Bettina Renz - Russia's Military Revival

Part of the research and writing for this book was completed during a project funded by the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office, Government’s Analysis, Assessments and Research Activities fund from October 2015 until July 2016. I would like to thank the fund for the generous support. The project, entitled ‘Russian hybrid warfare’, was conducted jointly with Hanna Smith at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute. Hanna also contributed with her expertise on Russian foreign policy and history to the first chapter of this book. I would like to thank Hanna for her invaluable input, our epic discussions and for her friendship throughout the years. For six months of the project I was based at the Aleksanteri Institute as a senior researcher and I benefited greatly from the positive atmosphere and from the space to think and write that the institute offers to its scholars. I am grateful to everybody there for their ongoing support and friendship. I would like to thank the project’s panel of experts for their vital input and for the time they spent with us in Helsinki: Tor Bukkvoll, Samuel Charap, Antulio J. Echevarria II, Keir Giles, Sibylle Scheipers, Hew Strachan and Rod Thornton. Thanks also go to Mikko Lappalainen for his involvement and support.

I am extremely grateful to Louise Knight and Nekane Tanaka Galdos at Polity for their wonderful support, advice and patience throughout the process of writing this book. Both went above and beyond to ensure that the project would come to fruition. I could not have wished for better editors and the book would not have been possible without you! I would like to thank Edwin Bacon, Lance Davies, Matthew Rendall, Rod Thornton, Hanna Smith, Jeremy Smith and Aaron Bateman for reading and offering valuable comments on various parts and chapters of the book. I am also grateful for the constructive criticism and helpful suggestions by the anonymous readers of the manuscript.

Thanks are due to many other people, who are too numerous to list here. I greatly appreciate the time given by the interviewees in Moscow to meet and discuss the subject in spring 2016 and to the many Russian scholars, analysts, journalists, politicians and officials that agreed to speak to me over the years. They all, without exception, have shaped and informed my understanding of Russian politics and military affairs. I would also like to thank all my wonderful colleagues and friends at the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics & International Relations. Their support has been vital, especially during the final months of completing the book. I continue to be grateful to everybody, past and present, at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Russian and East European Studies, my intellectual home. Long may it continue! Special thanks go to Edwin Bacon, Julian Cooper, Sarah Whitmore, Mary Buckley, Alex Danchev and Vivien Lowndes, all of whom have been hugely supportive of me and my work. I would not have got here without you.

Finally, my thanks and love go to Jason Curteis and to my parents, Karl-Dieter and Marlene Renz. My parents have always believed in what I am doing and given me tireless encouragement and support, so I would like to dedicate this book to them.

“Mr President, acting on your decision, since the 30th, we have been carrying out missions to strike ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other terrorist groups present on Syrian territory. Since September 30, we have conducted strikes against 112 targets. We are increasing our strikes’ intensiveness. Our various intelligence and reconnaissance forces have been working intensively over these last two days and have identified a large number of ISIS targets: command posts, ammunition depots, military hardware, and training camps for their fighters. Vessels from our Caspian Fleet joined our aviation in attacking these targets this morning. Four warships launched 26 Kalibr cruise missiles against 11 targets. Our target monitoring data shows that all targets were destroyed and civilian facilities were not damaged in the strikes. These strikes’ results demonstrate the high effectiveness of our missiles launched from a big distance of nearly 1,500 kilometres. This morning, 23 attack aircraft also continued their strikes against insurgent positions. Since September 30, we have destroyed 19 command posts, 12 ammunition depots, 71 pieces of military hardware, and six explosives production workshops producing explosives for car bombs and so on. We are continuing our operations according to plan.”

These are the words of the Russian Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, reporting to the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces, President Vladimir Putin, exactly one week after Russia’s air campaign over Syria was launched on 30 September 2015 (Shoigu 2015). Only ten years prior to this report, such an account of Russian military activities would have appeared like nothing but fiction. Throughout much of the 1990s and 2000s, the Russian armed forces had been left to fall into a state of serious disrepair. As Russia entered the new millennium it appeared clear, as Eugene Rumer and Celeste Wallander wrote that it did so with ‘its capacity to project power beyond its borders vastly reduced and its ability to defend its territorial integrity and sovereignty severely tested’ (2003: 61). By the middle of the 2000s, many believed, both in Russia and in the West, that the ongoing neglect of the Russian armed forces had pushed them close to irreversible ruin. Given that their service personnel were by now ‘impoverished, demoralized and largely ineffective’ (Barany 2005: 33) and the forces ‘woefully inadequate to address the country’s security threats’ (Golts and Putnam 2004: 121), it seemed clear that Russia no longer cast the shadow of a global military power.

Against this background Russia has experienced a remarkable military revival within barely more than a decade. The operations in Syria demonstrated that many of the shortcomings, which had led to humiliating defeat in the first Chechen War and to operational problems in other conflicts, had been decisively overcome. One year into the Syria intervention in autumn 2016, Russian forces had experienced minimal losses, both in the air and on the ground. Moscow had put on display new capabilities, such as vastly improved command and control and inter-service coordination, as well as advanced technologies like precision-guided munitions, including cruise missiles fired from the Caspian and Mediterranean seas. What came, perhaps, as the biggest surprise to many observers was that Russia now had the sealift and airlift capabilities required to launch military operations far beyond its immediate neighbourhood (Gorenburg 2016). As such, in Ruslan Pukhov’s words, Russia’s air operations over Syria represented ‘the most spectacular military-political event of our time’ (2016).

The world’s amazement at the Kremlin’s conspicuous display of its shiny new military power in Syria did not come completely out of the blue. This operation was launched only a year and a half after another Russian surprise military success: the annexation of Crimea in spring 2014. In this operation, Moscow had demonstrated not so much the advances it had made in the procurement and use of modern technology and its ability to launch a twenty-first-century air campaign. The Crimea operation, instead, had stood out for extreme restraint in the application of any physical violence. ‘Little, green and polite’ special operations soldiers (Nikolsky 2015), in combination with an information campaign and other non-physical tools, allowed Russia to achieve its objectives without almost a single shot being fired. This stood in stark contrast to previous Russian military operations, which all, without exception, had been criticized for the excessive use of force. Until Crimea it had been widely assumed that Russian military strategists were unable to move beyond Cold War thinking on large-scale inter-state warfare. The approach in Crimea, which later became known as ‘hybrid warfare’, suggested that serious advances had been made also in Moscow’s strategic thought. Whilst previous conflicts were approached as conventional warfare campaigns almost irrespective of the circumstances, in Crimea appropriate means were skilfully matched to the conflict’s ends. After years of failed attempts at reforming the Russian armed forces, the 2008 modernization programme finally led to systematic change and restored the country’s standing as a serious military actor. As The National Interest put it, ‘Russia’s military is back’ (Gvosdev 2014).