection of U.S. military power. As such, what the Kremlin understands the current international order to be is simply a system built around American unipolarity, and the best way to change this construct is to accelerate a transition from unipolarity to multipolarity (or what their policy establishment now calls a “polycentric” world).

Suffice it to say this transition will take a long time because, as William Wohlforth argued in 1999, unipolarity is more stable than it seems. Before 2014, many in Moscow thought they could just wait for this shift in power to happen. It’s important to understand that Russian elites too believe time is on their side. Many misread the 2007-2008 financial crisis as the beginning of rapid decline in the West. The confrontation has now forced Russian leadership to become active in pursuing the long-stated objectives of its own foreign policy, and they won’t stop until a settlement is made.

The center of gravity, in Russian military thought, is the adversary’s will to fight and a country’s ability to engage in  war or confrontation as a system. Therefore, the purpose of operations, particularly at a time of nominal peace, is to shape adversary decision-making by targeting their economic, information, and political infrastructure. Senior Russian officers see the modern character of war (correlation of forms and methods) as placing greater emphasis on non-kinetic means, particularly when compared to warfare in the 20th century. Russia’s chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, famously had this posited as a 4:1 non-military to military ratio in one article. Another important trend in Russian military thought identifies the decisive period of conflict as the confrontation or crisis preceding the outbreak of force-on-force violence and the initial period of war. Much of this Russian discourse focuses on non-contact warfare, the ability of long range precision weapons, paired with non-kinetic capabilities in global domains to inflict damage throughout the enemy’s system.

This vision seeks to reconcile the natural proclivities of a General Staff (i.e. planning for high-end warfare, buying expensive capabilities, and seeking larger conventional formations) with an understanding that modern conflicts will play out without set battle lines and meeting engagements. Russia seeks to shape the environment prior to the onset of conflict, and immediately thereafter, imposing costs and inflicting damage to coerce the adversary, in the hope that an inherent asymmetry of interests at stake will force the other side to yield. Russian officers are certainly not partisans, nor do they vocally advocate for raiding, but it is hard to escape the fact that the central tenets of current Russian military thought resemble more the coercive theory of victory of a chevauchee than they do of industrial scale warfare.

Raiding should not be confused with hybrid warfare. Raiding is an established historical approach to warfare, with discernible phasing, objectives, ways, and an overall strategy. The application of hybrid warfare to describe Russian operations has usually been confusing and disjointed in practice. Today, the term is increasingly relegated to European conversations about Russian information warfare and political chicanery.

The Strategic Terrain of Great Power Competition

Moscow is constrained by the structural realities of its competition with Washington. There is no way for Russia to fundamentally alter a balance of power that dramatically favors the United States. America’s GDP is more than five times that of Russia’s adjusted for purchasing power parity and ten times greater in raw terms. Washington sits at the head of the world’s most powerful network of allies in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. And U.S. conventional military superiority is underwritten by a defense budget that is many times the size of Russia’s.

This is why Stephen Walt was right when he argued in March that the current competition is dissimilar to the Cold War (China, however, might prove a different story). It is not borne of a bipolar system, has no universalist ideological conflict behind it, and will not shape international politics as that period of confrontation did. Despite shrill cries by Max Boot, this is also no war, and the United States should do its best to keep it that way. We are still in what can broadly be described as a great power peace. Ever since the great powers built nuclear weapons, large-scale warfare has proven too risky and costly, thereby displacing competition into a host of proxy conflicts or actions short of warfare. Occasional conflicts do occur, such as the Sino-Soviet border conflict 1969, or Kargil War in 1999, but these have tended to be among young, and relatively minor nuclear powers, during the early stages of their nuclear arsenal development. Major nuclear powers, with established nuclear deterrents, eschew conventional wars because they understand that no one wins a nuclear war.

International orders historically have been created from the ashes of a great power war. As such, powers that want to create a multipolar world order have no quick or easy way of realizing such a vision. Therefore, Russia is stuck playing on a largely fixed strategic board, where the rules and institutions created by the West both favor the United States and constrain revisionism. That’s the end of the good news.

However, not all is well with the U.S.-led liberal international order. One need only to look to Russia’s war with Ukraine, successful projection of power in Syria, and sustained efforts at political subversion. Russia’s strategy is aimed at pursuing a great power condominium, seeking to secure former Soviet space as a de facto sphere of influence and its status as one of the principal players in the international system. The approach is rooted in convincing the United States that Russia is a great power with special rights, including the primacy of its security over the sovereignty of its neighbors and a prominent role in organizations governing world affairs. The Russian dream is to return to a status and recognition the Soviet Union held during a very particular time of its history, the détente of 1969 to 1979, when Washington saw Moscow, albeit reluctantly, as a co-equal superpower. In the face of structural constraints, Russia has found a viable path to getting what it wants from the United States via a strategy of coercion, leveraging raids and a wider campaign of international brigandry to impose outsized costs and retain Western attention.

In the early 2000s, when Russia was weak, Putin hoped to make a deal, trading Russian support for the U.S. so-called War on Terror in exchange for certain prerogatives: being treated as a great power, a free hand in its near abroad, and a U.S. ‘hands off’ approach in the former Soviet space. Back then, Moscow sought to explain why Russia deserves a seat at the table, but it was judged in Washington as too weak and irrelevant. When that approach didn’t work, Russia sought to demonstrate that its power and influence was grossly underestimated. Starting with the 2008 Russia-Georgia War, Moscow began using force to prevent NATO expansion. In Ukraine and Syria, Russia illustrated to what at times seems an overly post-modern Western political establishment that military power is still the trump card in international relations, despite what then-Secretary of State John Kerry had to say about 19th century behavior.

Russia’s successful use of force got the West to rethink Moscow’s capabilities and intentions, but it did not lead to a recognition of Russian interests, or a renegotiation of the post-Cold War order and Russia’s place in it, as the Kremlin had hoped. In place of a great power condominium, Russian leaders earned a lasting confrontation. Russia may have the power to filch Crimea from Ukraine, but it is still judged too weak to force a renegotiation of the security framework in Europe or attain major concessions from the United States. After Congress passed  sanctions in the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act in July 2017 and the executive branch closed ranks to prevent any rapprochement, it became clear that no deal was in the offing between the Kremlin and the White House.

Russia still seeks recognition of its great power status in the international system, believing that with it will come privilege,  security, and a privileged sphere of influence over its neighbors. The Russian leadership’s strategic outlook has not changed, but demonstrating renewed military strength and resolve has proven insufficient for their country to get a deal with the United States. Washington is still full of policymakers who see Russian power as brittle, believing Moscow doesn’t have a long game. The Russian leadership has no alternative but to settle in for a prolonged geopolitical confrontation, banking on their own resilience, and the ability to impose costs on the basis of an old and familiar strategy of raiding.

Goodbye Nation-State, Hello Raiding

Ironically, as the driver of globalization and the growth of global interdependence, it is the West that has done the most to make raiding against itself so lucrative. Global connectivity, labor flows, migration both legal and illegal, proliferation of information technologies such as social media, together with the creation of supranational entities like the European Union are all enabling factors. Great powers like China and Russia often strive for autarky, seeking to fence off their kingdoms from influences that might create interdependence and allow uncontrolled outside influence. Beijing built the ”great firewall of China,” while Russia has also sought to wall itself off and impose statist control over the invisible ties that connect it to the rest of the international community.

Moscow’s latest battle that sparked protests was its attempt to censor Telegram, a popular messaging app, a contest which has escalated into millions of IPs blocked. These countries seek to create advantage in the great power competition by securing themselves from those technological trends which make modern states borderless. They are building forts. At the same time, they have come to recognize that liberal democracies are open plains ripe for raiding. The 21st century, with all its technological advancements and global interconnectedness, is naturally reviving forms of warfare that shaped Europe in 13th and 14th centuries.

Cyber operations are perhaps the most obvious instrument for modern day raiding. Both Russia and China have made good use of it to raid the U.S. politically and economically, pillaging and looting like in the days of yore. Those Russian attacks not intended to damage are perhaps even more worrisome intrusions designed to gain access and lay the groundwork for future strikes against critical infrastructure such as “energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation and manufacturing.” Russia’s recently closed San Francisco consulate was reportedly an intelligence hub for physically mapping fiber optic networks, and a host of activities described as “extraordinarily aggressive intelligence-collection efforts” considered to be “at the very forefront of innovation.”

However, military raiding is back as well. The Russian campaign in Ukraine’s Donbass region is only posing as a form of industrialized warfare. In reality, this was meant to be a raid. It began with infiltration, and its strategic centerpiece is a low-cost effort to coerce Ukraine into federalization in a bid to retain control over Kyiv’s strategic orientation. Moscow never wanted to hold on to the Donbass and still does not. If anything, it long sought to return it to Ukraine in exchange for federalization, though, at minimum, Russia is happy at the destabilizing effect that this conflict has on Ukraine’s policy and economy. Put aside cyber and political warfare campaigns, the four-year conflict in Ukraine is at face value a sustained raid that Moscow had hoped to close out with the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements. Russia empirically lacks the manpower to take over Ukraine, nor did it want to own and pay for parts of the country either. At its core the war in the Donbass is the modern equivalent of the Black Prince’s great chevauchee campaigns in France.

Raiding is not a direct imposition by conquest, nor is it a fait accompli. Behind a raid lies neither the desire for domination nor for limited territorial gains. From the outset, the adversary seeks to withdraw. This is why Crimea does not fit this model, although there is much evidence to suggest that Russia initially seized Crimea without the intent to annex it ( i.e. it was first meant as part of a game of coercive diplomacy). That said, Ukraine illustrates the fundamental problems with raiding: Raids are easier to launch than they are to manage. The fitful and messy escalation in Ukraine is a hallmark of raiding, when the character of war is not defined by two armies meeting in the field, or a militarily superior power seeking to simply impose its will on a weaker adversary via large-scale industrial warfare. If Russia wanted to crush the Ukrainian military, it could do it, but instead it wants to raid. Since 2015, the conflict has evolved to unconventional warfare throughout Ukraine’s territory, with state-sponsored assassinations, acts of terror, and industrial sabotage becoming the norm.

As Russia grows more confident, and the confrontation intensifies, raiding may become more military in nature. Moscow’s position in Syria is ideal for campaigns elsewhere in the Middle East where it can establish itself as a power broker on the cheap, with countries in the region already choosing to hedge and deleverage from their dependency on relations with the United States. This is ultimately an iterative experience: Some raids or acts of brigandage have clearly backfired. The best recent example of blowback was the failed Russian mercenary attack on February 7 east of Deir Ezzor. That night in the desert was the brainchild of one of Russia’s “mini-garchs” and infamous backers of the Wagner mercenary group, together with the internet troll factory, Yevgeny Prigozhin. While not exactly the brightest horseman, he has been closely linked to Russian efforts in information, political, and other forms of indirect warfare.

The Middle East is a flanking theater in the competition, one where the United States is visibly weak, and its allies are interested in any alternative external power to reduce their own dependency on Washington. Russia will look for ways to raid America’s influence there without taking ownership, security responsibilities, or otherwise over extending itself. The military campaign in Syria came cheaply, taught Russia that it can indeed project power outside its region, and challengeds America’s monopoly on use of force in the international system.

The Black Prince’s Strategy

Forget the decisive Mahanian battle. The typical conventional wars, which the United States frequently wargames, but probably will never get to fight (thanks to nuclear deterrence), are poorly aligned with how adversaries intend to pursue their objectives. Avoiding disadvantages in direct competition is undoubtedly important, as Russia and China have equally invested in conventional and nuclear capabilities, but it is precisely because of our investments in these realms that we have made raiding lucrative. The surest way to spot a raid is when the initiating power doesn’t actually want to possess the object in contest but is instead seeking to inflict economic and political pain to coerce a more important strategic concession out of their opponent. This is not to say that limited land grabs or conventional warfare will disappear from the international arena, but raiding poses a more probable challenge to the United States and its extended network of allies.

Great power raiding is not meant to represent a unified field theory of adversary behavior in the current competition. Not everything aligns neatly with this concept, nor can the actions of a country with numerous instruments of national power be reduced so simply. Nonetheless, raiding for cost imposition and outright pillage, together with other behaviors by intelligence services and elites that may be summed up as in international brigandry, do encapsulate much of the problem. The Russian long game is to raid and impose painful costs on the United States, and its allies, until such time as China becomes a stronger and more active contender in the international system. This theory of victory stems from the Russian assumption that the structural balance of power will eventually shift away from the United States towards China and other powers in the international system, resulting in a steady transition to multipolarity. This strategy is emergent, but the hope is that a successful campaign of raiding, together with the greater threat from China, will force Washington to compromise and renegotiate the post-Cold War settlement.

Can Russia win? If winning is defined as Moscow attaining influence and securing interests in the international system not commensurate with the relative balance of power, but rather based the amount of damage they have inflicted by raiding – quite possibly. If the raider has staying power, and makes a prolonged strategic burden of itself, it can get a favorable settlement even though it is weaker, especially if its opponent has bigger enemies to deal with. Throughout history, leading empires, the superpowers of their time, have had to deal and negotiate settlements with raiders.

Here, conventional military might and alliances count for a lot less than you might hope. Today, you don’t need mounted riders for a raiding campaign or for acts of international brigandry. Moscow successfully rode past NATO, all of America’s carrier strike groups, and struck Washington with a campaign of political subversion. The technology involved may be innovative or new, but this form of warfare is decidedly old. To deal with it, Washington will not require panel discussions, new acronyms, and the construction of a center of excellence, but instead to revisit the history of conflict, international politics, and strategy.

Michael Kofman is a Senior Research Scientist at CNA Corporation and a Fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute. Previously he served as program manager at National Defense University. The views expressed here are his own.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/looking-back-russian-georgian-war-10-years-later

[DougMacG]

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/looking-back-russian-georgian-war-10-years-later

Another article today on same topic:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-russia-invaded-georgia-1533682576

The Georgia invasion was another episode skipped in the article contending that Putin's Russia is not the Soviet Union.

[Crafty_Dog]

Highlights

    The Russia-West standoff is likely to intensify in the coming year, as Moscow will be largely unwilling to make the kinds of concessions that the United States and European Union are seeking in order to end their sanctions and military buildups.
    Russia's ties with China have strengthened and will continue to grow, but any sustainable Moscow-Beijing alignment will ultimately face limits due to the Kremlin's deep-seated concerns about China's rise as a major power.
    Russian President Vladimir Putin will face growing economic and political challenges on the home front, but these challenges will be manageable for the leader in the coming year.

 
It was October 1939, and Winston Churchill was on BBC radio, describing Russia: "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Of course, World War II had just begun, and the question regarding the intentions of the Soviet Union — and particularly its relations with Nazi Germany — was of paramount importance to the United Kingdom, Europe and the world at large.
 
Bookending Churchill's characterization of Russia was the following: "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia … but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." This quote has unique relevance to the work that we do at Stratfor. We produce forecasts, and driving our forecasts is a geopolitical methodology that considers first and foremost the broader national interest above the subjective considerations of individual leaders, decision-makers and ordinary citizens. But that does not mean that such people and their subjective considerations don't matter at all. Driven by geography and a state's geopolitical imperatives, the national interest provides the framework in which the trajectory of the nation plays out over the long term. But in the short term, people — from politicians to business leaders to blue-collar workers — do have an impact on shaping the policy and trajectory of their nation.
The Big Picture

In its 2019 Annual Forecast, Stratfor outlined the key trends that will shape Russia and the Eurasian region in the coming year, from the Russia-West standoff to Moscow's growing ties with China to Russia's internal challenges. A recent trip to Russia offered an opportunity to test these forecasts against the realities on the ground and the perspectives of Russian citizens themselves.
See 2019 Annual Forecast
See Eurasia section of the 2019 Annual Forecast
With these principles in mind, I recently set off for a visit to Russia. Having just completed work on Stratfor's 2019 Annual Forecast, I wanted to test our forecast at ground level and see how it stacks up against the perspectives of Russian citizens themselves. Of course, Russia is a big and diverse place, and it's impossible to capture a comprehensive picture in a country as vast and complex as Russia. But my visit — which included stops in my birthplace of Moscow, as well as St. Petersburg, Kazan and some small towns in between — and discussions with citizens from a diverse array of backgrounds and professions provided an excellent opportunity to test our forecast against realities and views on the ground.
A Russian Take on the Russia-West Standoff
Headlining our Eurasia forecast is the enduring standoff between Russia and the West. Ever since Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution in 2014 — along with Russia's resulting annexation of Crimea and provision of support to separatists in eastern Ukraine — Moscow and the West have been locked in a confrontation that has run the gamut from military buildups to economic sanctions, cyberattacks, propaganda dissemination and political meddling. Russia's strategic interest in keeping Ukraine and the rest of the former Soviet periphery within its sphere of influence, in contrast to the West's desire to deny Russia this sphere of influence, has provided a backdrop for this standoff, which has now spread from the European borderlands to Syria and North Korea. In 2019, this standoff is only likely to intensify, as arms control treaties collapse and sanctions expand.

Rightly or wrongly, Russians view their country as a great power that deserves a major voice on the world stage, and many citizens believe the West, especially the United States, is actively trying to undermine Russia.

According to the prevailing view among the Russians I spoke with, the tensions between Moscow and the West are here to stay. Rightly or wrongly, Russians view their country as a great power that deserves a major voice on the world stage. Many citizens believe the West, especially the United States, is actively trying to undermine Russia, both in terms of its role in the world and its domestic stability and cohesiveness. On several occasions, people described Russia as a country that does not respond well to pressure from the outside; many also depicted it as a "besieged fortress." The more Moscow faces this pressure — again, especially from the United States — the more it will double down on its position and strive to protect what it deems to be its rightful strategic interests.
 
The Ukrainian conflict is a case in point. Russia's standard line is that the Euromaidan uprising was a Western-backed (if not organized) affair whose primary goal was to weaken Russia at the most strategic and sensitive point in its immediate periphery. To many Russians, Moscow merely acted defensively in annexing Crimea and supporting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. For them, Ukraine was simply the West's latest move in a decades-old campaign of encirclement and containment that has previously included such actions as NATO's expansion into Central and Eastern Europe, as well as U.S. support for color revolutions across the former Soviet periphery. After Russia extracted itself from the chaos and instability of the 1990s, it could scarcely stand idly by as these events unfolded, as it was not clear how far the West would go in its ostensible campaign against Russia.
 
Because of this, I was told that Russia is not in the business of making major concessions to the West, even when it faces significant pressure in the form of military buildups or economic sanctions. And while the West may have imposed sanctions only in response to Russia's actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Moscow's foes have now broadened the measures to encompass many more aspects of Russian behavior, including everything from meddling in Western elections to North Korea and Syria. This expansion in scope has convinced Russian decision-makers that the West will not ease the sanctions or pressure in any significant manner, even if Moscow did offer concessions. As a result, more Western sanctions will likely only prompt greater resistance and greater retaliation from Moscow.
 
Although this confrontation now appears lasting, its start was not inevitable, according to Moscow. Indeed, Russian officials and foreign policy experts emphasized to me that during President Vladimir Putin's first term as president in the early 2000s, Moscow made serious efforts to integrate with the West — going so far as to consider joining the European Union and NATO, albeit on equal terms. This, obviously, never occurred, and by the end of Putin's second term — by which time the European Union and NATO had expanded into Central Europe and the Baltic states and disregarded Russia's position on Kosovo — it was clear to the Kremlin that Russia had to go it alone, even if that entailed direct conflict with the West and its allies. Confrontations duly ensued, first in the Russia-Georgia war (2008), and later in the battle over Crimea and eastern Ukraine (2014).

The Ukrainian conflict has reinforced the Russian perception that it is impossible to cooperate with the West on equal terms, resulting in Moscow's quest for partners and influential roles elsewhere in the world.

The Ukrainian conflict has reinforced the Russian perception that it is impossible to cooperate with the West on equal terms, resulting in Moscow's quest for partners and influential roles elsewhere in the world. One such role has been Russia's involvement in the Syrian conflict in support of Bashar al Assad's regime against the Islamic State and Western-backed rebels. My interlocutors told me that Russia doesn't really care about al Assad per se, but that Moscow felt it had to draw a red line on regime change imposed from abroad (that is, the United States). Russia was uniquely positioned to delve into Syria given its historical ties to the country and its strategic location, while Moscow also wanted to send the message that it, too, could be a major player in the Middle East — as well as in other theaters like Afghanistan and Africa — both militarily and diplomatically.
The Russia-China Alignment and Its Limits
Another key aspect of our annual forecast for Eurasia touches on Russia's aforementioned quest to expand its ties around the world to scale back Western hegemony and challenge the U.S.-led world order. The key to this is China, which also has its own interest in challenging the U.S.-dominated world order in the context of great power competition. Moscow and Beijing have enjoyed burgeoning ties in recent years, just as Russia's relations with the West have frayed. The two countries have bolstered their cooperation on trade and military drills, as well as their political coordination on issues such as North Korea.
 
Most Russians I spoke with acknowledged that ties between Moscow and Beijing have grown, particularly on security. Nevertheless, many cautioned that a sincere alliance is not emerging between Moscow and Beijing. Deeply mistrustful of China's rising clout and intentions, many Russians fear — justifiably or not — that Beijing has designs on Russian land in the Far East and the Arctic. China may not challenge Russia's political model in the way that the West does, I was told, but it may one day challenge its survival. It's perhaps an exaggeration, but it's a fear that gnaws at the back of the mind for many Russians. At the same time, many told me that Chinese investment in Russia isn't all it's cracked up to be, and one businessman who frequents Russia's large investment forums in St. Petersburg and Vladivostok told me that only around 5-10 percent of the multibillion-dollar deals between the countries actually come to fruition, mostly in the energy sector.
The Challenges From Within
On the domestic front, our forecast also pointed to a number of economic and political challenges for Putin, including a sanctions-weakened economy, public discontent over unpopular pension reforms and pressure to reform the country's powerful security organs. Our forecast noted that these challenges will test Putin as he enters his fourth — and perhaps final — term, although the long-serving leader will ultimately succeed in managing them this year.
 
Within Russia, the views on Putin himself are decidedly mixed, with those against the leader citing everything from corruption to unpopular plans to raise the retirement age as reasons for their opposition, while those in favor base their support on the president's track record of fostering stability, as well as the dearth of credible alternatives to his rule. But whether for or against Putin, nearly everyone agreed that there will be no significant changes or upheavals to Russia's political system so as long as the president remains at the helm. The more the Kremlin feels pressured — whether externally or from within — the more Moscow will centralize control, meaning security organs like the National Guard will only accumulate greater power.

Whether for or against Putin, nearly every Russian agrees that there will be no significant changes or upheavals to the country's political system so as long as the president remains at the helm.

From a macroeconomic perspective, most finance and business professionals believe that the Kremlin has the tools to cope with the economic challenges posed by sanctions, as the government has padded its foreign exchange reserves and wealth funds and taken measures to prevent currency volatility by decoupling the ruble from the price of oil. On the ground, however, it is clear that sanctions have taken their toll. Almost everyone lamented rising prices and stagnant wages, while foreign travel has become more expensive and difficult for some — and virtually impossible for others. Overall, however, my impression is that Russia is not on the verge of a major economic crisis.
 
But when it comes to Russia's longer-term outlook, there may be more cause for concern. According to one financial journalist, Moscow can manage economic shocks for 2019 or for a few years, but the long-term economic prognosis, particularly in regards to Russia's continued dependence on oil and natural gas and the brain drain of young professionals, is poor. Russia's anticipated demographic decline (the country is projected to lose 10 percent of its population by 2050) and looming social changes as a post-Soviet generation emerges could one day create more acute pressure and increasingly test the Kremlin's ability to maintain stability across the vast country.
 
The viewpoints that Russians from all walks of life expressed to me aligned, in many ways, with our forecast; in other certain respects, they added nuance to our thoughts for the year to come. Nearly 80 years on from Churchill's speech, Russia may still be "mysterious and enigmatic," but the combination of studying its national interests from afar and listening to the perspectives of its people from up close certainly offers important clues as to what to expect for the country moving forward.

[Crafty_Dog]

January 29, 2019
By George Friedman
The Russian Crisis
Vladimir Putin failed to keep his promise to create a modern economy. Now he has to pay the price.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trust rating has fallen to its lowest point in 13 years. According to a poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, only 33 percent of Russians said they trusted the president. Polls can be unreliable and opinions fickle, but a survey like this in a country like Russia can be an indicator of deep discontent arising from significant social and economic problems.
 

Hope Fades

Over a quarter of a century ago, the Soviet Union fell because things stopped working. The state was the center of society and managed the economy. After Josef Stalin died, there was a sense of hope in Russian society about the economy – and that hope sustained the government, even when it failed to meet expectations. But by the 1980s, ordinary Russians’ belief that they could provide for their families and that the gulf between them and the nomenklatura (or bureaucratic elite) would diminish had faded. What changed their minds was not envy or anger – Russians had grown to expect a certain level of inequality – but a lack of hope. They had little and were not going to get more. Worst of all, they lacked hope for their children.

This situation was a result of four factors. First, the inherent inefficiency of the Soviet apparatus, which could not build a modern economy. Second, the divergence of available goods, not only to the elite but also to a thriving black market that frequently operated in foreign currencies, which most Russians lacked. Third, the decline of oil prices, which shattered the state budget. And finally, a surge in defense spending, designed to both match U.S. spending and convince Russians that although they might be poor, they still lived in a powerful country. This was not trivial for a nation that had lived through the German invasion.

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no revolution. There was simply exhaustion. The elite were exhausted from trying to push the boulder of the Soviet economy and society up a steep hill. And the people were exhausted from standing in lines for hours to buy basic necessities. The general sense of failure was apparent not only in faraway capitals but in Russians’ own lives.

The Politburo selected Mikhail Gorbachev to solve these problems. He promised openness and restructuring. But the openness only revealed the catastrophic condition of the economy, and the restructuring, carried out by those who had created the disaster in the first place, didn’t work. All Gorbachev did was legitimize the fears and fatigue that had festered in the Soviet Union and allow them to eat away at what was left.

Boris Yeltsin replaced him but did nothing to solve the lingering economic problems. The Soviet Union was gone, and many took advantage – from Western financiers, consultants and hustlers, to Russians who figured out, frequently with Western advisers, how to divert and appropriate what little wealth Russia had. Privatization requires some concept of the private. In a country that had lived for generations by the old socialist principle “money is theft,” the oligarchs embraced the concept with a vengeance. Russia’s nomenklatura was just as inefficient as the Soviet Union’s, and, as shown in Kosovo, other nations held it in contempt.

Yeltsin couldn’t last. His replacement was Vladimir Putin, who had roots in the old Soviet Union and in the new Russia. He had been an agent of the KGB, the Soviets’ main security service. (For a country as vast and poorly connected as Russia, a strong central government and secret police have always been key to holding the nation together.) And through his time as deputy to the mayor of St. Petersburg, he was enmeshed with the oligarchs who became the holders of Russia’s wealth.

Putin came to power because of these connections. After Yeltsin, Russians craved a strong leader, and they drew comfort from the fact that Putin had ties to the KGB. They accepted his links to the oligarchs as simply part of how the world works.
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Putin’s Promises

Putin promised to make Russia prosperous and respected in the world. To do so, he had to build a modern economy. Russia was highly dependent on the export of raw materials, particularly oil and natural gas. Putin couldn’t control the price of these commodities, so Russia was always vulnerable to fluctuations in global supply and demand. Putin had a choice: allow the economy to deteriorate and the country to descend into chaos, or centralize governance once more. He chose recentralization, concentrating power in Moscow and distributing funds from the state budget to the regions. When oil prices were over $100 per barrel, Putin had an opportunity to make massive investments in new industries. But he was beholden to the oligarchs, and they to him. Any economic reforms could have jeopardized this relationship. It’s not so much that Putin missed the chance to modernize but rather that his path to power prevented it.

Then, in 2014, oil prices plunged. Though they have recovered somewhat from their lowest point, they remain low. Western sanctions have also taken a toll. Until 2018, Russia had two reserve funds, stocked with profits from the oil boom. But following the collapse in energy prices, one fund was depleted, and since January 2018, only the National Wealth Fund remains. To try to replenish the state budget, Putin decided to reform the pension system. Just seven months after his re-election in March, he signed an unpopular bill into law that will gradually raise the age of retirement for women from 55 to 60 and for men from 60 to 65.

Hence the 33 percent trust rating. That rating is more socially significant in Russia than it would be elsewhere. Putin promised to make Russia a modern, powerful nation. He has failed to deliver on the first point, and his forays in Syria and elsewhere haven’t compensated for deteriorating economic conditions. Older Russians are reminded of what was and what had been abolished; younger Russians are encountering conditions similar to those their grandparents told them of.

There are two possible paths forward. One is the old Russian solution of empowering the secret police to crush the opposition, though it isn’t clear that today’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, has the same power its predecessor organizations had. I suspect that the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain is intended in part as a message to the FSB, not only to frighten it but also to tell its agents that they need to uphold the integrity of the Russian nation.

The other path is a re-enactment of the fall of the Soviet Union. Few are eager to relive the 1990s, but collapse is not always the result of a vote. If oil prices remain low, sanctions remain in place, reserves continue to dwindle, and the FSB is more interested in doing business than in sacrificing for the Russian state, then it’s hard to see an alternative scenario.

No foreign power can come to Russia’s aid. Each one demands too much and offers too little. There’s a fantasy in Russia about an alliance with China, but Moscow is far away from Beijing, and China’s problems at the moment are even more intense. The Kremlin could try engaging in a war to boost morale, but there’s the risk it could lose or that the conflict would last longer than those at the top anticipate.

Russia now faces conditions similar to those it faced in the 1980s: low oil prices and high defense costs. The people aren’t angry, but they are resentful, and in due course they may become simply exhausted, as they were in the 1980s. Russia is vast and needs a strong central government to hold it together, but central governments are not good at managing economies. Thus, the secret police must hold the country together. If it can’t or won’t, then a Gorbachev-type leader may rise up to reform the economy, and a Yeltsin-type leader may follow to preside over the nation’s revolutionizing.

Karl Marx once wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. How this maxim may play out in Russia is becoming clearer by the day.

[Crafty_Dog]

Ukraine Provides a Test Case of Russia's Hybrid Warfare Strategy
By Eugene Chausovsky
Senior Eurasia Analyst, Stratfor

Passersby walk past a giant electoral poster of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko displayed on a building in central Kiev on March 22, 2019.
(SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images)


    Ukraine will provide a laboratory for the evolution of Russia's hybrid warfare strategy as Moscow adjusts its tactics and expands the scope of such actions around the world.
    The competition over Ukraine will factor heavily into the broader Russia-West standoff, which is only likely to intensify in the coming years.
    But regardless of who wins Ukraine's presidential elections on March 31, the country will maintain its orientation to the West, thereby highlighting the limitations of Russia's hybrid strategy.

 

On March 31, Ukrainians will head to the polls for one of the most pivotal and unusual elections in the country's post-Soviet history. This will be the first presidential election since the immediate aftermath of the country's Western-backed Euromaidan uprising in 2014, in which large-scale protests overthrew pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, clearing a path for the pro-Western Petro Poroshenko to capture the post in May 2014. But five years after Euromaidan, Ukraine has yet to find its political footing, as evidenced by the fact that Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko — two familiar faces in Ukraine's political scene — are trailing Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a 41-year-old TV star and comedian with no previous political experience, by a wide margin. But regardless of who wins the election, one thing is clear: Ukraine's pro-Western orientation is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. Following Euromaidan, Ukraine became ground zero for Moscow's expansion of its hybrid warfare strategy, but the country's decisive break from its powerful eastern neighbor has laid bare some of the limitations of such Russian activity.

The Big Picture

Ukraine has long been a battleground between Russia and the West. The consequences of its 2014 Euromaidan uprising have rippled far and wide over the past half-decade. As Ukraine prepares for a presidential election — and the future beyond — it will be a vital test case for the evolution of Russia's hybrid warfare strategy, since it showcases both the impact of the strategy and its ultimate limitations.

The Comedian Who Could be President

The latest opinion polls released by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology on March 25 show Zelenskiy with 32.1 percent of support, far ahead of Poroshenko's 17.1 percent and Timoshenko's 12.5 percent. It is worth noting that pre-election polls in Ukraine can prove unreliable, but Zelenskiy's substantial lead over his two main opponents (as well as a field of nearly 40 other presidential candidates) shows that the star of the popular TV comedy series "Servant of the People," in which he plays the president, has a good chance of joining the ranks of U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro as anti-establishment candidates who unexpectedly upended the political status quo in their countries.

Zelenskiy's rapid rise is contextualized by Ukraine's post-Euromaidan political climate, in which lofty expectations of significant change remain largely unfulfilled. In terms of foreign policy, Ukraine has made important strides in its bid to integrate with the West under Poroshenko, as Kiev has concluded a free trade and visa-free agreement with Brussels, while the United States and NATO have increased security support for the country. Still, membership in either the European Union or NATO remains a distant dream despite Poroshenko's initiative to enshrine Ukraine's desire to join these blocs in the country's constitution. Such aspirations have come at a high cost, including a prolonged conflict with Russia that has led to the loss of Crimea and Donbas — as well as over 10,000 lives.

A map showing Ukraine and the disputed areas of Donbas and Crimea.

On the domestic front, there has also been a mix of progress and setbacks over the past five years. Reforms in the energy sector, while lessening Ukraine's dependence on Russia, have raised utility costs substantially. In the meantime, wages have not kept pace with inflation, while efforts to tackle corruption through judicial and legal reform have largely stalled. Against this backdrop, Zelenskiy is a protest candidate against the powers that be; in such a situation, his fresh face and dearth of political experience is not a weakness for many voters, but rather a positive sign that he can shake things up.

Ukraine and the Russia-West Standoff

The impact of Euromaidan has also traveled well beyond Ukraine's borders, sending ripple effects throughout Eurasia and the West. While the revolution was not the first Western-supported uprising to occur in Russia's backyard (a wave of color revolutions, including one in Ukraine, preceded it earlier in the century), it was by far the most violent and most enduring in terms of its implications. For Russia, Euromaidan posed a major threat to its strategic interests and represented the biggest breach between Moscow and the West since the Cold War, fundamentally altering the way Russia interacts with the West.

Russia's initial reaction to the uprising serves as a case in point. Rather than pursue a formal military invasion of Ukraine, Russia sent in "little green men," or unmarked military personnel, to Crimea and, later, eastern Ukraine in a bid to spawn counter-Euromaidan political movements and forces to oppose the new government in Kiev. At the time, Russia's actions seemed like a thinly veiled effort to cover its tracks and avoid blame for a direct military intervention. In retrospect, however, these were the baby steps in a profound shift in Russian strategy to something different: hybrid warfare.

To be sure, hybrid warfare is not a new concept to either Russia or other states all the way back to antiquity. However, the manner in which Moscow waged hybrid warfare underwent a significant evolution and expansion after Euromaidan. While Russia had previously used hybrid tactics in a restricted manner to achieve limited objectives, such as during the Russia-Georgia War in 2008, Moscow expanded the tactics tremendously in both scope and breadth after Euromaidan in 2014. Russia's techniques grew to encompass everything from targeted assassinations and other covert security operations to cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. All of these were designed — with varying degrees of intensity and effectiveness — to weaken the Ukrainian state and undermine its efforts to align and integrate with the West.

Using Ukraine as a test case, Russia applied some or all of these expanded hybrid warfare techniques to other pro-Western countries in the former Soviet periphery, such as Moldova and Georgia, so as to undermine their efforts to integrate with the West. Russia expanded its political and economic backing for pro-Moscow parties like the Socialists in Moldova and boosted security support for contested territories like Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia also looked further afield to wield its enhanced tools, supporting Euroskeptic parties in Germany and Italy or establishing entire bot armies on social media platforms with the ultimate aim of fomenting divisions and sowing chaos in the West. Naturally, the scope of Russia's tools varied based on the country it was targeting: Moscow was not willing to challenge countries like the United States or France in a direct military sense, but it was willing to conduct cyberattacks and meddle in their political systems during critical elections.
Euromaidan's Global Reverberations

Russia's prolonged standoff with the West has also had a significant impact on the manner in which Moscow interacts with the rest of the world. Just a year after the Euromaidan uprising, Russia intervened in the Syrian conflict, deploying military forces to back the government of Bashar al Assad against U.S.- and Western-backed rebels. As in Ukraine, Russia's military involvement in Syria began with a small and unofficial presence to test the waters before growing to include a much larger and more powerful force. Russia's intervention also demonstrated that the country was ready and willing to challenge the West not only in the post-Soviet space but also in areas further afield like the Middle East.

Today, signs are emerging that Moscow could go even more global in its use of hybrid warfare. Russia's use of covert or mercenary forces has spread to regions like Africa, including in Libya and the Central Asian Republic, and even as far as Venezuela. What's more, Russia could bolster its military presence in Venezuela, especially after Russian military planes recently landed in Caracas with more than 100 troops and advisers. If so, Russia's forays into Venezuela would share important similarities with previous hybrid interventions in Ukraine or Syria, both in terms of tactics and its goals of enhancing its standing and leverage in its broader negotiations with the United States.

Euromaidan not only reoriented Ukraine's foreign policy toward the West, the decisiveness with which it occurred means the shift will likely endure long beyond this election.

Russia's Hybrid Strategy Hits a Wall

The West, however, has not been completely silent in the face of Russia's hybrid warfare activities. The United States and the European Union have ramped up sanctions against Russia, while NATO has bolstered its military presence in European border areas to protect front-line countries and reinforce defenses against Russia. In addition to conventional buildups, NATO members and countries like Ukraine have redoubled their efforts to enhance and integrate cybersecurity defenses and defend against online propaganda and disinformation tactics. Such efforts have led to diminishing returns for Russia, as the West has worked to both increase the cost of Russia's hybrid tactics and reduce their effectiveness.

Which brings us back to Ukraine. Despite public frustration over the uneven progress of reforms and the persistence of day-to-day difficulties for many citizens, the country has nevertheless undergone a major transformation over the past five years that is hard to ignore from a strategic perspective. Euromaidan not only reoriented Ukraine's foreign policy away from Russia and toward the West, the decisiveness with which it occurred means the shift will likely endure long beyond this election. Regardless of who wins on March 31, all leading candidates support the continuation of Ukraine's Western integration efforts; in fact, not a single pro-Russian candidate has a realistic chance of qualifying for the second round. That, in the end, is a major departure from Ukraine's polarized politics before Euromaidan, when the country was split roughly evenly between pro-Russian and pro-Western factions. More than that, it is also a testament to the limitations of Russia's hybrid tactics.

Ultimately, the motivation for Russia's hybrid warfare strategy goes deeper than the Euromaidan uprising to reflect Moscow's difficulties in competing with the United States and the West in a direct manner. Even as Russia's standoff with the West has been intensifying for half a decade, Moscow suffers from a number of inherent weaknesses, including a resource-dependent economy that can't keep up with the likes of the United States or China, as well as increasingly pressing demographic challenges at home. As a result, Russia has resorted ever more to a continuously evolving and spreading hybrid strategy to attain its strategic ends. Perhaps more than any other country, Ukraine has showcased both the effectiveness and limitations of this strategy for Russia — and that is unlikely to change, even as Moscow refines its strategy and deploys it much further afield.

[Crafty_Dog]

December 23, 2019   Open as PDF



    The Russian Military: Forging a Foreign Policy Tool
By: Jacek Bartosiak

Of all the military reforms Russia underwent as an empire, a Soviet Union and then a federation, none were as revolutionary as those of the late 2000s, when Anatoly Serdyukov ushered the armed forces out of the 20th century and into the era of modern warfare.

The scale of the changes is undeniable. The Russian military currently boasts some 800,000 personnel. In 1985, that number was about 5.3 million. It fell to between 3 million and 4 million in various stages of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which retained just over half of its available equipment. The reduction owed not just to reduced state finances but to the urgent need to modernize and enhance combat readiness in the face of new threats to its new border – as well as to the fact that the population of the country had been more or less halved.
As a result, unnecessary units were to be dissolved. The old, motionless structure that sported as many as 203 divisions, some of which were just 10 percent complete, was reduced to about 83 mobile divisions. They were now fully staffed brigades, unburdened by the glut of officers that had long plagued the Russian military. The plan was to reduce the number of officers from 350,000 to 150,000, but Moscow ultimately settled on about 220,000 as a concession to those who bucked the reforms, sometimes violently.

New emphasis was to be placed on the training of non-commissioned professional officers – the basis of every Western army – and on the training of cadets at schools, where they would also be mentally prepared for service. The target date for implementing the changes was 2017, when land forces were to reach 450,000 professional and contract soldiers, and the total number of all personnel of the armed forces was to be less than 1 million. In addition, it was planned that by 2020, new equipment would constitute about 70 percent of all Russian armaments. All told, the number of commands and intermediate command levels has been drastically reduced, and four strategic commands have been established for permanent operation, with a fifth – the Arctic – introduced in 2015.
Serdyukov, the face of the reform, drastically reduced the rear administration of the entire armed forces and command posts to improve the line of command and expedite decision making. The structures have been shrunk vertically and horizontally to make the system clearer, faster, more efficient and more flexible. In 2014, a modern National Defense Management Center was established in Moscow – as a C2 (command & control) for the modern scouting battle.

Despite how revolutionary the reforms were – or perhaps because of how revolutionary they were – they have yet to be completed. The armed services have yet to be fully professionalized, and there are still a lot of vestiges of the old system left by demographic decline and the low quality of servicemembers. The reforms were, moreover, unpopular among the military. Serdyukov had been the buffer between the military and the government, but by 2012, he was so unpopular that he had to be replaced by Sergei Shoigu, who conceded the most unpopular elements of the reforms but left them essentially intact. For example, after 2012 the army received substantial salary increases, restoring in the eyes of Russian society the integrity of the institution, while also implementing random inspections of the combat readiness of units throughout the state as well as sudden training and checking their time of exit from the barracks. Indeed, these have become the hallmark of Shoigu’s tenure, resulting in high strategic mobility on the internal lines of the world’s largest country.

In this way, the military was able to conduct decisive combat operations in regional conflicts, as evidenced by the actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, during which the Russian army deployed more than 40,000 troops to the Ukrainian border in just a few days. (In 1999, it took Russia three weeks to transfer that many troops to Chechnya.) That’s because Russia now has a generally stronger but smaller and more nimble army than it had the 1990s. It is also better balanced, able to operate in its near abroad and, in the case of Syria, the Middle East.
Russia’s recent equipment procurement, meanwhile, complements its newfound capabilities. In 2010, Moscow announced an ambitious modernization plan worth $700 billion over 15 years. Its goal was not to match the U.S. armed forces, or even develop a similar ability to project power in Eurasia. The goal was to gain an advantage over any opponents on its periphery, including all the armies of the NATO countries bordering Russia, especially the most important frontline state of the alliance: Poland. (Notably, Russia can hold its own against the U.S. in certain capabilities such as integrated air defense systems, electronic warfare systems, barrel and rocket artillery and infantry fighting vehicles.) Strategically, this makes sense for Russia, which has reshaped its military not to fight invasions from, say, Europe or China, but to wage new generation war on its periphery. Hence why the army, as with the Zapad exercises, trains in the places where these campaigns would take place.

It also comports with an important policy introduced in 2013 by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff. The Gerasimov doctrine applies virtually all aspects of the state – military, political, diplomatic, economic and so on – to achieving strategic goals without engaging in open conflict, especially on Russian borders. (In Europe, this is often called hybrid war.) It is central to Russia’s desire to be a dominant regional power in a multipolar world, a role that Moscow is keen to regain.
 
(click to enlarge)

To that end, land forces of the new Russian army will be organized into 40 brigades and eight maneuvering divisions. (While the 2008 reforms abolished the regiments and replaced them with brigades, it was also supposed to eliminate the vast majority of divisions.) Interestingly, the Soviets had in place similar structure comprising Afghanistan brigades and battalion tactical groups that worked pretty well, operationally speaking. In the new Russian army, the battalion tactical groups operating within the brigades are composed of professional and contracted soldiers, while the rest of the brigade consists of recruit-based structures. Both components train separately. This, of course, increases the efficiency of the brigades' combat component, but overall it proves that Russia’s great weakness is largely demographic – that is, in stark contrast to most of Russian history, where there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of soldiers, there are simply not enough people to fully staff the military.

Even so, after Serdyukov was dismissed in 2013, military planners decided several significant divisions would remain in place. In 2016, after studying the results of the Ukraine war, they decided that four new divisions would be added in the Western and Southern Military Districts, in addition to the formation of the 1st Guards Tank Army just behind the Smolensk Gate and another army in the Central Military District. This is because they realized that larger units, despite being slow and heavy, were nonetheless necessary for breaking the enemy’s forces. It follows that in the European theater, where large spaces and maneuverability are paramount, the “old” will need to meet the “new.” As for the U.S., it’s unclear how its land forces – which currently have weaker structures for symmetrical war with Russia in Eastern Europe and the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium – respond. What is clear is that the Russian military is better positioned now than before to be what Moscow wants it to be: a foreign policy tool in an increasingly multipolar world.

To learn more, please visit strategyandfuture.org.
 

[Crafty_Dog]

December 30, 2019   Open as PDF



    The Russian Military: By the Numbers
By: Jacek Bartosiak

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia transformed its military from a sluggish, archaic institution to a fighting force better able to wage modern warfare, an essential function of which is to serve as a foreign policy tool for the government in Moscow. This is perhaps best illustrated by the composition of the armed forces itself.

The Pride of Russia

The great pride of Russia, and the basis of its regional power projection, is its soldiers. They are divided into four divisions (98 and 106 Guardian descent, 7th Guards), four brigades (11, 31, 56 and 83) and one Spetsnaz brigade (45), though, notably, Spetsnaz is supported by 20,000-30,000 personnel. There are also airborne troops capable of rapid invasion or quick response, albeit intended to operate in post-Soviet areas. Unlike in Western armies, including the U.S. Army, Russian units are very “heavy,” supported by tanks, heavy infantry fighting vehicles and tracked vehicles required in the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium.

The Russians do not have a modern air force by Western standards, but it is good enough to defeat opponents on the periphery. Russia’s integrated air defense system, on the other hand, is very modern – it was one of the few things Moscow never stopped developing, even after the Soviet Union collapsed.

The Russian navy, which is headquartered in St. Petersburg, boasts four regional fleets: the Northern Fleet, the Pacific Fleet, the Baltic Fleet and the Black Sea Fleet. Together they have between 15 percent and 25 percent of the number of ships they had during the Soviet era. The average age of their ships is 20-25 years. (These numbers exclude the Caspian Flotilla, which operates in closed waters.) Traditionally, submarines were the backbone of the Russian navy, but 75 percent of the 61 submarines in service are already over 20 years old.
 
(click to enlarge)

The base of the most powerful Russian fleet – the Northern Fleet – is located in Severomorsk in Kola Bay, the only ice-free place with access from the Atlantic. It consists of seven or eight nuclear submarine carriers armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles (depending on your source), Russia’s only atomic cruiser and its only Russian aircraft carrier. Nuclear ballistic missile carriers can reach targets in the U.S., theoretically even from their own wharf. They are protected by submarine-hunting impact vessels and submarines with maneuvering rockets, of which there are 16 in the Northern Fleet, and by conventional submarines, of which there are six in the Northern Fleet.

The Pacific Fleet, with its bases in Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, includes nuclear submarines carrying intercontinental ballistic missiles and conventional diesel-powered submarines (nine pieces) intended for the coastal waters of the North Pacific. A new class of Kalina conventional submarines with air-independent propulsion, which allows for a long-lasting immersion of quieter and smaller conventional ships, is expected to enter service after 2020. The Pacific Fleet also has a large number of Udaloy-class destroyers sailing on patrols throughout the Western Pacific.

The Baltic Fleet has degraded since the end of the Soviet Union, which lost several ports when the Baltic states regained independence. The largest war port is now Baltiysk in Kaliningrad region. It controls the actions of the Polish navy right at its main approach to the Gulf of Gdansk, and the port of St. Petersburg.

The Black Sea Fleet is similarly afflicted, having lost its ports in Ukraine and Crimea after 1991. But now that Crimea has been annexed and restrictions have been placed on Ukraine’s sea access, Moscow is implementing plans to strengthen naval forces in this basin.

The Caspian Flotilla completely dominates the drainage basin, equipped as it is with modern Kalibr long-range maneuvering rockets with striking capabilities against all of Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. (It demonstrated as much in October 2015 by striking Syria.) The value of the Kalibr system is that it can be fired from relatively small mobile platforms such as corvettes and that it has a range of 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) – with relatively low rocket detection to boot. Most of the Caspian Flotilla is stationed at the base in Makhachkala, which has better access to water than Astrakhan, its traditional port.

Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence

The Soviet Union became a nuclear power in 1949. The Cold War arms race with the U.S. resulted in high numbers of warheads and their means of delivery, the number of warheads in the rockets, the direction of possible attacks, and homing locations – especially land-based near the enemy's borders (Cuba, West Germany and Turkey). Russia’s comparative weakness after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the United States’ comparative strength, made nuclear weapons all the more valuable to Moscow. They allowed Russia to maintain its status as a superpower and gave the Kremlin a ton of leverage as it pursued its interests.

In 2010, the “NEW START” treaty curbed the number of nuclear warheads to 1,735, but in practice, it applied only to strategic warheads, not tactical warheads. Russia now has somewhere between 2,000 and 2,700 tactical nuclear warheads, depending on which source you use. NEW START allows Russia to modernize and expand its nuclear arsenal and in fact has almost completely replaced its Soviet-era arsenal. By 2021, Soviet-era munitions are expected to constitute only 2 percent of Russia’s total nuclear force.

Of the three means of strategic nuclear delivery – intercontinental missiles, submarines and strategic bombers – ballistic ground-to-ground missiles from the Soviet era make up only half of the current number and are to leave service in 2022. They have largely been replaced by SS-27 Topol-M missiles, with the new RS-24 Yars and RS-26 Rubezh also joining the line. The SS-28 missiles with maneuvering warheads that are currently under development are expected to be able to avoid U.S. missile defenses, according to Russia. FR nuclear missiles are divided equally between above ground silos and rail launchers on land. In March 2018, President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had new rockets with completely new capabilities, including allegedly nuclear-powered maneuvering rockets with virtually unlimited range, as well as a hypersonic missile, though it’s unclear if this is true.

The second means of delivery consists of 10 Dolgorukiy-class ballistic missile carrier submarines. Russia plans to complete the launch of new missiles for SS-N-32 Bulava submarines, each with six warheads separately maneuvering (reentry vehicles).

Moscow is also modernizing the third means of delivery: the strategic bomb fleet of Tu-160s and Tu-95MSs. The first bomber is to be reopened on the production line, and the second will introduce new versions to the line. Works on the new PAK DA bomber are also underway.

Given such a vast nuclear arsenal, and given the disproportionate value of the munitions that comprise it, Moscow abandoned the Soviet policy of no first use. Officially, Russia seems prepared to use nuclear weapons not just in response to a nuclear threat but in response to conventional threats as well, especially if it “threatens Russia's survival in a nuclear or conventional war.” The notion of “survival” in the context of Russia – with its geography, disintegrative tendencies and historically labile power systems – is dangerously fluid. Strategic games and simulations suggest that if Russian forces face destruction in a theater or operational direction that endangers the state apparatus, then Moscow would use nuclear weapons under the so-called “escalate to deescalate theory.”

First floated in the 1990s, the general idea behind the theory is that a low-power tactical warhead could, in fact, stabilize a potential conflict because it produces the psychological effect of “escalating dominance” – that is, creating the impression of strength that confers to Russia the ability to control the escalation process. Russia can then count on achieving victory in the conflict by using low-power nuclear weapons on an operational scale, or to intimidate a state that has no nuclear weapons or is a member of a broader alliance. The interests of the other countries of the alliance are then separated from the interests of the country against which nuclear weapons would be used. Most often, the remaining countries of the alliance then tend to sacrifice the interests of the member at risk in exchange for a promise to stop escalating, thereby resolving the conflict on terms favorable to Russia and altering the balance of power in the region. In other words, Moscow escalates to deescalate.

By this logic, if conflict broke out between Russia and China or NATO, Moscow would opt for nuclear strikes to end a conventional war, assuming that the opponent would accept a loss or concession to Russia instead of risking further nuclear escalation. However, the most recent versions of Russia’s defense doctrines make no mention of deescalation through nuclear attack. The National Security Strategy issued in December 2015 is especially antagonistic, in that it directly accuses the United States of “instigating instability” and threatening Russia's interests and mentions the never-ending role of force as a factor in international relations. But it elides nuclear deterrence. Some believe this is merely a feint to trick the U.S. into not modernizing its own nuclear arsenal.

Either way, it’s important to note that in Russian military parlance, the notion of “deterrence” differs fundamentally from the understanding in the West, which sees it as a steady state of affairs. For Russia, it is dynamic, an active action, which is in opposition to a fixed passive state, which is active before the conflict, throughout the course of geopolitical rivalry, and even during open conflict. It is then expressed in a coordinated package of political, diplomatic, military, scientific, technological and all other undertakings aimed at ensuring the desired “stability” in competition. Put differently, Russian deterrence is to provide strategic stability favorable to Russia and its geopolitical interests. It is when Russia’s opponent cannot gain an advantage that Moscow cannot contest.

These notions of deterrence and stability are expressed almost exclusively in the context of Russia’s rivalry with the U.S. – and specifically Washington’s ability to project power into Eurasia, including the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium. This may change as China’s military power grows.

But even then, it’s unclear what action would trigger Russia’s use of nuclear weapons. The military holds nuclear strike drills, sure, but has never publicly defined its threshold. This is very likely a “calculated ambiguity” meant to throw off the planning of potential enemies. In this way, Russia creates a lot of room for political and military maneuvering, especially toward neighboring countries that do not have nuclear weapons.

To learn more, please visit strategyandfuture.org.
 

[Crafty_Dog]

January 21, 2020   Open as PDF



    Russia’s Puzzling Moves
By: George Friedman

Over the past few weeks, two odd things have happened in Russia. The first is that Russian President Vladimir Putin has restructured the government. During his state of the nation address last week, he announced constitutional changes that could lay a path for him to hold on to power beyond 2024, when his current term ends. He also shook up the Russian security command about a month ago and has been moving governors around like chess pieces. Such changes take place in many governments, but the moves are usually understated to increase power without creating a sense of urgency. Putin’s changes were not all that radical given the circumstances, but he went out of his way to make them look radical by removing longtime senior officials like Dmitry Medvedev, who will now serve as deputy chairman of the Security Council.

The second thing that has happened has less substance but is much stranger. Putin has made a series of statements that Poland started World War II, and that the Hitler-Stalin pact was forced on Russia by British and French deals with Germany. The substance of the statements is not worth debating; the Hitler-Stalin pact was no ordinary alliance, but a treaty by which Germany and the Soviet Union would together invade and divide Poland, which they proceeded to do. The claim that Poland started the war mirrors Hitler’s claim that Poland was invaded to protect Germans from Polish brutality.

It is revealing, however, that Putin felt it necessary to reopen the question of who started World War II at this time. Putin is not a casual man, so he didn’t do this carelessly. After announcing the shakeup of the Russian regime, he decided to charge Poland, France and the U.K. with responsibility for World War II, cleansing Russia of any wrongdoing in allying with Hitler.

At the very least, this is going to make France’s stated intentions of getting much closer to Russia more difficult.

For the French, the claim that they caused the war by reaching agreements with Nazi Germany will strike a chord. It will also make it harder for the Germans to get closer to Russia. For the Germans, whose primary historical goal is to allow World War II to slink into the past, the last thing they want to do is engage in a discussion of who caused the war.

To try to make sense of this we must remember that the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is called in Russia, is seared into the Russian national conscience. In making this charge, Putin is trying to cleanse Russia of responsibility for the war. By claiming that Poland, in some way, forced the Russians and Germans to invade Poland, he portrays Russia as an unqualified victim. In doing so, he reaches out to far-right forces in Europe who have argued that Hitler was forced into war. This is politically important. The European right has risen, and a segment of it wants to rewrite history. The Russians have toyed with supporting a rising right wing for years, and this places Russia in that position. Putin is claiming that it was not the totalitarians but the liberal democracies that started World War II, and that therefore the liberal democracies’ claim to moral superiority is false.

The problem is that by stating this so bluntly, Putin alienates France and makes Germany uneasy. It will be harder now for the Germans and French to collaborate with the Russians, although not impossible. Nearly all NATO members have condemned Putin for his view of the origins of World War II – something that he knew was coming; so why did he make this charge now?

The key, I think, was the charge against Poland. Putin is not expecting a war against France or Germany, but he is worried about Poland, and that has to do with Belarus, which shares borders with Poland to its west and Russia to its east. Belarus is sandwiched between the Baltic states and Ukraine. The Baltics are in NATO, and Ukraine, though shifting a bit, is still hostile to Russia. For Russia, these western buffers were indispensable, and losing them poses a threat to its national security.
 
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Belarus is key here. If Belarus were to be integrated into Russia, the West’s defense of Poland, which houses U.S. troops, becomes much more difficult. But if Belarus were to switch to the West and NATO troops were deployed, the defense of Smolensk and even Moscow would be difficult. The Russians have an initiative underway to integrate Belarus with Russia, but in recent weeks, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has been signaling an interest in maintaining good relations with the West.

Belarus is a flashpoint on this frontier. Lukashenko wants to maintain its free movement, Russia wants to lock it in, and Poland does not want to see more Russian troops on its eastern border. For Russia, settling the Belarus question is a vital matter. For Poland, even with more limited, though quite good, forces, this would cause a fundamental crisis and involve the United States. And this issue is moving to some sort of decision. The West does not want a shift, but Russia doesn’t trust the West and claims that its absorption of the Baltics into NATO already violated Moscow’s understanding with the West.

So there has been significant tension between Poland and Russia over Belarus. Belarus is important enough to Russia to consider military action – and the two countries have staged huge war games near Poland’s border in the past. Poland may see any such move as indicating war, if not now then later.

If a conflict were to break out, Russia would want it blamed on Poland. By raising the question of how World War II started, Russia is trying to change the perception of Poland from a victim nation to a historical aggressor. And by so doing, Putin may also be warning the Poles, and the Americans as well, not to believe for one minute that war is out of the question.

In this sense Putin’s restructuring of the Russian government makes sense. It was an unwieldy bureaucracy that would have difficulty aligning its economy with military action. Therefore, it is reasonable to wonder whether Putin’s attempts to redefine history and the government were designed as preparations for war, or for victory by intimidation.

Readers will recall our ongoing concern with Belarus and Poland. The best bet is that this is primarily signaling that Putin will not bend on Belarus, and not that he intends or expects war. But the actions meant to signal and the actions meant to prepare for war are easy to confuse. Reshaping the government and reshaping history inevitably open the door for conflict.   

[Crafty_Dog]

Russia Leans on Mercenary Forces to Regain Global Clout
Campaigns in Africa and the Middle East involve private security contractors and business interests with ties to Kremlin
By Benoit Faucon and James Marson
Feb. 23, 2020 1:29 pm ET
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In October, dozens of armed Russian mercenaries fanned out across two Libyan oil ports. Brought in by a renegade Libyan general, they helped rebel forces wrest control of the oil-rich region from the Libyan government.

After the fighting ended, a delegation of mining and oil executives from former Soviet states arrived seeking business with the rebels who now controlled the ports, Libyan immigration records show.

Almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet empire, Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a mission to rebuild Moscow’s international influence in the Middle East and Africa. The campaign relies partly on building alliances with developing countries outside official channels, often through proxies such as private security contractors, businesses and advisers, according to people involved and European security officials.

Russian activity in the Middle East and Africa coincides with a pulling back in those regions by the U.S. and its European allies. During a three-country tour of Africa last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated that the Trump administration is considering reducing military forces in Western Africa.

The Russian campaign has drawn the attention of U.S. and European officials who worry about the impact of growing Russian influence in the regions.

Earlier this month, the top American envoy to Syria said Russian military contractors are engaging in tense encounters with U.S. troops in Syria.

Gen. Stephen Townsend, head of the U.S. Africa Command, warned recently about Russia’s involvement in a region that is growing in prominence as a source of natural resources.

“Russian private military companies have a highly destabilizing influence in Africa, as they are frequently employed to secure Russian investments at the expense of Africans, to prop up corrupt regimes and establish a broader Russian military footprint globally,” he wrote in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Kremlin has said its aims in Africa and the Middle East are to help fight extremism and develop regional economies. It has denied any connection to private security contractors.

Once marginalized in Libya because of its association with toppled strongman Moammar Gadhafi, Russia has become, in just a few months, a pivotal player there. In January, Mr. Putin hosted talks in Moscow between the renegade general and the head of the internationally recognized Libyan government, then followed up with a summit in Berlin. The two sides have yet to agree to a cease-fire.


Gen. Khalifa Haftar, left, who heads a rebel faction called the Libyan National Army, met Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow in January.
PHOTO: MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS PRES/SHUTTERSTOCK
The Libya foray could give Russia a foothold in a failed state that is a significant energy exporter and a main route for illegal trafficking in people, drugs and weapons to Europe. European officials are concerned about the precarious state of Libyan security, in part because regions to its south are war zones and terrorist breeding grounds.

European Union foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell said in January that the Russian intervention could have undermined its efforts to broker a deal between Libya’s warring parties without using military force.

“Libya is a big gate to Africa” for Russia, said Libyan Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha. “It’s also the entrance to Southern Europe.”

Mr. Putin has denied the Russian government is behind any private contractors in Libya. “If there are Russian citizens there,” he said in January, “they don’t represent the interests of the Russian state and don’t receive funding from the Russian state.”

Mr. Bashagha said the mercenaries are in Libya with the Kremlin’s approval, citing a meeting held in Moscow between the renegade Libyan general, the Russian defense ministry and the private soldiers’ recruiter.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union spent billions of dollars on military aid to African allies. Then the collapse of communist rule in the early 1990s forced a retreat from the global stage.

Now, at a time of diminished Russian economic and military power, its efforts to exert political influence involve private security companies and businesses seeking access to oil, gold and diamonds, according to European security officials who monitor the groups. The private companies answer to the Kremlin, these people said.

A Russian company won a gold-mining contract in Sudan, where affiliated contractors have also been training forces, according to Russia’s foreign ministry and European security officials.

Moscow's Long Reach
Some of the African countries where Russian government or private interests have established a presence or are discussing deals.

RUSSIA

Sudan

Mining

interests

Central African Republic

Libya

Military

presence

Madagascar

Oil

interests

Eritrea

Algeria

Political

influence

Burkina Faso

Egypt

Naval

logistics

Rwanda

South Africa

Nuclear

power

Zimbabwe

Angola

Sources: reports by the United Nations’s panel on Central African sanctions; Central African government; Russian ministry of foreign affairs; Libyan ministry of interior; Libyan National Army; Ukrainian and Western intelligence agencies
In October, 43 African heads of state flew to the Russian resort Sochi for the first Russia-Africa summit. The leaders mingled with Russian state companies involved in defense and oil and gas, buying $12.5 billion worth of Russian agricultural goods and equipment and services for refineries and railroads.

Moscow’s tactics emerged with its interventions in eastern Ukraine in 2014, where the Kremlin worked with armed groups fielded by politically connected Russian businessmen. Companies owned by former restaurateur Yevgeny Prigozhin won multimillion-dollar catering and construction contracts for the Russian armed forces. Mr. Prigozhin then created Wagner Group, a private military company, according to European security officials.


Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin created a private military company called Wagner Group, according to European security officials.
PHOTO: METZEL MIKHAIL/TASS/ZUMA PRESS
Mr. Prigozhin also built a political consulting firm, the Internet Research Group, that the Justice Department says was behind Russian efforts to sow discord among Americans in the 2016 presidential election.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Wagner Group “has nothing to do with Russian state, with the Russian government, with the Russian defense ministry, with Russian special services or with the Kremlin.”

As fighting in Ukraine ebbed in 2015, Wagner turned to Syria, where it fought on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad, and Mr. Prigozhin’s companies won oil and gas concessions.

Mr. Prigozhin’s company and his lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Kremlin’s first major foray into Africa since Soviet days came two years ago in the Central African Republic, a mineral-rich former French colony. Africa was drawing foreign governments and companies hungry for resources. It also had become a source of terrorism and migration problems.

In late 2017, Moscow persuaded the United Nations to allow Russia to undertake a mission to train the Central African Republic’s army, which was fighting rebel forces, and support its weakened president, Faustin-Archange Touadera.

The first deployment—several dozen Russian mercenaries—arrived in January 2018 on a Russian military plane with crates of automatic weapons. Most weren’t members of Russia’s armed forces and wore neither standard uniforms nor insignia, according to officials who saw them arrive.


Russian bodyguards, in baseball caps, helped protect Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadera last July.
PHOTO: BENOIT FAUCON/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When the U.N. approved the mission, Moscow hadn’t specified it would be sending private contractors rather than soldiers—something that surprised U.N. officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for the U.N. mission there said the Russian forces were coordinating with others to help revamp the nation’s security sector.

Russia now has more than 235 security personnel in the country, according to a European security official, giving it greater clout there than any foreigners since France left in 1960. The senior Russian in the country appears to be Valery Zakharov, a retired Russian security-service officer who landed several months before the troops and became President Touadera’s top security adviser.

In an interview, Mr. Zakharov said that he isn’t part of the official U.N. mission and that he works for and is paid by Mr. Touadera, not Russia. He described his relationship with the Russian government by saying: “There’s no such thing as former” security-service officers.

The Kremlin spokesman said Mr. Zakharov “has nothing to do with the Russian government or our embassy or with Russian intelligence.” He said Russia is interested in developing its relationship with the Central African Republic.

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On a dusty field near the capital, Bangui, last summer, Russian instructors drilled dozens of government troops armed with machetes and rifles. Mr. Zakharov, standing nearby, said the Russian forces are paid under arrangements with Russia’s defense ministry. He declined to provide details.


Signs in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, recognize Russian military assistance.
PHOTO: BENOIT FAUCON/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Security Service of Ukraine, that country’s main security and counterintelligence agency, is investigating the quasi-private Russian military groups fighting in eastern Ukraine. It says many of the Russian soldiers sent to Africa fought in Ukraine with Wagner.

“It’s a convenient front,” said the security service Chief of Staff Ihor Huskov. “The geopolitical ambitions of Russia coincide with the appetites” of Mr. Putin’s inner circle, he said.

The Russian instructors have moved into the roughly 80% of the Central African Republic outside government control, according to Western security officials. As the Russians deployed, President Touadera’s government awarded mining contracts to Russian companies.


Valery Zakharov, a retired Russian security-service officer, has become a top security adviser to Central African Republic President Touadera.
PHOTO: BENOIT FAUCON/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In Libya, Russia’s involvement could give it a foothold in a major energy and migration hub near Europe. Libya is a large exporter of oil and natural gas to Europe, but most of its reserves—the largest in Africa and the ninth-biggest in the world—are untapped.

After Libyan dictator and Russian ally Gadhafi was deposed and killed in 2011 by Western-backed rebels, Mr. Putin said the U.S. and its allies had overstepped a U.N. mandate. A new Libyan government marginalized Russia.

The U.S. has since withdrawn from Libya and Russia has returned. Fayez al-Sarraj, Libya’s prime minister, attended the Sochi summit and discussed buying one million metric tons of Russian wheat, according to a Libyan security official.

Moscow simultaneously is helping Gen. Khalifa Haftar, who heads a rebel faction called the Libyan National Army, by printing Libyan money for his breakaway government and welcoming him aboard its aircraft carrier, according to Russian and Libyan government officials.

Gen. Haftar, a Soviet-trained former commander in Gadhafi’s military, rebelled in 2014 against Libya’s new ruler, uniting disparate militias to take control of a swath of eastern Libya. In 2018 he seized most of the country’s main oil-exporting ports. Last year, he attacked Tripoli.

The ports let Gen. Haftar control oil flows to Europe and offer a staging point for attacks on government troops. Rebels are expanding control of the region, known as the “oil crescent,” where 85% of Libya’s reserves lie. American companies long dominated the region until civil war prompted them to leave.

In the middle of last yea, Gen. Haftar’s troops brought Russian military contractors into two ports to train commandos and launch strikes, according to Libyan oil and security officials. Mr. Bashagha, the interior minister, said the Russians were Wagner employees.

“Whoever controls the area controls the oil fields,” said Mr. Bashagha, who is part of the internationally recognized government.


In December, the rebel administration of Gen. Haftar allowed a group of Russian and Belarusian businessmen to visit his eastern stronghold of Benghazi, according to an arrivals list at the city’s airport. The visitors included a Russian fuel-trading executive and managers at a Russian contractor specializing in mining and gas projects for state companies.

In Libya’s capital Tripoli, still under government control, prosecutors last summer arrested two Russian political consultants, alleging they were trying to destabilize the government and back opponents, including Gadhafi’s son and Gen. Hafter. They alleged the two men were connected to Mr. Prigozhin’s Internet Research Group, according to people close to the investigation.

The Kremlin has denied that Russian soldiers operate in Libya. Libyan officials said the private nature of Moscow’s military operations means it can deny its presence in Libya.

“Russia will say it has nothing to do with [Wagner],” said Mr. Bashagha, Libya’s interior minister. “They will say it’s a security company.”

—Ann Simmons in Moscow contributed to this article.