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Defense Attaché to Moscow 2012 – 2014

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National Defense University 2015 – 2019

NYT May 2018

The Quiet Americans

05/08/2017

Can Washington’s “Russia hands” help explain why the post-Cold War relationship has gone off the rails?

By KEITH GESSEN

The strangest Russian political scandal so far this year — a year that hasn’t lacked for them — revolves around a Belarusian escort named Anastasia Vashukevich, who goes by the name Nastya Rybka. Rybka, whose pseudonym means “little fish,” is a prolific Instagrammer, a teacher of “sex workshops” and the author of a how-to book, “Who Wants to Seduce a Billionaire?” She became famous in Russia this year for having chronicled, on Instagram, her 2016 affair with one particular billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. A few weeks later, she caught the world’s attention after she was arrested in Thailand in the middle of a sex workshop and then claimed, from the back of a police van, that she possessed information that could blow the investigation into Russian meddling in the American presidential election wide open.

This strange story included an intriguing detour into the recent history of United States foreign policy. One of Rybka’s initial posts on the Deripaska affair was a short audio clip from a conversation that took place on the oligarch’s yacht in August 2016. As they sailed off the coast of Norway, Rybka and Deripaska were joined by an influential Kremlin official named Sergei Eduardovich Prikhodko, and in the clip, Deripaska, who made his fortune during the violent aluminum wars of the 1990s, explains some things about geopolitics to Rybka, who was 26 at the time. “Our relations with America are bad,” Deripaska says. “Why? Because the person in charge of them is Sergei Eduardovich’s ‘friend’ — Nuland is what she is called. When she was young — about your age — she spent a month living on a Soviet whaling vessel. Ever since then, she’s hated our country.”

Deripaska was referring to Victoria Nuland, a longtime American government official and “Russia hand,” as Russia experts are sometimes known, who at the time of the video was assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia. Nuland had in fact, as Deripaska said, spent time aboard a Soviet vessel (fishing, not whaling) in the mid-1980s; whether she hated Russia ever after is a subject of some dispute. She spent three decades in various posts in the State Department and the White House. In 2013, as a newly confirmed assistant secretary of state, she became the point person for the increasingly fraught situation in Ukraine, where large protests against the president, following his decision to pull out of an economic agreement with the European Union, eventually led to his ouster. Early in the protests, Nuland was filmed handing out sandwiches, pastries and cookies to the demonstrators in what some viewed as a provocative show of solidarity. Later, as the government began to totter, she made a call that was intercepted and leaked online, most likely by Russian intelligence, in which she discarded the notion of working with the E.U. to resolve the crisis. “[Expletive] the E.U.,” she memorably said.

What was remarkable about the episode was the utter confidence with which Nuland seemed to speak for the United States and its policy. From the start of his administration, President Barack Obama had tried to lower tensions with Russia and refocus American attention on a rising China; he had made clear he wanted no part in the problems of the post-Soviet periphery. Yet in the middle of the uprising in Kiev, there was Nuland, encouraging protesters and insulting European allies. And after the call leaked, it was Nuland, as much as Obama, who came to personify American policy for everyday Russians — to the point that a professional sex coach like Rybka knows more about her biography than all but a handful of Americans.

During two decades, on and off, reporting in Russia and the post-Soviet states — in the turbulent ’90s, the wealthy but depressing aughts and finally during the eruption of violence in Ukraine — I occasionally heard people talk about how “the Americans” wanted this or that political outcome. The events in Ukraine demonstrated, or seemed to demonstrate, that behind the visible facade of changing presidents and changing policy statements and changing styles, “the Americans” were actually a small core of officials who not only executed policy but also effectively determined it. The continuing wars in Ukraine and Syria, the apparent Russian campaign of targeted assassinations on foreign soil, the widening gyre of sanctions and countersanctions and the still-festering question of Russian meddling in the 2016 election have made for the worst relations between the two countries since the 1980s. Understanding how to get out of this mess will require understanding how we got into it. There may be no better place to start than with the people inside the American government who have been working on the subject since 1991 — the Russia hands.

‘Some people say, “It’s not business as usual with the Russians.” But it’s never business as usual with the Russians!’

The abiding mystery of American policy toward Russia over the past 25 years can be put this way: Each administration has come into office with a stated commitment to improving relations with its former Cold War adversary, and each has failed in remarkably similar ways. The Bill Clinton years ended with a near-catastrophic standoff over Kosovo, the George W. Bush years with the Russian bombing of Georgia and the Obama years with the Russian annexation of Crimea and the hacking operation to influence the American election.

Some Russia observers argue that this pattern of failure is a result of Russian intransigence and revisionism. But others believe that the intransigent and unchanging one in the relationship is the United States — that the country has never gotten past the idea that it “won” the Cold War and therefore needs to spread, at all costs, the American way of life.

Last summer, a few months after the inauguration of President Trump, I began traveling to Washington to speak with Russia hands: those who had worked on Russia inside the State Department, the National Security Council or the Department of Defense. I interviewed hands who served in the government as far back as Jimmy Carter and up to the current administration; some served Republican presidents, others served Democrats, but a vast majority served both parties.

The government, as a rule, discourages specialization: Military officers and diplomats are constantly transferred from one post to another, from one region to the next. Still, specialists do emerge. Many but not all Russia hands have Ph.D.’s — in Russian history or political science or security studies. Others got their graduate education on the job. Nuland worked on the Soviet fishing trawler; Daniel Fried, her eventual close collaborator at the State Department, spent a semester as a live-in babysitter for an American Embassy family in Moscow. “Seeing Communism up close cures you of all your left-liberal illusions that the Cold War is a misunderstanding that can be cured through arms control and détente,” Fried says. “Communism up close is very ugly.” Some Russia hands started out as civil servants or military officers, others as academics pulled into government service after working as advisers on political campaigns.

The Russia hands have clear generational characteristics. Those who came of age at the height of the Cold War worked on Russia because it was America’s most important foreign-policy problem. Many of those who finished graduate school or officer-training school in the late ’80s or early ’90s bear the scars of having studied a subject that became seemingly irrelevant overnight. In 1989, Peter Zwack, now a retired brigadier general, was a young military-intelligence officer stationed in Germany, taking Russian language and politics courses. “I was waiting for them to come through the Fulda Gap,” he says, referring to a section of West Germany through which NATO planners expected the Soviets to push large mechanized formations. “We were outmanned. I thought we were outgunned.” But the Soviets never came, and for the next 20 years Zwack worked in the Balkans, then Afghanistan and South Korea, before finally returning to Russia in 2012 as defense attaché to the American Embassy.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States had to staff 14 new embassies in the post-Soviet republics. Many of the Foreign Service officers who emerged from these postings did so with a somewhat jaundiced view of Russia. “When you start looking at the Russians by the people who have been visited by the Russians,” says Fried, who spent a fair amount of time in Poland during his long career in the Foreign Service, “you tend to see it a different way.”

Finally, there is the younger generation, those 40 and under. These Russia hands are for the moment a rarer species. “If you were an ambitious young Foreign Service officer after 9/11, you wanted to get sent to some reconstruction team in Afghanistan or Iraq,” says Andrew Weiss, who worked on Russia at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and now runs the Russia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “You wanted to learn Arabic. If you were ambitious, you did not want to go to the embassy in Ukraine.”

As in other foreign-policy sectors, the Russia hands divide less along party lines than along foreign-policy philosophies: They are either “realists” or “internationalists.” Realists tend to be cautious about American overseas commitments and deferential toward state sovereignty; internationalists tend to be more inclined to universalist ideals like democracy and human rights, even where these are forced to cross borders. But the two supposed categories are blurred by a thousand factors, not least of which being that realists don’t like being called realists, because it suggests that they have no values, and internationalists don’t like to be called internationalists, as opposed to realists, because it suggests that they have no common sense. In the end, a vast internationalist middle, consisting of neoconservative Republicans and interventionist Democrats, predominates, with tiny slices of hard realists on the right and soft realists, or “neorealists,” on the left. And there are many shades of difference among all these people.

The longtime Russia hand Stephen Sestanovich, a veteran of the Reagan and Clinton administrations, says there are two kinds of Russia hands — those who came to Russia through political science and those who came to it through literature. The literature hands, he suggests, sometimes let their emotions get the best of them, while the political-science hands, like Sestanovich, are more cool and collected. Fried, who served in every administration from Carter to Obama, also thinks there are two kinds of Russia hands, though he draws a different dividing line: There are those, like himself, who “put Russia in context, held up against the light of outside standards and consequences.” These people tend to be tough on Russia. And then there are those “who take Russia on its own terms, attractive and wonderful but subject to romanticization.” These people tend to give Russia what Fried would consider a pass.

Then there are those, like Michael Kofman, a young Kiev-born military analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, Va., who say that there only appear to be two kinds of Russia hands. “There are the nice missionaries who knock on your door and say, ‘Hey, have you heard the good news about democracy, freedom and liberalism?’ And then there are the crusaders who are trying to claim the heathen Eastern European lands for democracy and freedom. But they’re basically the same person; they’re two sides of the same coin.”

There are two kinds of Russia hands, or maybe there are six kinds of Russia hands, or maybe there is an infinite variety of Russia hands. And yet the mystery is this: After all the many different Russia hands who have served in the United States government, the country’s relations with Russia are as they have always been — bad.

The Cold War ended with a bang in the U.S.S.R. — new countries were forged, the ghosts of the past were confronted, a McDonald’s opened in Moscow’s Pushkin Square. In the United States, there was also much hope. A sometime Russia hand named Francis Fukuyama, then deputy director of policy planning at the State Department, even wrote an essay in which he wondered if we were entering a new post-historical era, when the great questions of how to order society had been settled and all would live in a stable, if boring, peace.

The first high-level Russia hand of the post-Cold War era was a man named Nelson Strobridge Talbott III, or Strobe for short. The scion of a prosperous Ohio family (his grandfather, the first Nelson Strobridge Talbott, was captain of the Yale football team in 1914), Talbott followed his forefathers to Yale, where he studied Russian literature and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. There he found himself rooming with a wonky, gregarious Georgetown graduate named Bill Clinton. Talbott remained interested in Russia, writing his master’s thesis on Mayakovsky, translating Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs and then becoming a foreign correspondent — and eventually a columnist — for Time magazine. He was the first journalist to track down and interview Joseph Brodsky upon his exile to the West in 1972. “Looks like we lucked out,” Brodsky wrote in his diary. “He’s read me.” Talbott’s fundamental view of the U.S.S.R. was that it could be reasoned with; in the pages of Time, he regularly praised the virtues of arms control and détente, and was despised for it by more ardent Cold Warriors. When Clinton was elected president, Talbott came on to advise his old roommate on what Clinton believed to be his most pressing foreign-policy concern: the transformation of Russia into a viable, American-friendly democracy on the eastern edge of Europe.

‘The Russians took it as a sign that we were still against them. It was really hard to walk back from.’

Things did not turn out that way, and most of the reasons were internal to Russia. But the United States was not without its share of blame. The economic advice dispensed by the gurus of what was known as the Washington Consensus weakened an already vulnerable Russian state. Average Russian citizens saw their living standards and life expectancies drop. It was Talbott who offered one of the pithier critiques of the doctrine known as “shock therapy”: What the Russian people wanted, Talbott said, “was less shock and more therapy.” The remark led to one of the stormiest passages of his political career.

But he weathered it. During his tenure, the United States made one of the most momentous foreign-policy choices of the post-1991 era: the decision to expand NATO eastward, first into the former countries of the Warsaw Pact, then into the former republics of the Soviet Union itself. Talbott at first was opposed, or at least, as he now puts it, “deeply riven.” On one hand, the Eastern European countries, some of which were now led by heroic former dissidents, wanted very much to join the military alliance; on the other, the Russians warned Talbott — “with a mirthless smile,” as he later recalled — that NATO was to them a “four-letter word.” If the Cold War was really over, as the Americans kept saying it was, why expand a Cold War military alliance set up expressly to deter and contain the Soviet Union? But as much as Talbott loved Russia, there were clear advantages to securing the West’s gains. “If the leadership of a country has any view but the following,” Talbott told me last summer, “it’s not going to be the leadership of that county for very long. And that is: We do what we can in our own interest.” But the NATO question, Talbott admitted, was complicated. “Should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our real interests that would require us to hold back on what many people would say is our own current interest?”

At the time the debate was taking place — 1993 and 1994 — much of the State Department and the Pentagon took the anti-expansion view, arguing that it would needlessly antagonize Russia at a difficult moment in its post-Communist journey and that the alliance was unwieldy enough without incorporating three fledgling Eastern European democracies (not to mention, eventually, Romania). But there were some who disagreed. A small working group at RAND produced a report arguing for NATO expansion as key to the future of Eastern Europe. “We talked to the Poles, and they said: ‘If you don’t let us into NATO, we’re getting nuclear weapons. We don’t trust the Russians,’ ” one of the report’s authors, a former Air Force officer and Pentagon strategist named Richard L. Kugler, told me. “Then we talked to the Germans. They said: ‘The line of contact with the Russians now runs through Warsaw. If you don’t defend it, we will.’ We had a vision of a nuclear-armed Poland being fortified by German troops facing off with the Russians — I don’t think anyone wanted that!” The report was laughed at and rejected in some quarters — a State Department official supposedly threw it in the trash in front of one of its authors — but Fried, then at the National Security Council, started using it to lobby inside the administration for a more robust approach to expansion. Talbott initially resisted, but he and Clinton soon came around.

The decision on NATO was essentially made by early 1994, but it would take some years before the first countries joined the alliance, and in the meantime, relations between Russia and the United States steadily declined: Russia was angered by the NATO bombing of Bosnian Serb positions in 1995, by the American insistence that the Russians stop the sale of nuclear technology to Iran and especially by the 1999 NATO bombing — just a few weeks after the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland finally joined the alliance — of Belgrade. That conflict almost expanded when a small contingent of Russian troops seized the Pristina airport in Kosovo. If a British officer named James Blunt had not refused to act on an order from Gen. Wesley Clark to clear the airport, things might have turned out a lot worse. Blunt went on to fame as a rock musician with the hit song “You’re Beautiful,” but the Russia-United States relationship remained precarious.

The damage, in any case, was done. “We were so excited about the spread of democracy and the collapse of Communism,” says Olga Oliker, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There were all these countries saying, ‘Yes, please, take us into NATO with weapons that you’ll give us to defend ourselves from the Russians, who are going to be coming like they always do.’ And we said, ‘Well, the Russians aren’t coming, but yes, please, join us in democracy.’

“But the Russians took it as a sign that we were still against them. It was really hard to walk back from. From there on out, we were doing things that we kept saying, ‘We’re not doing this to hurt you,’ and that the Russians felt hurt them. We didn’t do it because we wanted to hurt them. We did it because we didn’t care if it hurt them.”

In the case of the centrist, Democratic Clinton administration, you might say that it was always going to be torn between hard internationalists like Fried and soft internationalists like Talbott. But what about the George W. Bush administration, which staffed itself with self-described realists? The answer turned out to be: more of the same. The main Russia hand in the Bush White House was Thomas Graham, a quiet, intense, scholarly former State Department official who was described by a colleague as “the smartest Russia hand ever produced by the Foreign Service.” Graham was known for his prickly independence. As a political officer at the United States Embassy in Moscow in the 1990s, he became so frustrated with the White House’s approach to Russia that he published a repudiation of it in a Russian newspaper, under his own name. But on Graham’s watch, the relationship soured even more. The United States invaded Iraq despite Russian objections; vocally supported the popular uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine, known as the Rose and Orange Revolutions; and then, in Georgia, gave moral and material support to the flamboyantly anti-Russian administration of Mikheil Saakashvili, who in turn sent troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan and the coalition in Iraq.

Factors external to Russia played a role here: The Sept. 11 attacks refocused American foreign policy around counterterrorism. “We had a long period of inattention because of the war on terror,” Weiss says. “It was a long period where anyone who banged his fist on the table and said: ‘Mr. President! Mr. President! Drop everything you’re doing killing bin Laden’s inner circle! We need to talk to you because Vladimir Putin is mad about blah blah blah!’ You can imagine how that did not rate.”

But it wasn’t just the fight against terrorism. The Soviet Union’s collapse and Russia’s subsequent weakness reconfigured the entire process of American decision-making. When I asked Graham about the decline in relations on his watch, he delivered a soliloquy about bureaucracy.

“The way the N.S.C. is structured,” he began, “the way the State Department is structured, is through a series of regional and functional bureaus. The question is always, Who takes the lead?” In Soviet times, when the entire foreign policy of the United States was oriented around countering the Soviet threat, the Russia hands frequently took the lead. In the post-Soviet era, with an increasingly irrelevant Russia, the reverse was true. “Russia was unique in that it’s a country that was a factor in almost all the major things the U.S. government did, but it wasn’t in any place the most important factor. So you’re working on missile defense: Russia is clearly an important player in missile defense. But that process is not led by the person who’s responsible for Russia policy; it’s led by the person who’s responsible for nonproliferation policy. If you come to energy, Russia is obviously an important player in global energy markets, but Russia is not the most important player in global energy markets. That’s the Saudis and OPEC. So when you come to an energy issue, the people who are in charge of energy run that.”

The same was true of the states of the former Soviet Union, which were now independent and the province of different regional desks at the State Department and the N.S.C. The most damaging episode in United States-Russia relations during Graham’s time at the N.S.C. was American cheerleading for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in late 2004 and early 2005. Graham argued that the Russians saw the “color revolutions,” as the Rose and Orange Revolutions were known, as an outgrowth of American policy and feared that regime change would be coming to Russia next. But freedom was on the march, Graham was told: “ ‘All we’re doing is promoting democracy.’ ”

“But you’re the Russia expert,” I said.

“But Ukraine is not a Russia issue,” he said. “It’s a Ukrainian issue. There’s a bureau for European affairs that overseas Ukrainian issues.”

During the Orange Revolution, the Europe desk at the N.S.C. was run by Fried.

“My main contribution,” Graham summed up, “was preventing things from being worse than they could have been.”

Graham left government in 2007. Fried, his sometime nemesis, had become assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia and continued to push vocal American support of Western-leaning governments in former Soviet states, Georgia in particular. Nuland was the American ambassador to NATO. In April 2008, at a NATO summit meeting in Bucharest, the alliance announced over strong Russian objections that it intended to eventually admit Georgia and Ukraine. Four months later, deteriorating security conditions in South Ossetia, Georgia, provoked an emboldened Saakashvili into an attack on the breakaway region. Russian forces intervened, crushing the Georgian Army in less than a week.

The Georgian debacle — in which a non-NATO American ally was defeated by Russia and the United States was left with no plausible response — represented a low point. But the relationship was about to get much worse.

The next president, Barack Obama, was the rare American politician with a sense of the fallibility of American power. He opposed the Iraq war and spoke honestly about the crimes of the American empire. Yet he was also divided in his mind. A realist in most of his foreign-policy leanings, Obama chose as his chief Russia hand a Stanford political-science professor named Michael McFaul.

McFaul had spent years visiting Russia and writing about it. He was a Russophile, an advocate of more cooperative relations and a critic of the Bush administration’s unilateralism: in all this, a good fit for Obama. But he was also an avid internationalist and democracy promoter, who had speculated in a widely circulated 2005 essay on the seven “factors for success” required for color revolution — the implication being that more such revolutions were necessary and desirable. In 2008, McFaul proposed a “reset” in relations between the two countries. This became the administration’s policy, and for a while it worked. A new arms-control agreement was negotiated. Dmitri Medvedev, who succeeded Putin as president in early 2008, toured Silicon Valley. Russia joined the World Trade Organization. And a sprawling supply chain, called the Northern Distribution Network, was established to move supplies through Russia to NATO troops in Afghanistan. The existence of an alternate route gave the United States some leeway in its dealings with Pakistan. When Pakistan cut off the supply route in Afghanistan not long after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, NATO simply sent more through Russia.

But relations with Russia soon soured. The more liberal Medvedev years created an expectation on the part of some Russians that the country would open up; when Medvedev announced in 2011 that he was stepping aside, that Putin would be returning to the presidency and that this is what they had planned all along, there was a feeling of grievous disappointment. Three months later, spurred by a number of blatant falsifications in the national Duma elections, this disappointment erupted into the largest protests of the post-Soviet period. Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, voiced approval for the protests and expressed “serious concerns” about the voting irregularities. Her comments fed the Kremlin’s fears that the United States was somehow behind the demonstrations. McFaul, who arrived as ambassador to Russia in the midst of the protest wave, inflamed the situation further by taking a meeting with opposition leaders. He was never forgiven by the Russian authorities, who proceeded to harass him and his family and denounce him whenever possible as a foreign spy.

From there, the relationship grew increasingly strained. In the words of Paul Stronski, a Russia hand who joined the N.S.C. in 2012: “I was brought in to do reset, Part 2. Instead, I got Magnitsky, Snowden and Ukraine.” Magnitsky was the Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions on individuals engaged in human rights violations and corruption and was inspired by the death in prison of a Russian tax attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, who was arrested after uncovering a huge corruption scheme. Snowden was Edward Snowden, who turned up in Moscow after orchestrating perhaps the most significant leak of American government documents since the Pentagon Papers. And Ukraine was, of course, Ukraine.

Ukraine was a catastrophe two decades in the making. Its government was as corrupt and ineffectual as any in the post-Soviet space; it produced neither oil nor gas to serve as a financial cushion, and it was divided between a Russian-leaning east and a Europe-leaning west. To make matters worse, it was also the host, at Sevastopol, of the Russian Black Sea fleet, whose long-term lease, during times of tension, tended to become a political football.

In the summer of 2013, with the shock of Snowden’s turning up in Moscow still fresh, Russian officials started making noise about an “association agreement” that Ukraine was about to sign with the European Union. To the Russians, the proposed agreement was a rejection of their own cherished customs’ union, the Eurasian Economic Union, as well as a concrete step toward European integration for a country with which it had profound, centuries-old connections. And European integration, the Russians believed, would eventually mean NATO membership: hostile troops on the Russian border and an end to the lease for the Russian fleet.

McFaul, still in Moscow, was one of the people to whom the Russians took these complaints. By his own account, he was dismissive of their concerns. First of all, he said, it wasn’t Russia’s business what Ukraine signed or didn’t sign. And second, he didn’t think the Russians should get all worked up. “We’re talking about an association agreement,” he told me. “That’s expansion of the E.U. maybe in the year 2040, 2050? Ask the Turks about their association agreement.” (Turkey signed a similar agreement with the E.U. in 1963 and still has not become a member.) It was just a piece of paper. But the Russians didn’t seem to think so. And neither, it would turn out, did the Ukrainians. When Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, under intense Russian pressure, pulled out of the accord with the Europeans, people took to the streets.

Ukraine was a Ukraine issue, not a Russia issue, and so the burden of dealing with the expanding crisis there fell in the laps of a newly appointed ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, and the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, the old Russia hand Victoria Nuland. The daughter of Sherwin Nuland, the surgeon and Yale bioethicist, she fell in love with Russian culture after seeing a performance of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” when she was 12; she studied Russian history and politics at Brown, worked at a Soviet children’s camp and after that for an embassy family in Moscow. Then, eager for adventure and contact with real-live Russians, she did her tour on the Soviet fishing vessel (for seven months, not one). That experience taught her something about the planned economy: After 25 days of drinking and card-playing, the crew did five days of hard work to meet their monthly targets. She also says she learned “how to drink 10 shots of vodka and still get back to my cabin and put a chair under the doorknob. Things could get a little hairy when the boys were drunk.” She entered the Foreign Service in 1984. Over a long and eventful career, she witnessed the defense of the Russian White House during the attempted hard-line coup against Mikhail Gorbachev; served as Talbott’s chief of staff during the chaotic ’90s; worked as Dick Cheney’s deputy national security adviser in the years after Sept. 11 but “before Cheney became Cheney,” as she put it; and served as the State Department spokeswoman under Hillary Clinton. She was known inside successive administrations as a Russia hawk, but when asked if she hated the country, she drew a distinction between “Russian culture and the Russian people,” which she loves, and the Soviet strain she sees in Putin’s Russia, which she does not. “I deplore the way successive governments in Moscow — Soviet and Russian — have abused their own people, ripped them off, constrained their choices and made us the enemy to mask their own failings,” Nuland says. Hearing her speak with such conviction about governments that, in at least one case, no longer existed, you could understand how she had been over the years a very effective advocate inside several American administrations for her point of view.

In December 2013, with the protests in the center of Kiev just a few weeks old, Nuland traveled to Moscow and then to Kiev to try to defuse the crisis that had engulfed the Yanukovych government. She made little progress with the Kremlin, which was of the opinion that Yanukovych should simply clear the protesters from the streets. On her first night in Kiev, she was woken by members of her staff. The riot police brought out to contain the protests had formed a ring around them and were closing in. The demonstrators were desperately singing patriotic songs to keep up their spirits, but they were in mortal danger. Nuland got on the phone with Washington and worked to release a statement in Secretary of State John Kerry’s name, expressing “disgust” at the move on peaceful protesters. “After that,” Nuland says, “the singing grew louder”; the demonstrators on the square, she told me, were holding their phones in the air, “displaying the Kerry statement in Ukrainian and Russian.” The riot troops backed off.

‘Seeing Communism up close cures you of all your left-liberal illusions that the Cold War is a misunderstanding that can be cured through arms control and détente.’ The next morning, Nuland was to meet with Yanukovych. But first she wanted to visit the protest encampment, which, two weeks into its existence, had grown in both scope and moral authority. “In accordance with Slavic tradition, I wanted to bring something,” Nuland says. She took a large plastic bag filled with treats. Alongside Pyatt, she handed them out to the protesters, and thus was born one of the iconic images of the Ukraine crisis, immediately and widely circulated by the Kremlin’s media apparatuses — a powerful official, not a famous politician like Senator John McCain or Secretary of State John Kerry but a representative of the supposedly more neutral American policymaking bureaucracy, succoring revolutionaries in the center of Kiev. (Nuland points out that they also gave food to the riot police.) Two months later, as the Yanukovych government entered its terminal phase, Nuland’s “[Expletive] the E.U.” comment leaked out. For many Russians and Europeans, the line became emblematic of American arrogance.

A few weeks later, Yanukovych fled the country, and Russian troops annexed Crimea. In tandem with Fried, who had taken the newly established position of sanctions coordinator at the State Department, Nuland began drafting harsh sanctions against Putin’s inner circle, individuals involved in the invasion of Ukraine and eventually large Russian companies and banks. Fried told me that one senior State Department official thought this was pretty funny. He said to Fried, “Do the Russians realize that the two hardest-line people in the entire U.S. government are now in a position to go after them?”

The Russians may have realized this perfectly well. According to American intelligence agencies, two years after the sanctions went into effect, the Russians started feeding emails stolen from the servers of the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks and helping with their distribution.

Michael Kimmage is a soft-spoken professor of American intellectual history with a focus on the Cold War and an interest in Russia. In 2014, seized by what he says his wife still calls a midlife crisis, he left academia for a two-year fellowship on the policy-planning staff at the State Department. “I imagined showing up there and writing a memo that would change the course of history,” Kimmage recalls. “Then when I got there, I learned it wasn’t really like that. It’s much more like a Stendhal novel.” That is to say, both grand and comically banal. “You might have a brilliant idea, but then you have to go find out if it’s already being done. That takes a while. Then you find out it’s already being done. And it doesn’t work.”

Kimmage nonetheless found the experience enlightening, and he came away with the feeling that a lot of what the American government did had deep and sometimes invisible ideological sources. The apparent final triumph of liberal democracy in Europe in 1989 produced two powerful strains in American internationalist foreign-policy thinking, according to Kimmage — one radical, the other moderate. The radical strain, associated with the neocons, called for a universal democratization, by force if need be. This strain was (mostly) discredited in Iraq. But the other strain, which aimed to spread American-style democracy as far east as possible into Eurasia, has never been discredited. It is close to being the conventional wisdom in Washington, and it is carried forth, Kimmage suggests, by a certain sort of young person, typically a graduate of Yale or Georgetown, “who believes — perhaps by definition — in the virtues of American power.”

And yet there is, within the Russia-hand community, a small countervailing tendency. This new generation of Russia hands is deeply skeptical of the missionary impulse that has characterized American policy toward Russia for so long. Oliker is one, Kimmage another. There is also the military analyst Michael Kofman, at the Center for Naval Analyses, and Samuel Charap, at RAND, whose recent book on the events leading to the war in Ukraine, “Everyone Loses,” written with the Harvard political scientist Timothy Colton, lays out week by week the way in which American, European and Russian policy in 2012 and 2013 pushed Ukraine into a zero-sum choice, leading eventually to the collapse of the government and the dismemberment of the country. And there are others, some who prefer not to be named.

Despite some differences in politics, all are seeking a less chauvinistic approach to Russia policy. They are disgusted by American failures and want them to end. “I find the past 17 years of continuous warfare to be abnormal and abhorrent,” one of them wrote in an email. “It’s a real reflection on our policy community that they have placed their nation in this position.” In the harsh climate of Washington opinion, where an errant editorial could come back in the form of an angry senator reading it aloud at your confirmation hearing, they do what they can to push back. As a group, they have opposed sending weapons to Ukraine as an unnecessary escalation of the proxy war there — “We just lost a proxy war in Syria!” Kofman cried. “Why do we expect to do better in Ukraine?” — and are concerned about the current hype over a potential Russian incursion into the Baltics. Kofman compared American worries about a Russian invasion of the Baltics to equally far-fetched Russian worries about an American move into Belarus. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’ve never heard anyone in Washington say: ‘Wow, Belarus. That’s real prime real estate. We should get that.’ By the same token, the Russians are amazed that we think they want to take the Baltics. They just find it incredible. They’re going to go into the Baltics — which they have no use for — and take on the world’s pre-eminent military alliance? It’s crazy.”

There is also a strong bureaucratic incentive to exaggerate the threat. “You might say it’s provided a new imperative to parts of the Pentagon that used to be focused on counterinsurgency in unpleasant places like Helmand Province” in Afghanistan, one skeptical Russia hand said. “Sitting in the Baltic States or Poland or Germany is a lot more pleasant. It’s kayf,” he said, using a Russian word meaning, approximately, “bliss.”

Kofman believes that some form of conventional deterrence on NATO’s eastern flank is useful, but he worries that it can turn into what international relations theorists call a “security dilemma,” wherein the actions you take to increase your security cause your adversary to feel threatened, so that it takes steps to increase its security, forcing you in turn to take further steps to increase yours, and so on, until war. “You have to be very careful where you put forces,” Kofman said. “You can’t start stacking units 20 minutes from St. Petersburg. Keep in mind Russia is the world’s pre-eminent Eurasian land power. They can put more ground forces in Russia, because that’s where they happen to live, than you can put in the Baltics, because that’s not where you live. That’s not a tough competition.”

These young Russia hands find the current political and news attention to Russia deeply frustrating, even as its sources are no mystery to them.

“I’m a Democrat,” said one Russia hand who spoke on the condition of anonymity so that he could comment openly. “And Russia contributed to the defeat of Secretary Clinton and, frankly, to our current national tragedy. It’s hard for me not to think about that.

“But the Democrats see this as a political opening. And the conversation has moved into politics. They don’t want to know what’s actually happening or what we should actually do. They want to beat Trump with this Russia thing.”

Oliker, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, makes a similar point: “It used to be you could explain things to people at great length and with nuance, and they would say: ‘Oh, how interesting. You’ve explained it so well, and now I understand better where the Russians are coming from.’ Of course,” she added, “they wouldn’t do any of it, because Russia was secondary or tertiary, and no one cared about Russia.

‘The threshold for bad stuff happening in the Russia-U.S. relationship is pretty high. Like, nuclear Armageddon. That’s low probability. But high impact.’ “Now everyone cares about Russia, and there’s no nuance.”

Charap, at RAND, says that the postelection political climate has made it impossible to work with Russia even on issues that would benefit both sides. “When the U.S. and Russia work together, they can accomplish things no two other countries can. The only reason we were able to kill bin Laden is that the Northern Distribution Network was set up! McFaul did that. And he had to deal with a lot of people saying: ‘Why are we talking to these people? They’re never going to stick to their agreements.’
“Even I was told once: ‘We don’t want to be chasing Russia.’ What is this, dating?”

The difference between these Russia hands and most others is less their analysis of Russia than their analysis of America. According to Oliker, what the United States should be focusing on is “managing hegemonic decline.” America’s vast overseas commitments need to be scaled down bit by bit, in a slow and responsible process. The amount of money spent on the United States military should be brought in line with historical norms and recalibrated to the country’s actual defense needs. Diplomacy (cheap, effective), rather than military might (expensive, deadly, counterproductive), needs to become America’s primary means of interacting with the world. So far, Oliker points out, the Trump administration is largely doing the opposite.

As for Russia, it’s a threat that needs to be handled, not exaggerated. “We have to talk to them,” Oliker says. “If we don’t talk to them, things are going to get a lot worse. Yes, they hacked our election. Did they invade Ukraine? Yup, they did that. But we talk to countries that do bad things all the time. We have to talk to them, and as we’re talking to them, we have to understand that they don’t think they’re evil. I was testifying on the Hill not long ago, and I was saying, ‘The Russians think they’re acting defensively.’ And the senators were like, ‘But we’ve explained to them over and over that we’re not a threat.’ Like, are you serious?”

Zwack, the retired brigadier general who once waited for the Soviets to break through the Fulda Gap and now teaches at the National Defense University, agrees. “Short of a shooting war, you have to find bridges,” he says. “Some people say, ‘It’s not business as usual with the Russians.’ But it’s never business as usual with the Russians! They’re the one nation on the planet that, on a bad day — they’ll go away, too — but they can take us off that planet. “The crisis might not happen in the Baltics or over Syria. It could happen in the Sea of Okhotsk. You’ve got all kinds of Russian military stuff out there; we’ve got military stuff; the Japanese have stuff. It takes one incident — an accident that, to someone threat-inclined, looks like a deliberate action. If those commanders can’t get on the phone or on email to say, ‘This is what it is,’ if the crisis has to now be resolved in Washington or Moscow, it may be too late.”

Charap, at RAND, puts it most succinctly: “The threshold for bad stuff happening in the Russia-U.S. relationship is pretty high. Like, nuclear Armageddon. That’s low probability,” he says. “But high impact.”
With Trump, the Russia relationship has taken some unprecedented turns: No other president has come into office suspected of being subject to blackmail by the Kremlin. Nor has any other presidential campaign been investigated for colluding with Russia to undermine American elections. But in other ways, the Trump presidency fits perfectly the pattern identified by the longtime Russia hand and Georgetown professor Angela Stent: an initial attempt to mend relations with Russia, followed by a plunge into a deeper crisis.

For the past year, the administration’s top Russia hand has been a British-born, Harvard-educated historian and policy analyst named Fiona Hill. A longtime fellow at the Brookings Institution, of which Strobe Talbott became president after the end of the Clinton administration, Hill is the author of “Mr. Putin,” a probing and not entirely unsympathetic biography of the Russian president. In that book, Hill and her co-author, Clifford Gaddy, advocate what another historian has called “strategic empathy,” trying to see the situation from the perspective of your adversary — in this case, Putin. This is the sort of move that more hawkish Russia hands like Fried have long counseled against. But it is unclear how much influence Hill has had on current policy. One report in The Washington Post indicated that the president at one point mistook her for administrative staff and yelled at her; another report in the same paper described her as heading up the recent American expulsion of Russian diplomatic personnel in response to the nerve-agent poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England.

There isn’t, in any case, much room to maneuver. Fried reached retirement age and left the State Department a few weeks into the Trump administration; Nuland, not yet of retirement age, stepped down the day before Trump’s inauguration. “To show up for work on Inauguration Day and have to do a 180 on U.S. policy toward NATO, Russia, Germany, Brexit — I just couldn’t do it,” she said. But their legacy lives on. Over the summer, and partly in response to the investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, Congress voted overwhelmingly to strip the president of his authority to release Russia from Fried’s and Nuland’s sanctions. Only Congress can now end the sanctions. In the words of one Russia hand, the congressional bill makes the United States-Russia confrontation “structural.” “The president is like a captain holding a wheel that isn’t attached to anything,” said the Russia hand.

In early March, I met to talk about Russia policy with a senior official in the current administration, who was not authorized to speak to the press and thus asked not to be identified. Nastya Rybka, the Instagramming Belarusian escort, had just been arrested in Thailand, but to my chagrin the official hadn’t even heard of her; instead, the official was focused on a speech Putin had just delivered in which he announced that Russia had supermissiles that could elude American defenses. “He is putting us on notice that we are not listening to him,” the official said of Putin and cautioned that we were at an inflection point in American relations with Russia. “We can’t just have half-cocked sanctions legislation. We can’t go around sanctioning everybody without thinking through the implications.
“We’re in a period where the Russians’ threat perception is causing them to think that they need to take pre-emptive, preventive, very aggressive action to get us to back off, or to make us incapable of having a concerted effort to be able to push back,” the official went on. “And if we don’t get our act together and try to tackle that, we’re not going to be able to change the trajectory of our relationship.” The word “trajectory” had a particularly resonant ring in the wake of Putin’s missile video.

Our time was over, and I walked back out onto the streets of the capital. A strong nor’easter had knocked out power and grounded flights all along the Eastern Seaboard. Schools, many businesses and parts of the federal government were shut down; the capital looked deserted. I wasn’t sure what to make of my meeting with the administration official. That the official was deeply knowledgeable and highly competent was without any doubt. But it was hard not to feel that in terms of the United States-Russia relationship, it was too little, too late. The official stressed to me that the decision to join the administration came out of wanting to head off a crisis: “When your house is on fire, you go put it out.” But this was now a fire that was going to burn for a very long time. In the Russia-hands community, some who had once been doves had become hawks, and those who had been hawks all along felt vindicated. The small contingent of dissidents was keeping a low profile. I asked one of them if he felt lonely. “I do feel lonely,” he said. “But I am not alone. It’s just that we have to speak more quietly.”

One of the first Russia hands trained by the United States government back in the 1920s was George Kennan. The government paid for his Russian lessons in Berlin, then posted him to Riga, the capital of newly independent Latvia, where he mixed with Russian émigrés and studied economic reports from the Soviet Union. When diplomatic relations were finally established between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s, he helped set up the embassy in Moscow, and in the postwar era he was among the first to articulate clearly the nature of the Soviet threat. But he was also concerned that his home country not freak out. “Much depends,” he cautioned in his famous “long telegram” from 1946, “on health and vigor of our own society.”

That society now looks sick. The absence of nuance on the Russia question — the embrace of Russia as America’s new-old supervillain — is probably best understood as a symptom of that sickness. And even as both parties gnash their teeth over Russia, politicians and experts alike seem to be in denial about mistakes made in the past and the lessons to be learned from them. Many foreign-policy hands are eager to return to the Obama-era status quo, as if American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War had, until the evening of Nov. 8, 2016, been doing just fine. “I would give anything to have that world back,” said a Russia hand who has been critical of the old interventionist paradigm. But chances are, that world will come back soon enough. Wasn’t the idea, in the end, to change it?
Keith Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia University and is the author of the forthcoming novel “A Terrible Country.” This is his first article for the magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 2018, on Page MM44 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Quiet Americans.

US and Russian Military Leaders Are Meeting Again, Breaking a Long and Dangerous Drought

03/19/2017

Over three years had passed without direct senior-level contact between the world’s preeminent nuclear powers.

The military leaders of the world’s most lethal nuclear-tipped states met in February, the first such meeting in three years. The two generals got together again earlier this month, once more in relative obscurity that belied their meetings’ tremendous importance.

Long projected, but politically and geographically difficult to finalize, the Feb. 16 meeting was a personal first for Gen. Joseph Dunford and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, respectively the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Russia’s chief of the General Staff. They met in Baku, Azerbaijan, and frankly but cordially discussed the overall diminished state of U.S. and Russian military relations, the need for better communications between key leaders, and ways to deconflict military activities that could inadvertently put both countries at risk.

Then, — remarkably, considering the overall difficult state of U.S. and Russian relations — Dunford and Gerasimov met again on March 7. This time, their two days of talks were hosted by the Chief of the Turkish General Staff, Gen. Hulusi Akar, in scenic Antalya. Serious discussions ensued in a conducive environment where the three senior generals also shared meals together. Their positions reflected the varied perspectives and hence different strategies their states pursued with a contentious array of regional allies, proxies, and adversaries that placed their forces in ever-closer, increasingly dangerous proximity in northern Syria, near the cities of Manbij and al Bab. This array includes Russians backing the Syrian government, the U.S. backing the Syrian Democratic Force comprising Arabs and Kurds, and Turks supporting Assad regime opposition while combating Kurdish fighters. All recognize the need to destroy ISIS and capture its de facto capital in Raqqa.

These important meetings occurred against the backdrop of a difficult and fractious U.S. political transition of power, made even thornier by Moscow’s disruptive cyber tampering with the recent U.S. presidential campaign, and a Russian resurgence beset by challenges internally and abroad.

Much else had changed since January 2014, when General Gerasimov and Gen. Martin Dempsey, then the JCS chair, met in Brussels to sign the now-canceled annual “Work Plan” of exchanges and exercises between the two militaries. As the senior U.S. military attache in Moscow at the time, I witnessed the entire meeting. While this encounter was also cordial, it reflected the steady post-“Reset” decline in relations that was occurring between our countries. The discussion addressed the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, as well as concerns about Afghanistan, Central Asia, Syria, missile defense, and the spread of Islamist extremist terror, all issues still of contemporary concern for both our nations. Additionally, both military leaders agreed for the need to continue military-to-military exchanges at different levels, an effort that understandably died in February 2014 after the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime in Ukraine collapsed, precipitating Russia’s stealth invasion and illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and non-attributed operations supporting proxies in eastern Ukraine. Since then, the two militaries have barely communicated, mostly to deconflict air operations in and around Syria. Just a few terse phone calls were exchanged by the senior generals during these long three years. This lack of contact, less even than during the height of the Cold War, is dangerous to both nations vulnerable to a crisis at the speed of cyber.

Since Dempsey and Gerasimov last met in early 2014, the Russian military has evolved both materially and doctrinally, despite a major international sanctions regime, severe ruble inflation, and fallen oil prices emptying Russia’s coffers. The Russians have conducted three distinctly different military operations that have increased their military capability and its out-of-area presence while upping its overall stature in Russian society. Whether the initially surreptitious, almost bloodless invasion of “little green men” and illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, its non-attributed insertion of main force units into Eastern Ukraine and its bold, full blown intervention of high-level, strategically capable conventional assets into Syria, it is evident that President Vladimir Putin sees his improving military as an increasingly reliable policy tool for both coercion and defense. Its relative success the past three years has also been popular in Russia and reinforces the regime’s stature domestically.

The consequential period framed by these operations also reveal the vulnerability of the increasingly fragile post-Cold War order. Russian military actions — both conventional and difficult-to-attribute yet aggressive hybrid “gray zone” activities —have stretched and violated the norms of international law, as well as stressing stability-focused organizations such as the UN, EU, OSCE and NATO. Several European governments, beset by migration challenges and skillfully wielded, societally-corrosive Russian disinformation are adopting increasingly illiberal positions, while Russia declares the rise of a “post-West world order.”

This was the setting within which these powerful military leaders recently met in Baku and Antalya after three years of no direct contact. It is imperative that they continue, along with senior U.S. and Russian defense officials and key regional commanders, to find venues to frankly exchange views and perspectives, de-conflict actions and incidents, and directly relay, unfiltered, what they are thinking and doing. Relationships matter, especially during times of tension and serious institutional distrust.

Peter Zwack, who recently retired from the U.S. Army as a brigadier general, is the Senior Russia-Eurasia Fellow at the National Defense University’s Institute of National Security Studies. From 2012 to 2014, he was the U.S. senior U.S. defense attache to Russia. These are his personal views.

Originally Published: Defense One, Sunday, March 19, 2017 – 21:30

NYT

New York Times Quote

01/11/2017

Brig. Gen. Peter Zwack, a retired Army officer who was the American military attaché in Moscow at the time of the visit, said Mr. Flynn was not blind to the pitfalls of forging closer ties to Russia. He saw areas of mutual interest, as did many others in the United States at the time, but was always firm in advancing the American position in areas where there was disagreement, General Zwack said.

“There was nothing kumbaya about these talks at all,” he said. “It was a question of finding common ground on this big, complex, fractious and increasingly dangerous planet.”

——— Mark Mazzetti New York Times 10/10/2017

Originally Published: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/trumps-national-security-pick-sees-ally-in-fight-against-islamists-russia.html

Charting a Course: Strategic Choices for a New Administration

12/12/2016

Chapter 11 | Russia

By Peter B. Zwack, From Charting a Course / Published Dec. 12, 2016

U.S. and Western relations with Russia continue to deteriorate as Russia increasingly reasserts itself on the global stage. Driven by a worldview based on existential threats—real, perceived, and contrived—Russia, as a vast 11–time zone Eurasian nation with major demographic and economic challenges, has multiple security dilemmas both internally and along its vulnerable periphery that include uncertain borders to its south and far east. Exhibiting a reactive xenophobia curried from a long history of destructive war and invasion along most of its borders, the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s peaceful enlargement, and perceived Western slights, Russia increasingly threatens or lashes outward with its much improved but still flawed military. Time is not on Russia’s side, however, as it has entered into a debilitating status quo that includes unnecessary confrontation with the West, multiple unresolved military commitments, and a sanctions-strained economy. In a dual-track approach, the U.S. and its allies must deter Russian aggression while simultaneously rebuilding atrophied conduits between key U.S. and Russian political and operational military leaders to avert incidents or accidents that could lead to potential brinksmanship.

In recent years Russia has dramatically reasserted itself on the global stage, drawing attention to a complex and increasingly tense relationship with the United States that has never been fully resolved. Despite the complexities, U.S. national security interests in the region are clear. The United States must deter Russia from further aggression in Eastern Europe, bolster the security of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Allies and partners, reconstitute direct conduits for frank dialogue and deconfliction while aggressively countering Russian disinformation campaigns, and reestablish and reinvigorate languishing arms control regimes. These interests are directly linked to the turbulent course Russia has charted as it struggles to break out of a status quo that it views as debilitating and threatening. As this chapter explores, the resulting security dilemmas that have emerged are grounded in Russia’s historic perception of what it considers to be an existential threat, and in the growing number of both real and perceived vulnerabilities facing the Russian state.

In 2014 Russia set into motion a turbulent course with its illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea that by year’s end left it isolated, hemorrhaging resources, and under a heavy international sanctions regime. The euphoria from the Sochi Olympics and the invasion of Crimea rapidly dissipated as Russian proxy separatists became bogged down in an increasingly bloody conflict within eastern Ukraine, culminating with Air Malaysia MH-17 being shot down by a Russian-provided Buk missile.1 In the interim Russia had been thrown out of the prestigious Group of Eight and was suffering from increased sanctions by the European Union (EU) and the United States. Additionally, NATO moved to reassert its Article 5 mission. The EU coalesced behind a strong sanctions regime, despite the threat of Russian disruption of energy supplies. Ukrainians found a sense of national purpose and patriotism. Oil prices, from which Russia derives the bulk of its revenue, collapsed while the ruble lost over 50 percent of its value.2

For these reasons, the Putin regime, a pseudo-democratic autocratic kleptocracy, was forced to confront the prospect that its domestic legitimacy was beginning to erode from 2014 to mid 2015. Despite a purported 85 percent approval rating for President Vladimir Putin, polls did not necessarily translate to full public approval of the Russian regime and its actions abroad, or even internally. The regime no doubt remembered the large and primarily middle-class “Bolotnaya” protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg during the winter of 2011–2012.3 Despite the strident disinformation that dominated Russian airwaves, Russia simmered internally with disparaging international news and difficult economic conditions that stressed its generally loyal population. Even this patriotic majority became troubled by stories of egregious corruption and by disconcerting information about Russian soldiers and intelligence operatives being captured or killed in eastern Ukraine.4

During much of 2015 Russia remained isolated internationally. The sanctions continued to bite and NATO continued to regain its confidence and strategic balance, taking measures to increase shared spending while reasserting its presence in and around those areas that felt threatened by an increasingly confrontational Russia. Paradoxically, Russia did manage to remain active within international organizations, notably the United Nations (UN), the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa association of nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and the Eurasian Economic Union. Russia also was instrumental as a member of the P5+1 consortium (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) that negotiated the Iran nuclear deal.5 Perhaps most important was Russia’s deepening but utterly transactional “strategic partnership” with China. Despite a flawed natural gas deal, this gave both nations the opportunity to focus their attention and efforts toward different fronts and not against each other.6

In late October 2015 Russia undertook a gamble to break out of its perceived containment by aggressively asserting itself in the Middle East as both a diplomatic and military actor. With its sharp-elbowed military intervention in Syria, Putin and his regime, for the first time since 1979 in Afghanistan, successfully reasserted Russia’s military presence beyond the confines of the Former Soviet Union (FSU), establishing Russia as once again a key actor in the Middle East.7 By restoring the near-term viability of the Bashar al-Asad regime and securing bases at Tartus and Latakia, Russia is showing the region, the world, and its own citizens that it remains a powerful nation on the world stage.8 The widely reported “shock and awe” demonstration of military firepower using heavy bombers and long-range cruise missiles from the Caspian Flotilla accentuated this narrative.9 This phenomena may in part explain the sortie of Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, and flotilla from its Northern Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean.10

In so doing, Russia has partially broken out of the debilitating status quo of late 2014–2015. The Russian population, suffering the effects of sanctions and collapsing oil prices, responded positively to Putin’s decisiveness and verve through the eastern Ukrainian and Syrian interventions. The destruction of Russia’s civilian Metrojet by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) entities and the Turkish downing of a Russian warplane sent tremors into Russia, however, ending the easy phase of intervention and signaling that Russia may face a long, hard slog. Despite the apparent success in Syria, this may be the new status quo for Putin’s Russia. Russia is now deeply and violently enmeshed in an open-ended Syrian civil and sectarian war that has a long way to go before any cessation of hostilities. It is also internationally tarred by its indiscriminate bombing of Aleppo that brutally breached any mainstream adherence to international laws of war. Furthermore, Russia has the added burden of being stuck with a violent, expensive, and increasingly frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian coffers dwindle, food imports are reduced, and despite slight increases oil prices remain low with the ruble inflated. These external and domestic factors will continue to put increasing pressure on Russia and Putin. What will Russia do next to break out of the status quo? While it is difficult to predict Russian actions, it is clear Russia will be looking for every way to keep “the narrative”—both internationally and domestically—assertive, positive, and forward moving.

The single main event that undermined the 2009 political “reset” between the United States and Russia and set off Russia’s strategically defensive, tactically preemptive military actions of early 2014 was the February ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine.11 For many observers, it is difficult to comprehend how inclusion into a peaceful economic union could set off a violent reaction and invasion by a dominant neighbor. Called a Western-backed coup by the Russian disinformation machine, this vociferous and dogged expression of majority Ukrainians hit at the core of the Putin regime’s existential fear of internal regime change.12 In fact Russia exists in and in some ways is trapped by its historical worldview. It lives in a world full of existential threats, real and perceived—and contrived.

Russia and Its Perception of Existential Threats

Russia is Eurasia. It touches or influences about 70 percent of the world where the United States has serious economic and security interests. Any discussion about Russia must first begin by recognizing the role geography and history have played in determining the Russian perspective. How does one rule a barely cultivatable, permafrost-heavy nation of 144 million people spread out over 11 time zones, where all trains depart on centralized Moscow time through lands mostly cut out of the hide of former nations and civilizations?13

In prior generations, ideological struggle was represented by the great “isms,” namely capitalism, communism, socialism, and fascism. These drove great power dynamics and conflict. Tomorrow’s conflicts will be resource-driven. Russia is a warehouse of yet untapped natural resources and, as competition grows, will perceive its increasing vulnerability to energy and resource-dependent neighbors.14

Given these challenges, a Russian general staff planner conducting an objective strategic assessment out to 2050 would necessarily be highly concerned about the future of his nation. Foremost Russia has a looming demographic challenge. Whether the population increases, any growth will be marginal at best.15 A significant portion of Russia’s population, about 74 percent, lives in urban areas primarily west of the Ural Mountains where greater Asia becomes greater Europe.16 This gives the state a predominately Western feel even in Siberia and the Far East. The nature of the population is also changing, becoming increasingly ethnically Central Asian or from the Caucasus. Much of this population “supplement” will be Muslim, which has to be concerning to the Russian Orthodox Church that is enjoying a “renaissance” of faith and worship with up to 73 percent of the “Great Russian” population.17 The conflicts along Russia’s periphery and within the Middle East involving Sunni Islam threaten to intensify anti-Russian sentiment both externally and among Russia’s approximately 15 million predominantly Sunni Muslims.18 The dynamics of Chechnya, and the incipient Sunni insurgency in Dagestan, can only become more complicated and dangerous for Russia as surviving jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq eventually return home.

Russia’s petroleum-based economy must adapt as access to oil and natural gas becomes more challenging in the years ahead. With extraction increasingly difficult and costly in the high latitudes of the frozen but melting tundra, the economy will increasingly struggle with fewer barrels extracted at higher cost.19 This is a major catalyst driving Arctic development—an area of potential cooperation—and concomitant military basing to expand and secure its claims. These claims include the Lomonosov Ridge and access to natural resources along the widening Northern Sea Route.20 Additionally, much of the Russian population is unhealthy. This is exacerbated by high alcohol and tobacco use, plus the ecological blight that came with Soviet-era rust belt industrial development and poorly regulated nuclear reactor development and storage.21

A Short Geostrategic Survey Around Russia’s Periphery

The Far East and Asia

The Russian Far East is currently calm though geostrategic fault lines persist. One should not forget that Russia is also an Asian power, albeit on a scale smaller than in the West. Though armed with plenty of deterrent capability, particularly within its Rocket Forces and Pacific Fleet, Russia is playing pure defense and has no territorial ambitions in the east. The heart of its defensive posture is built around a capable antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) posture that the Chinese are working to adopt.22 Russia’s principal active Asian territorial issue beyond the dormant Chinese border remains the Kurile Island dispute with Japan. Far from being resolved, the dispute has lingered for over 70 years after the southern four islands were occupied by the Soviet Union.23 Despite resettlement efforts by the Russian regime, regional demographics are overwhelmingly in China’s favor. While a scant seven million Great Russians live between Siberian Irkutsk on Lake Baikal to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean, longitudinally there live several hundred million Chinese, including a large minority living and trading on Russia’s side of the border.24 The border dispute along the Ussuri River that culminated in bloody clashes between the Soviet Union and China in 1969 was pragmatically resolved in 2004.25 Additionally, trade and military contact have increased, including the signing of a natural gas deal.26 With Russia embroiled in eastern Ukraine and Syria and China increasingly committed to exerting influence and control within the Spratley and Senkaku islands, these arrangements relaxed tensions over their 2,700-mile land border.27

Looking long term, however, one could see a natural tension reoccuring along this resource-rich zone, especially on the Russian side. Russia’s Far East and Eastern Siberia are rich in natural resources beyond oil and gas that resource-starved China could covet. For years Russian locals along the border have complained about illegal Chinese logging activity along their remote border regions.28 Notably a huge chunk of the Russian Far East, including those lands that encompass Vladivostok east of the Amur River, was annexed by Imperial Russia from the weak Qing Dynasty in the mid-1800s and formalized by the Treaties of Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860)—a fact that has not been forgotten by Chinese historians.29 While the Russians and Chinese are both practicing prudent foreign policy regarding one another, they are not natural friends or allies, with a history, culture, religion, and ethnicity that are different from one another.

Central Asia

In Central Asia Russia sees the five independent FSU nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan within its “privileged sphere of influence” and will take firm action to ensure that no excessive foreign military presence takes root in the region.30 Whatever its post-Soviet imperial desires, Russia does not have the military means to retake and occupy these diverse states. Therefore, it has taken measures to maintain a strong and influential regional suzerainty among them. There is little doubt that Russia has military contingency plans to prop up Central Asia’s existing regimes and is prepared to counter a wide range of scenarios, including extremist Islamists or so-called color revolutions, that might lead toward some form of local liberal democracy. This is a major reason that the Russian-controlled CSTO exists, whose members include Kazakhstan, Krygyzstan, and Tajikistan (Uzbekistan withdrew in 2012) as well as Belarus and Armenia.31 While likely impossible today due to an extreme trust deficit, it could be far-sighted to offer exchanging modest observer missions among Russia-controlled CSTO, Chinese-led SCO, and U.S.-NATO.

The dynamics of Central Asia have evolved since the Soviet Union’s breakup in 1991. In the 1990s, with Russian power and influence diminished, major Western initiatives were undertaken economically, most notably in 1994 through accession into NATO’s Partnership for Peace. These relationships, with Russian acquiescence, were leveraged to support the swift U.S.-allied invasion of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after 9/11.32 The Russians were generally uncomfortable with U.S. activity and airbases in Central Asia (Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan and Manas in Kyrgyzstan); however, their initial support of the war on terror and concern about militant Sunni Islam triumphing in Afghanistan superseded those worries, allowing (at considerable financial benefit) the establishment of the Northern Distribution Network in 2008. The network brought substantial nonlethal materiel and personnel through Russia and Central Asia into Afghanistan.33 This logistics arrangement, which included the brief establishment of a Russian-operated NATO logistics hub at Ulyanovsk in 2012, gradually eroded as relations degenerated between NATO and Russia.34 For example, under major Russian pressure, Kyrgyzstan forced the United States to close its logistics base at Manas in 2013.35 The paradox is that Russia does not want the United States and its allies to depart Afghanistan, fearing the possibility that the fragile Afghan government would ultimately implode and releasing a flood of radical Sunni Islam, drugs, crime, and illegal migration into its buffer zone of regional partners. Russia dreads the destabilizing effect this might have, potentially spreading into an already demographically and ethnically vulnerable southern Russia.36

The Caucasus

This complex, fractious region of both Russia and the FSU looms as dynamic and contentious in the years ahead. An ethnic, religious, and migratory crossroads for centuries, the Caucasus bifurcates both the Black and Caspian seas and presents significant current and future security challenges for Russia. The issues are not only geostrategic and economic, but also ethnic, linguistic, and religious.

The clumsy Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 served notice to the region and the world that Russia would remain engaged in the FSU and not tolerate what it perceived to be discrimination against ethnic Russians living outside Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union. South Ossetia and Abkhazia, wrested into autonomous “statelets” by force of arms, remain a frozen conflict between Russia and Georgia.37 The Russian 102nd Military Base garrison in Armenia, consisting of about 3,000 troops, remains the guarantor of Christian Armenia that borders hostile Azerbaijian.38 Smarting and revanchist over their 1990’s losses in still simmering Nagorno-Karabagh, Azerbaijan in April 2016 launched major incursions using late model Russian-provided weapons that shook Armenian trust in Moscow. Meanwhile, neighboring Turkey still refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide.39

The gravest danger to Russia is within the Russian Caucasus. Mountainous Chechnya, site of two horrific campaigns commencing in 1995 and 1999, remains under Russia’s thumb under the guise of the Russian-enabled President Ramzan Kadyrov, who staunchly supports most of Putin’s actions, including sending Chechen fighters into the Donbass in 2014.40 This support could be severely challenged, however, when the several thousand Chechen jihadists in Syria return to fight Russia in Chechnya and elsewhere.41 In adjacent Dagestan, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has been fighting a low-boil insurgency for years. It is likely this insurgency will increase in intensity as fighters return home and radical Wahhabist Islam spreads in the overall region.42 There is significant concern that this radical cancer could “metastasize” from the Caucasus and Central Asia into Southern Russia, where in contrast to Russia’s overall demographic stagnation, the Muslim population is rapidly growing via high birthrates and illegal migration.43 Additionally these concerns have been stoked by several pointed ISIL statements branding Russia as an enemy.44 This is a dangerous long-term threat to Russia and another reason Russian forces have been ordered into Syria to fight Islamic extremists while supporting an old ally.45

The Middle East

The Russian intervention in late September 2015 on behalf of Bashar al-Asad’s Baathist regime in Syria signaled a major geostrategic shift in Russia’s military activity since the end of the Cold War. This was a bold, high-risk endeavor that could leave Russia enmeshed in a hornet’s nest of competing regional factions and interests that has taken on a Sunni-Shiite sectarian flavor involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.46 Up until then, direct Russian military action had been confined to within territorial Russia, notably in Chechnya and Dagestan, and then within states of the FSU.

Not since the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan during Christmas 1979 has Russia moved so aggressively “out of area.”47 For Russia watchers, this intervention should not have been a surprise. As one of his unstated “Red Lines,” similar to Donets and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine from summer 2014, President Putin repeatedly signaled Russia’s full support for the Syrian Baathist regime, an unbroken Soviet-Russian-Syrian relationship that dates back continuously since 1956.48 Preservation of the Syrian regime was a major reason in 2013 that Russia acceded to assisting the removal of the bulk of Syria’s chemical munitions that precluded a U.S.-led coalition bombing of Syrian regime installations and bases.49 With Asad’s forces significantly weakening in late summer 2015, the Russians went through a “go and no/go” intervention criteria and risk assessment before launching their operation in late September with the intent to save the Syrian regime and batter the Islamic rebels most threatening to its immediate viability.50 It should be no surprise, therefore, that the Russians first went after anti-regime rebels, the so-called moderates, most lethal to the Asad regime. While the Russians loathed ISIL, their first priority in Syria was to stabilize the Asad regime and consolidate longstanding interests in Syria such as the Tartus Naval Base, their only functioning port facility outside of the FSU.51 Their key equity is the perpetuation of a stable and allied Syrian regime and regional platform, and not necessarily over time the persona of Asad.

Putin also wanted to take the fight against militant Sunni Islam beyond Russian borders. Only time will tell if this preemptive strategy will prevent attacks both against and within the Russian homeland by its large Sunni minority.52 Woven into this entire situation is a supporting narrative that asserts Russia’s role as a serious global player beyond the confines of the FSU, while simultaneously promoting a narrative of U.S. and Western weakness.53

The Russian intervention in Syria also created the conditions to test and showcase the resurgence of Russian military prowess, capability, and systems. These include the swift, opportunistic deployment into Syria of the lethal long-range S-400 air defense system with its formidable A2/AD capability in the stunned aftermath of the Turkish downing of a SU-24 bomber in November 2014. This deployment, along with recently inserted S-300s, has changed the regional airpower equation.54 On top of the rapid deployment of air and ground assets into Syria in late September 2015, coupled with air- and naval-launched Kalibr precision missile strikes and bombing by strategic bomber assets, this was definitely a regional, domestic, and international demonstration and testing of firepower reminiscent of the 1936 Spanish Civil War. It signaled to the world that the Russian military was back.55 Essentially a laboratory for its evolving tactics, techniques, and procedures across a wide spectrum of conventional warfare and a training ground for a new generation of military leaders, Syria, and more subtly Eastern Ukraine, has reaped numerous near-term benefits for the Russian military. Russian arms exporters are also benefiting from the successful demonstration of their leading-edge systems.56

The West

Any discussion about the West must begin with the Russian psychosis toward what it perceives as a liberal democratic and economic system of governance and finance that is totally at odds with, and perceived to be an existential threat to, the Russian state. NATO and the EU are seen as the hard-power and soft-power agents that threaten Putin’s regime. With a false narrative designed to present and pump up external threats and reinforce Russian self-reliance and internal controls, the regime sees Russia in a permanent state of competition and confrontation with the West. As events have shown since Georgia in 2008, Russia will use force, overt or nonattributed, if it feels its direct interests are threatened, especially within the FSU. Russia does not want to go to war with NATO or the United States, but certainly feels threatened by them, and has singled out the Alliance as its principal adversary.57 As such it prepares its military and is mobilizing its societal base for what some would say is inevitable war.58

Russia’s obsession with so-called color revolutions and regime change reveals Putin’s deep insecurity concerning the legitimacy of his regime within the eyes of Russia’s own domestic population.59 Secure nations, comfortable with their governance and secession processes, do not obsess and talk about regime change. Since Muammar Qadhafi’s fall in 2011 in Libya, and the large-scale and apparently frightening Bolotnaya protests in Moscow in 2011–2012, the Russian media and official pronouncements have sounded increasingly strident.60 In spring 2014 a main theme at the Moscow Security Conference, and again in 2015 and 2016, was the perceived threat to Russia of Western-backed color revolutions. Some Russian variation of President Yanukovych’s ignominious February 2014 fall from power in Ukraine is likely what “keeps Putin up at night.”

Anyone in Russia over 45 years old remembers the fall of Communism, when a restive Soviet population induced by deteriorating economic conditions, a discredited ideology, and the unpopular conflict in Afghanistan pressed Soviet leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to take bold reform measures. Those measures unintentionally led to the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and to a new Russia—shorn of 14 of its republics comprising one-third of its landmass and half its population including 25 million ethnic Russians. This remarkable event was, and still is, a bitter pill for many Russians. The difficult and mismanaged economic reforms in the 1990s saw the rise of the first wave of oligarchs. Western political chortling following victory in the Cold War, and poorly handled insurgencies and conflicts in Chechnya and the Russian “near abroad,” helped pave the way for a strong no-nonsense leader when Putin became President of Russia in 2000.

From the Western perspective, NATO enlargement focused on the incorporation of newly sovereign states into a democratic, market-based system with only defensive intentions. The Alliance worked hard to bring Russia into its fold as a partner in the 1990s, resulting in the NATO-Russia Founding Act and NATO-Russia Council.61 Both Russia and the United States signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons.62 Russian paratroopers were even integrated into NATO operations in Bosnia.63This was a challenging, difficult process that ended with the NATO bombing of Belgrade and intervention to stop genocide in Kosovo in 1999.64 Even moderate Russians were deeply upset by the U.S.-NATO intervention despite the righteousness of Western actions to prevent a Kosovar Albanian genocide. This was the real break, and the beginning of the downward spiral of post–Cold War NATO-Russia relations.

From a Russian perspective, the problems concerning NATO’s enlargement began after Germany’s reunification. While no official document exists, the Russian narrative contends that verbal promises were made at high levels that NATO would not expand to the east.65 Most Russians, stoked by their state-controlled press, genuinely believe this. By 1990, reunited Germany was in NATO, and in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic entered the Alliance.66 Throughout the process, the Russians were consulted, and to any informed observer, the militaries joining the Alliance were not a conventional threat to Russia. In 2004 a second major tranche joined the Alliance. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were invited into the Alliance along with Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.67 It has long been the policy of NATO to dictate that no external state should interfere with the accession process. Russia’s direct interference in this process by issuing incendiary statements over Montenegro’s recent invitation to join NATO further damaged the NATO-Russia relationship.68

While a natural progression from the Western perspective, this advance was seen by the Russians ominously through a prism steeped in the historiography of contemporary Western threats. In 1989 the Warsaw Pact extended deep into central Europe. While providing a menacing offensive platform for huge Soviet and satellite country armies, xenophobic Soviets also saw the borders as a major buffer separating the Soviet Union from the West, which in the lifetime of senior Russian and FSU citizens perpetuated a war of annihilation by Nazi Germany that led to the deaths of a staggering 20–26 million Soviets, many of whom were civilians. The 1989 East-West German border was 880 miles from Leningrad and surrounded West Berlin 800 miles away. Today the distance from NATO’s Estonian-Russian border at Narva to St. Petersburg is only 85 miles.

A deep suspicion toward EU soft power exists as well. It was, after all, Russia’s response to the EU’s offer of Association to Ukraine in late 2013 that began the slide into today’s difficult confrontation.69 Russia’s reaction following Yanukovych’s ouster—committing special forces to seize Crimea and backing proxy forces in eastern Ukraine—shed light on evolving Russian geostrategic thinking, especially around its periphery. The idea that color revolutions spurred by NATO/EU enlargement are the greatest existential threat to Russia has likely played a major role in all Russian interventions since.70 In each, Russia took both overt and covert military action to achieve its objectives, which should give policymakers and planners insight into how Russia might preemptively react over future events involving FSU nations Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Transnistria, Ukraine, and, most dangerously, NATO’s Baltic allies. Watching what transpires in Uzbekistan, after the elderly President Islam Karimov’s recent death, will be instructive.

Much has been written about the dramatic events that transpired between Russia and Ukraine after the fall of its pro-Russian regime in 2014. While the Russians appeared successful with their masked invasion and annexation of Crimea, follow-on efforts to secure large tracts of eastern Ukraine on behalf of its large ethnic Russian population bogged down after initial successes.71 Efforts to use variations of hybrid, nonlinear warfare, seemingly so effective in Crimea, failed to create the conditions to seize Kharkiv, Mariopol, and Odessa. The downing of Air Malaysia MH-17 in July 2014 signaled a nadir for Russian efforts in eastern Ukraine.72

From 2014 through 2016, four new strategic factors emerged and continue to influence the conflict today:

Catalyzed by aggressive Russian actions, a sense of mainstream Ukrainian patriotism beyond former right-wing splinter nationalism coalesced among the bulk of the Ukrainian population and especially with Ukrainian elites.73 Over 32 million Ukrainians, while not necessarily anti-Russian, were now proudly pro-Ukrainian. They would fight. This was a significant strategic miscalculation by Russia.
The EU managed to implement effective, sustained sanctions that have remained in place despite Russian countermeasures and even beyond Brexit, adding pressure on both the Russian economy and public well-being.74
NATO sharpened its strategic Article 5 focus after withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was another strategic development Russia had not counted on.
Russia had not anticipated the simultaneous fall in oil prices and the inflation of the ruble. These, combined with EU sanctions, placed great stress on the Russian economy.75

Despite the apparent success in Syria and elsewhere, these four strategic developments will continue to extract a high cost in exchange for limited gains.

The Russian Military

The Russian military, though much improved as an overall fighting force, is not the juggernaut it is sometimes made out to be. With a defense budget only one-ninth of the U.S. budget, and few true allies, Russian leaders and planners must think carefully before employing the military.76 Therefore, the aggressive intervention into Syria was of major significance.

Russia’s current demographic challenges make it difficult to sustain large standing field forces.77 Short of a mobilization, it is hard-pressed to put a million active-duty personnel under arms. Russia’s robust security services, even before factoring in the omnipresent Federal Security Service, include roughly a quarter-million Ministry of Internal Affairs troops, which compete in the same Russian personnel pool as the regular armed forces. The role of the ministry will likely further change with the announcement of a new “national guard” that could be employed internally or beyond Russia’s borders.78 While major strides have been made under its “New Look” initiative in reducing its bloated structure and streamlining the military into a more lethal and deployable force as displayed in Syria, major inconsistencies remain.79 Despite its major and partially successful effort to create a contract (volunteer) force, the expense as well as social challenges have slowed progress.80 The Russian military, especially the Land Forces, still consist of over 30 percent conscripts who are called up in annual drafts for a service term of 1 year. This was reduced from 18 months in 2008.81 Conscription is generally unpopular, though the popularity of the Russian military has grown in recent years. However, for career leaders and trainers, the challenges of annually bringing in and assimilating several hundred thousand new 1-year recruits into formed units is daunting.82 Dedovshina (hazing) of recruits still occurs, and Russian decisionmakers have to think long and hard before deploying conscript-heavy ground units that are connected to social media into complicated, sensitive, and potentially divisive arenas such as eastern Ukraine, the Baltics, or even Syria.83

Russia’s standing nuclear forces (Strategic Rocket Forces, Strategic Aviation, and Navy) still command the crème of the Russian military personnel system. Additionally, elite forces such as the Main Intelligence Agency and FSB Spetsnaz, airborne forces, and Naval Landing Infantry, which do most of the hard “out of area” work, continue to improve their capabilities and are increasingly battle hardened across a broad spectrum and direct and indirect (hybrid) conflict in Crimea, Donets-Lugansk, and Syria. These forces have been heavily used in the past 2½ years and likely are in major need of rest and refit. Cracks have appeared in the facade of even elite elements, as revealed by their occasional capture and unpopular nonattribution in Russia.84

The Russians have stated that they do not want to go to war with the United States and NATO, as demonstrated in the recent rewrite of their Strategic Doctrine85 and recently announced National Security Strategy.86 However, they are preparing for conflict against the West. The Russians are well aware of their overall deficiencies and lack of allies.87 Therefore, any prospective action must invoke surprise and be fast, deep, precise and multispectral. While there are those who wish for the geographic reknitting of the Soviet Union, most practical Russian military thinkers realize this is impossible. Instead the military is being rebuilt to maintain credible strategic nuclear retaliation, conventional area and maritime denial using precision munitions, and swift deployable forces that could, for example, overturn a looming color revolution within a failing former FSU capital or even conduct limited out-of-area operations in strategically important regions such as Syria. Without a significant mobilization, the Russian military, especially conscript-heavy ground forces, cannot hold large expanses of contested ground as would have been the case if it made an attempt at seizing Crimea’s Perekop Isthmus via Mariopol.88 An added factor to consider—an enormous tactical-to-strategic leap—is the emergent Soviet doctrine of using tactical nuclear weapons to “deescalate” a conflict.89 Finally, Russia still must contend with the challenges posed by extremely long and chronically difficult-to-defend borders with the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East. Unfortunately, due to its reactive behaviors based on obsolete threat perceptions, Russia views the Ukraine and Baltic border regions as tense—as reinforced by the recent deployment of SS-26 Iskander short-range ballistic missiles to Kaliningrad—even though these areas should be the quietest and most peaceful.90

Possible Worst-Case Scenarios

If Russia saw war as inevitable, much as Japan did before World War II, it would attempt to strike first and fast using maskirovka (deception) and disinformatsiya (disinformation) to mask its intent. War could be sparked by the fear of regime change, a bordering color revolution, some incendiary incident that rapidly moves to brinksmanship, or, worst case, a failed attempt to subvert the Baltic states protected by NATO Article 5. While preparing its population and the world with an intense media and disinformation campaign, Russian moves would also involve an initial cyber and electronic warfare onslaught to blind and deafen U.S. command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, as well as space and navigational capabilities. Kinetic strikes would follow to attack U.S. and allied capital ships and forward-based aviation with an opening barrage of precision munitions. The loss of these symbols of Western power and prestige would be followed by a declaration of Russian readiness to use nuclear weapons if the United States were to respond in kind.91 These approaches suggest a defensive mindset by a nation that understands it is globally outmanned and outgunned, except in the nuclear realm. In any initial phase of a conflict, Russia will use surprise and shock as a decisive force multiplier. For any major preplanned scenario, Russia will have to stage a discreet mobilization and call-up of reserves to buttress its standing forces.

Russia’s military buildup and modernization are hampered by the effects of ongoing sanctions and the overall weakened state of the Russian economy.92 This resulted in the announcement of a 5 percent reduction in the 2016 modernization budget.93 Relatedly, since the Cold War, the diplomatic ties holding together much of global arms development and proliferation have been unraveling. At an impasse over missile defense and increased Russian obsession about strategic U.S. global conventional strike capabilities, the possibility for a tactical-to-strategic nuclear exchange triggered by an accident or incident is now greater than during the Cold War.94 The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and Open Skies Agreement are increasingly questioned, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative is history, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty is suspended, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is scrapped.95 Furthermore, a longstanding agreement signed in 2000 between the United States and Russia for the mutual disposal of dangerous military plutonium stockpiles was recently canceled by Russia.96 Besides actively working to reduce nuclear arsenals and to moderate the building and testing of new destabilizing weapons, these treaty regimens (with their associated communities of diplomats, scientists, and bureaucrats that met nearly every working day) were confidence-building measures that reduced tensions and enhanced understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia. The same could be said for U.S. and Russian (diminished but still active) cooperative space programs.

Where is all this headed? The United States and Russia remain at odds both officially and in much of written and spoken media. Russia continues to work to divide Western allies and partners politically, domestically, and economically (principally through energy deliveries). Its disinformation machine, modulated directly by the Putin regime, is a good way to track the nature of the currently troubled relationship. Tangible lines of stress, confrontation, and even potential cooperation are well demarcated. While eastern Ukraine simmers in Donets and Lugansk, further seizing and holding larger tracts of Ukrainian territory would require a large-scale use of conscripts against an improved Ukrainian military that would extract high financial and domestic costs. Russia could emerge victorious against Ukraine but would then be forced to confront a large, seething fellow-Slavic population, broken economy, and a hostile global community. Greater Russian pressure on Ukraine will drive Western upgrades to the Ukrainian military, adding modern defensive weapons to Ukraine’s arsenal. Furthermore, Russia could expect added sanctions by an increasingly resolute West reinforced by the return of U.S. units and capabilities to Europe.

The Russians also know that if they try to destabilize the Baltic states with a variation of their hybrid Crimea operation, they will at some point face the invocation of NATO’s Article 5. The Baltic states could be overrun in 48 to 72 hours, but the results would be too unpredictable for even Putin’s regime to calculate. This would also open a NATO-enabled and expensive partisan ulcer on the Baltic periphery that Russia could ill afford to maintain for long. It would also shake the neutrality of Sweden and Finland.

An adventure in Transnistria would also bring more trouble than progress for Russia. Russia could easily subvert Moldova, but again, to what end? To support any such adventure, Russia would be forced to support with main force Russian units in an area bounded by NATO forces. And then there is an angry Turkey, a strategic nation and NATO Ally with a strong military. Even after its internal failed coup and warming relations with Russia, Turkey will always—due to difficult history, geography, and increasingly conservative Sunni religious orientation—present future challenges for Moscow.

The Russians are in a strategic bind. If they continue to use military force to change the status quo in the name of protecting ethnic Russian populations and maintaining unwilling buffer states, they will likely fail as a nation. Eastern Ukraine will limp along in an increasingly expensive, frozen status. Syria, which is becoming a public relations and legal disaster internationally, will continue to be challenging for Russia due to its unpredictability and volatility. Syria does, however, despite Russia’s brutal bombing campaign and failed diplomatic efforts, present a potential opportunity to build a real international effort to address the conflict. Without international cooperation leading to a sustained ceasefire, even the Russian people will eventually demand to bring troops home. As history has repeatedly proved, bad things happen to foreign militaries that remain fighting and indefinitely exposed within Middle Eastern civil and sectarian wars.

To navigate this complex relationship, the following recommendations might warrant consideration by U.S. policymakers:

Develop a dual-track policy regarding the Russian Federation. First, push back hard on transgressions against NATO Allies and partners, and breaches of international law. Second, rebuild direct, cogent conduits between key civilian and operational military leadership to increase understanding on issues, activities, and incidents that could reduce the enormous and increasingly dangerous trust deficit between our nuclear-tipped nations.
Support and reassure Allies and partners. Reinforce Europe militarily. Place credible defensive forces in eastern European countries that feel threatened by Russia. Work closely with framework nations such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Add a U.S.-flagged combat engineer company to each of the three NATO battalions in the Baltic states. Ensure forward-based ground units have a short-range air defense capability. Deter, remove, or mitigate any viable early stage offensive military option from the Russian strategic calculus.
Emphasize nuclear deterrence. Rebuild eroded U.S.-Russia arms control and confidence-building regimens. Patiently and transparently chisel away at missile defense concerns.
Improve strategic messaging. Aggressively counter Russian narratives seeking to justify actions or divide Western opinion in a more responsive and coordinated manner. Agree to exchange observers for major exercises.
Work with European allies toward agreement on ways to provide defensive armaments to threatened partner states. In tandem with such, establish direct conduits for messaging to Russia to clearly explain why.
Continue to communicate to Russian officials why a strong NATO is important for Russia as well. Make clear in every venue that Russian attempts to erode and undermine peaceful Western stability-focused institutions, such as the EU or NATO, will only end badly for a fundamentally vulnerable Russia. Russia should not want an unstable, anxious, and possibly reactionary West as a result.
Enhance full-spectrum cyber capabilities for deterrence. Emphasize to other cyber nations that the United States will aggressively respond with the full range of possible options to proven state-sponsored cyber attacks. Collectively avoid at all costs opening a state-sponsored cyber “Pandora’s Box” while being ready for a worst-case scenario.
Maintain sanctions and political isolation in coordination with the EU until Russian actions deescalate in both Ukraine and Syria.
Build political offramps to ensure that countries do not fall into strategic brinksmanship.
Coordinate U.S. national and theater policy and activities to ensure that they do not inadvertently drive China and Russia—not traditional allies—into a transactional temporal military pact.
Buttress the U.S. role in a flawed and frustrating United Nations. As primary donors, press for internal UN reform. Press Russia and China to promulgate and support positive UN international actions including joint peacekeeping.
Reiterating the first point: Rebuild atrophied personal links and conduits between key Western and Russian political and military leaders, despite inevitable disagreements and disinformation. Establish a network of crisis “first responders” on both sides that could rapidly intervene at the regional level in event of a fast-breaking accident or incident.

The status quo remains ominous for Russia as current demographic, economic, political, and security trends play out. In medical terms, all Russia’s vital signs are trending negatively into the next generation. What comes next? If the United States and Russia, despite their huge trust deficit, focus on core interests, with a reasonable appreciation for the concerns and interests of each other, a stable relationship could be regained. There is a clear danger, however, that Putin’s conflation of Russia’s interests with those of his regime may drive him to more and greater military-backed adventurism. Continued Russian military use of force as an increasingly preferred policy tool of choice in the face of economic decline will raise the chances of open conflict with the West—an outcome that represents a policy and strategy failure of the first order. Managing this risk must rest at the very top of the administration’s foreign policy and national security agenda. This task will require equal doses of firmness and pragmatism; U.S. alliances and partnerships must be stoutly upheld, while Russia’s core concerns on its periphery and insistence on recognition of its great power status should be acknowledged. Over time, rapprochement and economic reintegration with the West represent Russia’s best option. Without such pragmatism, the future of the Russian state, and therefore the stability of the international order writ large, will be at peril.

Notes

1 “Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 Shot Down by Russian Built Buk Missile, Dutch Report,” Reuters, October 13, 2015, available at <www.financialexpress.com/article/india-news/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh17-shot-down-by-russian-built-buk-missile-dutch-report/150745/>.

2 Michael Birnbaum, “Ruble Stabilizes in Russian Crisis, but Putin and Kremlin Remain at Risk,” Washington Post, December 17, 2014, available at <www.washingtonpost.com/world/ruble-swings-against-dollar-putting-pressure-on-russias-putin/2014/12/17/f8328bd8-8578-11e4-abcf-5a3d7b3b20b8_story.html>.

3 David Amos, “Russian Protests, December 10 As It Happened,” The Telegraph (London), December 10, 2011.

4 David Herzenhorn, “Ukraine Says It Captured Two Russian Soldiers,” New York Times, May 18, 2015, available at <www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/world/europe/ukraine-captured-two-russian-soldiers.html>.

5 Anna Borshevskaya, How Russia Views the Iran Nuclear Talks, PolicyWatch 2383 (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute, March 12, 2015), available at <www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/how-russia-views-the-iran-nuclear-talks>.

6 Gordon G. Chang, “China and Russia, Axis of Weak States,” World Affairs, March/April 2014, available at <www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/china-and-russia-axis-weak-states>.

7 Tom Kutsch, “The Risks of Russia’s Intervention in Syria,” Al Jazeera America, October 2, 2015, available at <http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/10/2/the-risks-of-russias-intervention-in-syria.html>.

8 Jonathan Marcus, “Russia S-400 Syria Missile,” BBC, December 1, 2015, available at <www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34976537>.

9 Mike Eckel, “Russia’s Shock and Awe,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, October 7, 2015, available at <www.rferl.org/content/russia-syria-shock-awe-military-air-strikes-information-warfare/27293854.html>.

10 “Russia to Send Its Aircraft Carrier to Eastern Mediterranean,” Associated Press, September 21, 2016, available at <www.foxnews.com/world/2016/09/21/russia-to-send-its-aircraft-carrier-to-eastern-mediterranean.html>.

11 Natalia Antonova, “Why Russia Fears Ukraine,” The Moscow Times, August 28, 2014, available at <www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/why-russia-fears-ukraine/506072.html>.

12 Peggy McNerny, “Putin Regime Unable to Change Course,” UCLA International Institute, March 16, 2015, available at <www.international.ucla.edu/Institute/Article/151035>.

13 Joseph Chamie and Barry Mirkin, “Russian Demographics: The Perfect Storm,” Yale Global Online, December 11, 2014, available at <http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/russian-demographics-perfect-storm>.

14 Kurt Hepler, “Russia’s Far East, Future Opportunities and Challenges,” The Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, October 11, 2015, available at <www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-russian-far-east-future-opportunities-and-challenges-to-russias-window-the-pacific>.

15 World Population Review, “Russian Population 2016.”

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 M. Zuhdi Jasser, “Russia Should Embrace Its Religious Diversity,” The Moscow Times, July 26, 2015, available at .

19 Deborah Gordon, “Opportunities and Challenges Facing Russian Oil,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 28, 2013.

20 David Francis, “The Race for Russian Oil,” The Week, February 27, 2014, available at <http://theweek.com/articles/450318/race-arctic-oil-russia-vs>.

21 Nicholas Eberstadt, “Russia, the Sick Man of Europe,” The National Interest, no. 158 (Winter 2005).

22 Rakesh Krishnan, “China Emulates Russian Military Strategy in the Pacific,” August 20, 2015.

23 Justin McKurry, “Russia Says It Will Build on Southern Kurile Islands Seized from Japan,” The Guardian (London), June 9, 2015, available at <www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/09/russia-build-southern-kuril-islands-seized-moscow-tokyo-abe>.

24 Liz Bagot and Josh Wilson, “The Russian Far East, Gateway to Asia,” School of Russian and Asian Studies, May 31, 2016, available at <www.sras.org/russian_far_east>.

25 “China, Russia: An End to an Island Dispute,” Stratfor.com, July 17, 2008, available at <www.stratfor.com/analysis/china-russia-end-island-dispute>.

26 “Russia, China Agree to Natural Gas Deal,” Stratfor.com, May 21, 2014.

27 Dragos Turnoveanu, “Russia, China and the Far East,” The Diplomat, January 20, 2016.

28 Howard Amos, “Chinese Thirst Drives Illegal Logging in Russian Far East,” The Moscow Times, December 5, 2012, available at <www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/chinese-timber-hunger-drives-illegal-logging-in-russias-far-east/472587.html>.

29 Igor Denisov, “Aigun, Russia and China’s ‘Century of Humiliation,’” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 10, 2015, available at <http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/06/10/aigun-russia-and-china-s-century-of-humiliation/i9o6>.

30 “Understanding the Russian Sphere of Influence,” UKEssays.com, March 23, 2015, available at <www.ukessays.com/essays/politics/understanding-the-russian-sphere-of-influence-politics-essay.php>.

31 Alexander Cooley and Marlene Laruelle, The Changing Logic of Russian Strategy in Central Asia: From Privileged Sphere to Divide and Conquer, Program on New Approaches to Russian Security (PONARS) Policy Memo 261 (Washington, DC: Elliott School of International Affairs, July 2013), available at <www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/changing-logic-russian-strategy-central-asia-privileged-sphere-divide-and-rule>.

32 Arif Bagbaslioglu, “Beyond Afghanistan NATO’s Tangled Partnership with Central Asia and South Caucasus: A Tangled Partnership,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 5, no. 1 (October 2013), 88–96.

33 Andrew C. Kuchins and Thomas M. Sanderson, The Northern Distribution Network and Afghanistan: Geopolitical Challenges and Opportunities (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 2010).

34 Nicholas van Twickel, “Ulyanovsk Hub Not Getting Much Use by NATO,” The Moscow Times, February 21, 2013, available at <www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/ulyanovsk-hub-not-getting-much-use-by-nato/475885.html>.

35 Dan Murphy, “Why Closure of Kyrgyzstan Air Base Is Point of No Return for Afghan War,” Christian Science Monitor, June 5, 2014, available at <www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2014/0605/Why-closure-of-Kyrgyzstan-air-base-is-point-of-no-return-for-Afghan-war>.

36 Nastia Suquet, “Russia Prepares for NATO Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Global Risk Insights, June 23, 2013, available at <http://globalriskinsights.com/2013/06/russia-prepares-for-nato-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/>.

37 Michael Cecire, “Georgia Misses Chance on Russia Overreach in Abkhazia, South Ossetia,” World Politics Review, February 6, 2015, available at <www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/15032/georgia-misses-chance-on-russia-overreach-in-abkhazia-south-ossetia>.

38 “Russian 102nd Military Base,” 2013.

39 Robert Coalson, “Armenia Looks West, Tries to Loosen Moscow’s Grip,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, April 9, 2016, available at <www.rferl.org/content/armenia-russia-relations-eu/25005446.html>.

40 Liz Fuller, “The Unstoppable Rise of Ramzan Kadyrov,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, January 19, 2015, available at <www.rferl.org/content/profile-ramzan-kadyrov-chechnya-russia-putin/26802368.html>.

41 Brandee Leon, “A View of Chechens in Syria,” The Bridge, June 22, 2014, available at <https://medium.com/the-bridge/a-view-of-chechens-in-syria-db74d4585a77#.usq5e9dbf>.

42 Lawrence A. Franklin, “Dagestan: New Epicenter of Terrorism in Russia,” The Gatestone Institute, February 14, 2014, available at <www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4172/dagestan-terrorism-russia>.

43 Ivan Kurilla, Southern Russia: The Heartland or Russia’s Soft Underbelly, PONARS Policy Memo 120 (Washington, DC: Elliott School of International Affairs, April 2000), available at <www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/ponars/pm_0120.pdf>.

44 Jack Moore, “ISIS Tells Vladimir Putin: We are Coming to Russia to Free Chechnya,” International Business Times, September 3, 2014.

45 “2,200 Russian Jihadists Fight in Syria, Iraq—Russian Foreign Ministry,” Russia Today, July 7, 2015, available at <www.rt.com/news/272299-russia-jihadists-syria-iraq/>.

46 The Right Honorable Lord of Baglan, “Putin’s Gamble in Syria,” Chatham House, October 6, 2015, available at .

47 Bruce Riedel, “Vlad and Yuri: How Putin Is Applying the Lessons of Afghanistan to Syria,” al.Monitor.com, October 5, 2015.

48 Alexey Eremenko, “Why Russia’s Vladimir Putin Is Standing by Syria’s President Assad,” NBC News, September 26, 2015, available at <www.nbcnews.com/news/world/why-russias-vladimir-putin-standing-syrias-embattled-bashar-assas-n432936>.

49 Anne Gearan, “U.S., Russia Reach Agreement on Seizure of Syria’s Chemical Arsenal,” Washington Post, September 14, 2013, available at <www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-russia-reach-agreement-on-seizure-of-syrian-chemical-weapons-arsenal/2013/09/14/69e39b5c-1d36-11e3-8685-5021e0c41964_story.html>.

50 Lizzie Dearden, “Russia Launches First Air Strikes in Syria as Non-ISIS Rebels Claim They Are Being Targeted,” The Independent (London), September 30, 2015.

51 Josh Cohen, “Russia’s Vested Interests in Supporting Assad,” The Moscow Times, October 23, 2014, available at <www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/russia-s-vested-interests-in-supporting-assad/509979.html>.

52 Egor Lazerev and Anna Biryukova, “20 Million Muslims Seething about Putin Bombing Syria,” Washington Post, March 7, 2016, available at <www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/03/07/are-russias-20-million-muslims-seething-about-putin-bombing-syria/>.

53 Dmitri Trenin, “The Revival of the Russian Military: How Moscow Reloaded,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016, 26.

54 Jonathan Altman, “Russian A2/AD in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Naval War College Review, 69, no. 1 (Winter 2016), 75.

55 Andrew Roth, “Syria Shows That Russia Built an Effective Military. Now How Will Putin Use It?” Washington Post, March 18, 2016.

56 Alec Luhn, “Russia’s Campaign in Syria Leads to Arms Sale Windfall,” The Guardian (London), March 29, 2016, available at <www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/29/russias-campaign-in-syria-leads-to-arms-sale-windfall>.

57 Karl-Heinz Kamp, “From Wales to Warsaw: NATO’s Future Beyond the Ukraine Crisis,” American Foreign Policy Interests 36, no. 6 (2014), 362.

58 Andrew Monaghan, “Russian State Mobilization: Moving the State onto a War Footing,” Chatham House, London, June 3, 2016, available at <www.chathamhouse.org/event/russian-state-mobilization-moving-country-war-footing>.

59 David Matsaberidze, “Russia v. EU/US through Georgia and Ukraine,” Connections 14, no. 2 (Spring 2015), 79.

60 Michael Weiss, “Rights in Russia: Navalny and the Opposition,” World Affairs 176, no. 4 (November 2013), 73.

61 “Russia’s Accusations,” NATO Fact Sheet, NATO Public Diplomacy Division, April 2014, 1.

62 David Yost, “The Budapest Memorandum and Russia’s Intervention in Ukraine,” International Affairs 91, no. 3 (May 2015), 505.

63 James Hughes, “Russia and the Secession of Kosovo,” Europa-Asia Studies 65, no. 5 (July 2013), 1005.

64 Ibid., 994.

65 Michael Ruhle, NATO Enlargement and Russia: Die-Hard Myths and Real Dilemmas (Rome: NATO Defense College, 2014), 3.

66 Ibid.

67 “Seven New Members Join NATO,” March 29, 2004, available at <www.nato.int/docu/update/2004/03-march/e0329a.htm>.

68 “Moscow Warns Montenegro of Possible Consequences of Joining NATO—Russian Foreign Ministry,” Interfax, November 23, 2015, available at <www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp?id=635054>.

69 Nicholas Ross Smith, “The EU and Russia’s Conflicting Regime Preferences in Ukraine: Assessing Regime Promotion Strategies in the Scope of the Ukraine Crisis,” European Security 24, no. 4 (April 2015), 528.

70 Dave Johnson, Russia’s Approach to Conflict—Implications for NATO’s Deterrence and Defence, NATO Defense College Research Papers No. 111 (Rome: NATO Defense College, April 2015).

71 Igor Sutyagin, Russian Forces in Ukraine, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Briefing Paper (London: RUSI, March 2015), 1.

72 Ian Bremmer, “What MH17 Means for Russia-Ukraine,” Reuters, July 18, 2014, available at <http://blogs.reuters.com/ian-bremmer/2014/07/18/what-mh17-means-for-russia-ukraine/>.

73 Trenin, 26.

74 Sergei Guriev, “Russia’s Constrained Economy: How the Kremlin Can Spur Growth,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016, 19.

75 Ibid.

76 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, available at <www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/milex_database/milex_database>.

77 Mikhail Barabanov, Konstantin Makienko, Ruslan Pukhov, “Military Reform: Toward the New Look of the Russian Army,” Analytical Report, Valdai Discussion Club, July 2012, 12.

78 “Russia: Putin Orders Creation of National Guard,” Situation Report, Stratfor.com, April 5, 2016, available at <www.stratfor.com/situation-report/russia-putin-orders-creation-national-guard>.

79 Barabanov, Makienko, and Pukhov, 32.

80 Ibid., 25.

81 Iva Savic, “The Russian Soldier Today,” Journal of International Affairs 63, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2010), 223.

82 Ibid., 221.

83 Ibid., 219.

84 “Ukraine Crisis: Russian Special Forces Captured,” BBC News Europe, May 17, 2015, available at <www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32776198>.

85 Jaroslaw Adamowski, “Russia Overhauls Military Doctrine,” Defense News, January 10, 2015, available at <www.defensenews.com/story/defense/policy-budget/policy/2015/01/10/russia-military-doctrine-ukraine-putin/21441759/>.

86 Olga Oliker, “Unpacking Russia’s New National Security Strategy,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, January 7, 2016, available at <www.csis.org/analysis/unpacking-russias-new-national-security-strategy>.

87 Stephen Kotkin, “Russia’s Perpetual Geopolitics: Putin Returns to the Historical Pattern,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016.

88 Sutyagin, 2.

89 Dmitry Adamsky, “If War Comes Tomorrow: Russian Thinking About Regional Nuclear Deterrence,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 27, no. 1 (2014), 168.

90 Jonathan Marcus, “Russia’s Missile Deployment in Kaliningrad Ups the Stakes for NATO,” BBC.com, October 9, 2016, available at <www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37600426>.

91 Steven Collins, “Russia and China Now Able to Sink All American. Aircraft Carriers?” Gog Magog War, available at <http://stevenmcollins.com/WordPress/russian-and-china-now-able-to-sink-all-american-aircraft-carriers/>.

92 Dmitry Gorenburg, “Impact of the Economic Crisis,” The CIPHER Brief, April 8, 2016, available at <www.thecipherbrief.com/article/europe/impact-economic-crisis-1090>.

93 “In Russia, Defense Cuts Were Inevitable,” Stratfor.com, March 11, 2016, available at <www.stratfor.com/analysis/russia-defense-cuts-were-inevitable>.

94 Julian Borger, “Nuclear Weapons Risk Greater than in Cold War, says Ex-Pentagon Chief,” The Guardian (London), January 7, 2016, available at <www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/07/nuclear-weapons-risk-greater-than-in-cold-war-says-ex-pentagon-chief>.

95 Mark R. Wilcox, “Russia and the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty)—A Paradigm Change?” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 24, no. 4 (2011), 568.

96 Andrew E. Kramer, “Russia Withdraws from Plutonium Disposal Treaty,” New York Times, October 3, 2016, available at <www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/world/europe/russia-plutonium-nuclear-treaty.html?_r=0>.

Originally Published: http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Publications/Books/charting-a-course/Article/1026986/chapter-11-russia/

Russia Seen Moving New Missiles To Eastern Europe

12/08/2016

By Geoff Brumfield, NPR

In what could mark an escalation of tensions with the West, commercial satellite images suggest that Russia is moving a new generation of nuclear-capable missiles into Eastern Europe.

Russia appears to be preparing to permanently base its Iskander missile system in Kaliningrad, a sliver of territory it controls along the Baltic coast between Lithuania and Poland. Arms control experts shared fresh satellite imagery with NPR, which they say provides evidence that the Iskander will soon be housed in the Russian-controlled enclave.

The images show ground being cleared for tentlike shelters used at other Iskander bases, says Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “The pattern, and the size, and the location strongly suggest to us that this is the beginning phase of construction of the shelters for Iskander,” Lewis says.

Lewis and Finnish defense analyst Veli-Pekka Kivimäki, a doctoral student on open-source intelligence, discovered the construction through digital sleuthing. First, they searched Russia’s Facebook, known as VKontakte, for images taken by military conscripts assigned to missile units (Russian grunts are prolific on social media, according to Lewis). Comparing the images posted by conscripts to the satellite imagery, they were able to pinpoint the missile base in Kaliningrad where the Iskanders have sometimes been sent on training exercises.

They then monitored the bases until they saw construction of what they recognized as permanent storage structures used for Iskander missiles.

Lewis says placing Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad is a provocative act. Kaliningrad has been controlled by Russia since World War II. It lies far to the west of Russia’s own border, putting any missiles based there within range of additional targets in Europe. “Things that are in Kaliningrad… can reach places that they could not otherwise reach in Russia,” Lewis says.

Lewis and other experts believe Russia may be also developing a longer-range cruise missile that would allow the Iskander system to reach targets in Western Europe as well. That missile, if it does exist, would violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibits medium-range cruise missiles from being deployed on the ground.

If Russia has decided to permanently position Iskander in Kaliningrad, “It may be in response to a number of things,” says retired Brig. Gen. Peter Zwack, who served as defense attaché to Russia from 2012 to 2014.

The U.S. has recently deployed a missile defense system in Romania and is building a second base in Poland. U.S. and European officials say those sites are to defend against potential ballistic launches from Iran, but Zwack says that Russia views them as provocations. The new Polish missile defense site would be within range of the Iskander, adds Lewis.

But Zwack says it’s important not to overreact. Russia already has nuclear-capable systems based in Kaliningrad, including SS-21 ballistic missiles. The new Iskanders will “freak the local neighbors,” he says, but they “will not change any strategic equation, because if they go into tactical mode, it’s the end of the world anyway.”

Ultimately, Zwack says he believes any decision to put Iskanders into Kaliningrad is about sending a message to NATO and the West that Russia disapproves of their activities.

“It ups the ante in the region,” he says.

Breaking Down US-Russian Distrust With Time, Talk, and Meals

11/28/2016

A recent session of the long-running Dartmouth Conference shows how non-governmental dialogue can ease tense relations.

I was a recent participant in the Dartmouth Conference, one of the few remaining Track 2 — that is, non-governmental — dialogues between the U.S. and Russia. Its results may be especially interesting in the wake of the recent victory of President-elect Donald Trump and for those paying close attention to the difficult relations between our two countries.

The oldest dialogue of its kind, the Conference has for 56 years enabled senior American and Russian citizens to seek mutual solutions to our shared political and geostrategic challenges. The three-day symposium I attended in late October was the 146th meeting under the Conference’s auspices.

One of a series of events on the Middle East, the meeting convened 10 bipartisan Americans and 10 Russians, included former ambassadors and diplomats, academicians, and business people, all with a wide range of experiences involving the overall U.S.-Russian relationship and the Middle East. While the main focus was on Syria, the overall Middle East, and Afghanistan, we also talked about greater global challenges facing the U.S.and Russia.

The discussions were frank and direct, with many disagreements. It was troubling, though not unexpected, to see how imperfectly these well-informed participants understood each other’s world views, priorities, and vital interests. The perception chasm between us was wide.

If this had been a transactional meeting of only a few hours, the chances of progress would have been slim. From my experience as a military diplomat, such meetings — especially between officials meeting each other for the first time and tied to official talking points — rarely produce much open dialogue.

But over the three days of our conference, during which we shared time and meals, discussions eventually turned toward the kind of frank problem-solving that can only transpire over a sustained period of contact. We ultimately hammered out several modest recommendations, a rare occurrence in the tense relations between our nations.

The recommendations looked for both major parties to find mutually acceptable “contact points” to explore working together, especially in the humanitarian realm in Syria. While not perfect, they are at least a starting point. From this, if there is progress, any nascent cooperation could possibly deepen into other sectors.

Several major strategic points became evident during these discussions and articulated by delegation heads in the final meeting.

First, neither the U.S. nor Russia has a vital, existential-threat-level interest in the complicated situation in or around Syria. Second, an accident or incident involving our militaries in or around Syria could inadvertently escalate into a dangerous existential threat risk involving our two nuclear-tipped countries. Third, sectarian allies and proxies including Iran and Saudi Arabia, will attempt to involve the U.S. and Russia in pursuit of their own parochial regional interests, without regard for overall strategic U.S and Russian interests. Finally, the group agreed on the need for continued support of the difficult mission to ensure a stable Afghanistan.

The findings and recommendations of the group were presented to senior officials in the U.S. State Department and counterparts in Moscow.

This example of sustained U.S.-Russia dialogue should be readopted – across key political and defense entities of both nations – by U.S. and Russian policy-makers as the new Trump administration comes into office. Such a sustained relationship-building, problem-solving approach coupling direct, frank dialog to actions, could reduce serious misperceptions and the high level of paralyzing distrust between our nations that has become so dangerous during these volatile times.

Peter Zwack, a retired Army brigadier general, writes from the Institute for National Strategic Studies within the National Defense University. From 2012 to 2014, he served as the United States’ senior defense official and attaché to Russia. He has traveled extensively throughout Eastern Siberia

Originally Published: https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2016/11/breaking-down-us-russian-distrust-time-talk-and-meals/133430

All rights reserved © Peter B Zwack

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