Home - Peter B Zwack

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Defense Attaché to Moscow 2012 – 2014

Global Fellow at The Kennan Institute
Woodrow Wilson International Center

University of Pennsylvania – Adjunct Fellow

Senior Russia-Eurasia Research Fellow
National Defense University 2015 – 2019

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and the Questioning of an American Jew’s Patriotism

11/08/2019

One June evening in 2013, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, welcomed his guests from the GRU (Russian military intelligence) for a dinner in the American embassy compound in Moscow. General Igor Sergun, head of the GRU, arrived with two of his generals and an interpreter at the embassy home of Army brigadier general Peter Zwack, who was the American defense attaché. That night, Russian and American military intelligence officers, who had long been suspicious of one another, tried to put a good face on things.

At the time, the Obama administration’s initiative to “reset” relations with Russia was floundering. Pro-democracy protests in Moscow had President Vladimir Putin convinced that the U.S. was trying to foment a color revolution to oust him from power, and the Americans were alarmed at the Kremlin’s crackdown on civil society. Arms control and NATO expansion were straining the relationship, as was Congress’s passage of the Magnitsky Act, which froze the U.S. assets of corrupt Russian officials and banned them from visiting the United States. Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia at the time, was constantly harassed by the Russians, his children followed to school. The “reset” was on life support, and in eight months, when Russia would seize Crimea, it would be officially dead.

But on that summer night in 2013, American and Russian intelligence officials tried to concentrate on what they could do together. They still had areas of mutual interest and cooperation, like counterterrorism, and they toasted to improving their countries’ relationship. The GRU officers left with American baseball caps and, the following night, hosted the Americans for dinner at an old Soviet hotel and gave them a tour of Joseph Stalin’s suite upstairs.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated Iraq War veteran, was stationed in Moscow at the time as part of Zwack’s defense attaché’s office and was intimately involved in planning Flynn’s visit. It was a tricky mission at a tense moment, and Vindman was just the man for the job, recalls Zwack, his boss at the time. “By virtue of being in the attaché business at such a particularly sensitive time, if you don’t trust each other in an environment like that, you fail,” Zwack told me. “And it’s no exaggeration to say that I trusted Alex with my life. I still do.”

In the two years, from 2012 to 2014, that Vindman and Zwack were in Moscow, they worked assiduously to keep the reset afloat. Unlike previous defense attachés who stuck to official meetings in the capital, Zwack traveled widely around Russia, trying to engage with Russians where he could. Everywhere Zwack went, Vindman went too. “I saw him literally every day,” Zwack recalls. Vindman, he says, was a tremendous asset in helping him do this work. “He was multilingual, which really matters,” Zwack says. “He was an area specialist, which is what you want as a boss. He was worldly. He was a very good diplomat. He had good relations with his Russian counterparts. That doesn’t mean you agree on everything, but that’s part of the job.”

Vindman was a rare bird in the Army: a native-speaking Foreign Area Officer. There are about 1,200 of these highly specialized area experts in the Army, and almost none of them are native speakers. (The Army invests in training them extensively.)

Vindman stood out. He was born in the Soviet Union in 1975 before emigrating with his family to the U.S. four years later. His family, which was Jewish, fled the institutionalized, official anti-Semitism of the Soviet Union as refugees—a heritage he didn’t speak about often to colleagues. He spoke fluent Russian, and not just because he grew up speaking it. Shortly before he departed for his mission in Moscow in 2012, his wife, Rachel, and a toddler daughter in tow, he completed a master’s program through the Davis Center at Harvard University, one of the best Russia programs in the country. (Citing privacy laws, the Center declined to comment. Alexandra Vacroux, the Center’s executive director, did manage one sentence. “We’re so proud!” she exclaimed.)

His posting to Moscow was a sign of both trustworthiness and accomplishment. “For a Foreign Area Officer to get assigned to Moscow, that’s a big deal,” explains McFaul. “And then to be seconded to the National Security Council as he was, that is a minority group. They’re the crème de la crème. You have to be super smart to get that job.” The Atlantic Council’s Daniel Fried, who designed the Obama administration’s Russia sanctions when he was at the State Department, met Vindman several times when he came in to talk to Vindman’s boss, the NSC’s Russia director (and witness in the impeachment probe), Fiona Hill. “He was always there, he was very sensible, completely nonpartisan,” Fried recalled. “When I read his testimony [about President Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky], I thought, right. He didn’t speculate, he only commented on what he knew about, he was thorough and methodical.” Vindman, Fried says, struck him as “a Boy Scout.”

In 2015, two years after hosting that dinner at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Flynn, now retired from the Army and heading up his own consulting, would attend another dinner in Moscow. Unlike the GRU dinner, which had been approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government, the 2015 event was the tenth anniversary dinner of RT, the Kremlin’s foreign propaganda channel. This time, he wasn’t sitting with American diplomats but next to Putin. And two years later, Flynn would be fired from his position as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser for lying about a secret back channel from the White House to the Russian ambassador to Washington. He eventually pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Vindman also saw a secret back channel from the White House to the former Soviet Union. The president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Gordon Sondland, his ambassador to the E.U., were trying to extort the Ukrainian government outside typical diplomatic communications: Give us dirt on the Bidens, and we’ll free up the congressionally allocated military aid.

On July 10, 2019, Vindman, who had been born in Kiev, sat in on a meeting between the Ukrainian national security adviser and American officials, including Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and U.S. special envoy Kurt Volker. The Ukrainians were pushing for a White House meeting with President Trump, which would be an important signal of American support in the face of the five-year war Russia has waged on Ukraine. But to Vindman’s surprise, administration officials took the conversation elsewhere. “Amb. Sondland started to speak about delivering the specific investigations in order to secure the meeting with the President, at which time Ambassador Bolton cut the meeting short,” Vindman wrote in his planned remarks to the House Intelligence Committee.

“Following this meeting, there was a scheduled debriefing during which Amb. Sondland emphasized the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens, and Burisma. I stated to Amb. Sondland that his statements were inappropriate, that the request to investigate Biden and his son had nothing to do with national security, and that such investigations were not something the NSC was going to get involved in or push. Dr. Hill then entered the room and asserted to Amb. Sondland that his statements were inappropriate.”

“Think about if a young officer who is trying to do the right thing is confronted with what he was confronted with in the NSC,” says Zwack. “When this young officer is put in a really tough position, this is what you do. This is what you’re taught to do.”Most PopularAnd so Alexander Vindman, known to his colleagues as highly disciplined, especially about the strength of his convictions, marched over to the NSC’s legal office and reported what he had just witnessed: the president of the United States using the power of American military and diplomacy for his personal political gain.

One of the NSC lawyers to whom Vindman took his complaint was his identical twin brother and fellow ROTC alum, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman.

Almost as soon as news of Vindman’s planned testimony broke on Monday night, Trump’s allies seized on Vindman’s birthplace and language abilities as proof of his disloyalty to the United States. John Yoo, architect of the post-9/11 torture program, even went so far as to accuse Vindman of “espionage” on behalf of the Ukrainians. It was an assertion repeated by a former Republican congressman who is now a CNN commentator.

Of course, what they meant was that Vindman was not loyal to Trump, something the president himself confirmed this morning on Twitter when, without any evidence, he dismissed Vindman as a “Never Trumper.” According to public records, both Vindman and Yevgeny were once registered Democrats, but Zwack says he never knew of Vindman’s personal political leanings in the two years he served with him. Of course, the president’s defenders had no issue with Soviet-born Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two men arrested earlier this month for allegedly funneling Russian money to Republican candidates. Nor did they criticize Flynn, who regularly worked for foreign governments and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to Washington.

While Trump has a history of attacking anyone who questions his power, there is a particularly insidious history to questioning the loyalty of Jewish émigrés. According to a source who knows the family, Vindman’s grandfather died fighting for the Soviet Union in World War II. After the war was over and the state of Israel was founded, Stalin unleashed a bloody and ruthless campaign against Soviet Jewry. He called them “rootless cosmopolitans,” a wandering people who had no real roots in the Russian soil, and therefore no loyalty to the Soviet state. The campaign continued even after Stalin died, with harsh quotas imposed in universities. Politically sensitive jobs were closed to Jews because their loyalty could not be trusted. In everyday life, Soviet Jews, whose ancestors had been living in Russia for centuries, were told to “go to your Israel” or to return to their “historic homeland.”

This constant harassment and discrimination, combined with Western pressure, triggered a mass exodus, with millions of Jews leaving the Soviet Union because it had decided that they were second-class citizens and not to be trusted. The Vindmans were part of that exodus.

All three Vindman brothers—Leonid, Yevgeny, and Alexander—did ROTC and joined the U.S. military. It is a highly unusual career path for Soviet Jewish immigrants of my generation. Having tasted both state-sponsored violence and the Soviet lack of gratitude for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish men and women who fought valiantly on their country’s behalf, Soviet Jews are understandably wary of military service. The Vindman brothers apparently didn’t share this skepticism. “The brothers went to SUNY Binghamton, followed in [their older brother’s] footsteps, loved the discipline, loved the ideals—they really did,” photographer Carol Kitman, a family friend, told me. “That became their life.” And unlike many Soviet Jewish immigrants of his father’s generation, Alexander Vindman did not betray any hostility or resentment toward the place that had forced out his family. In February 2013, he went to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) as part of an official U.S. delegation to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, where over a million Soviet soldiers lost their lives.Most Popular

We Soviet immigrant kids had different ways of immersing ourselves in America, of losing ourselves in its powerful tides of assimilation. This, clearly, was Vindman’s. The tragedy of it is watching our parents, who brought us from a place that never fully accepted us as citizens to a place they really believed would never flash these ancient anti-Semitic tropes at us. Maybe they’d never fully assimilate—they came here when they were too old—but we, their children, surely would. We would be such fervent Americans, they hoped, that Americans would never tell the difference. And when it came to officially sponsored anti-Semitism, they were right, at least for a few decades.

Then 2016 came around, bringing to power a set of people all too eager to remind us of a thought we’d left in the old country: No matter what you do for this country, even if you give it your life and limb, you will always be foreign, suspect. And if, like Alexander Vindman, you dare to flag the president’s deeply problematic behavior and talk about it to congressional Democrats trying to impeach him, none of your service to your country will matter. There will be an effort to discredit you—you won’t be suspected of being secretly loyal to Israel, as your parents once were in the Soviet Union, but to Ukraine—any country but the one you actually serve.

Julia Ioffe is a GQ correspondent.

Russia Geostrategic Primer

Russian Challenges from Now into the Next Generation: A Geostrategic Primer

05/27/2019

U.S. and Western relations with Russia remain challenged as Russia increasingly reasserts itself on the global stage. Russia remains driven by a worldview based on existential threats—real, perceived, and contrived. As a vast, 11-time zone Eurasian nation with major demographic and economic challenges, Russia faces multiple security dilemmas internally and along its vulnerable and expansive borders. Exhibiting a reactive xenophobia stemming from a long history of destructive war and invasion along most of its borders, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and perceived Western slights, Russia increasingly threatens others and lashes outward. However, time is not on Russia’s side, as it has entered into a debilitating status quo that includes unnecessary confrontation with the West, multiple unresolved military commitments, a sanctions strained and only partially diversified economy, looming domestic tensions, and a rising China directly along its periphery.

Washington still has an opportunity to carefully improve U.S.-Russia relations and regain a more stable relationship in the near term, but only if activities and initiatives are based on a firm and frank appreciation of each other’s core interests, including those of their allies and partners. In a dual-track approach, the United States and its allies must continue to work closely to deter any destabilizing Russian behavior ranging from corrosive gray zone disinformation activities—including malign cyber efforts to erode Western democracies—up to full and overt military aggression. Simultaneously, rebuilding atrophied conduits between key
American and Russian political and military leadership is imperative in order to calm today’s distrustful and increasingly mean-spirited relations, to seek and positively act upon converging interests, and to avert potential incidents or accidents that could potentially lead to dangerous brinksmanship. Notably the July 2018 Trump-Putin summit failed to bring any positive developments to the U.S.-Russia relationship; however, pragmatic efforts to bridge major and increasingly dangerous divides must continue. Perhaps most notable during the summit was the emphasis made by both sides that the weakened arms control regimen and overall strategic stability be addressed to stop a dangerous drift toward renewed nuclear weapons development and competition.

Yet in recent months, the relationship has only continued to weaken on multiple fronts too numerous to summarize, including Russian actions against Ukraine in the Sea of Azov and the end of the 31-year Intermediate Nuclear Weapons Treaty signed in 1987 by Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan.

https://inss.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/1793887/russian-challenges-from-now-into-the-next-generation-a-geostrategic-primer/

Pearl Harbor and the fallacy of inevitable war: The Thucydides trap

12/07/2018

More than 2,500 years ago, Greek historian Thucydides summed up the origin of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) in a single sentence: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

I contemplated that last word — inevitable — during a recent visit to the Arizona battleship memorial at Pearl Harbor.

The deadly Japanese surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941, was the culmination of decades of rising resentment against the United States. Japan’s first encounter with the U.S. came in the mid-1850s, when Adm. Matthew Perry boldly sailed into Tokyo Bay. At the time, the U.S. was a brash, wet-behind-the-ears global upstart; Japan was an ancient and self-isolated country. Subsequent encounters during the next 80 years fed Japan’s conviction that the U.S. was intent on curbing the island nation’s ambitions to lay claim to more territory and natural resources.

The decision in 1940 to move the U.S. Pacific fleet to Hawaii was interpreted as a direct challenge. The final straw was the U.S. decision in mid-summer 1941 to cut off Japan’s oil supplies and freeze the country’s assets in response to its occupation of Indochina during its brutal campaign in China. The precisely planned assault on Pearl Harbor occurred five months later.

My pilgrimage to the Pearl Harbor memorial came at the end of an intensive two-week visit to Russia’s Far East, a complex region where Russia, China, Japan, the Koreas and nearby Alaska all intersect.

As I peered at the watery grave of the 1,102 U.S. sailors and Marines killed when the Arizona went down, I imagined the unflinching Japanese warrior mindset of the 1930s and Japan’s fatal overestimation of its international destiny. I also pondered the seemingly similar perceptions of long-term destiny resurfacing among one or more of the players in today’s restive Pacific region. Finally, retrospectively, I’m now also wondering what was going through the mind of the young 19-year-old Ensign George H.W. Bush when his mother ship, the light carrier USS San Jacinto, arrived for the first time at Pearl in May 1944 and berthed near the wreck of the Arizona and several other lost battleships.

Economic and political factors similar to those that fueled regional conflicts in the 1930s appear increasingly evident today. China’s ambitions for growth and global influence are currently limited by the country’s inadequate natural resources. Its strategies so far include an aggressive campaign to claim islands in the South China Sea and spearhead the far-reaching Belt and Road Initiative. Meanwhile, just across the border, in Russia’s lightly guarded, demographically challenged Siberian and Far Eastern hinterlands, vast forests and mineral fields beckon — a vulnerability of which Vladimir Putin is keenly aware.

Currently these two traditionally distrustful Asian giants are pursuing a pragmatic, mutually supporting policy regarding one another. Add to the mix the latent fears perennially entertained by Japan and the Koreas about their neighbors and you have a highly combustible blend that could, literally, set the world aflame. To boot, advances in cyber, artificial intelligence, and weaponry make it easier for conventionally out-gunned nations to conduct surprise asymmetrical warfare with a high degree of initial shock as Japan did in 1941.

On the long flight back to the mainland, I had plenty of time to think about Thucydides and his observation about the inevitability of war, eloquently elucidated by Harvard University Professor Graham Alison in his prescient “The Thucydides Trap” (2017).

Surely there is a way to free the world from the fatal temptation to believe — as Sparta and Japan each did — that the best defense — in fact, the only defense — is a good offense?

I think so.

But it will require an unprecedented level of frank communication and cooperation among countries, as well as a willingness to stand firm with like-minded partners when opportunistic nations use extralegal means to claim territory or intimidate neighbors.

As a liberal and democratic nation, the United States remains vulnerable to surprise attacks; we must always be on guard. That said, we must also be sensitive to the potential for our words and actions to make a possible adversary believe conflict is “inevitable.”

What will be required is direct, quiet and patient dialog coupled with unambiguous actions that will promote mutual understanding and thereby more trust, and help humanity fend off future Pearl Harbors.

BY RETIRED BRIG. GEN. PETER B. ZWACK, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR —12/07/18 11:00 AM EST
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

What Pearl Harbor Still Has to Teach Us

12/07/2018

Thinking about Pearl Harbor and avoiding inevitable war, I recently revisited the solemn Arizona battleship memorial at Pearl Harbor while on a brief layover in Hawaii, after spending two enlightening weeks traveling deep within the complex Russian Far East.

Returning to such hallowed American waters and ground on the heels of my trip to Northeast Asia brought home to me the unsettling fact that events like Pearl Harbor—a carefully planned surprise attack—often grow out of an adversary’s complete and utter conviction that war is inevitable . Once that conviction takes root, it’s all too easy for a nation to interpret even unintentional slights or innocent actions as signposts on the “road to war.” In today’s lightning-fast world, a major misunderstanding or miscalculation could spell catastrophe for the planet.

In the 1930s, Imperial Japan entertained major regional ambitions in Asia that met with irritating resistance from a number of nations that included Great Britain, the Netherlands, France and the United States. Japan—certain of its superiority and destiny—viewed the United States with a mix of disdain and suspicion. Any U.S. action that appeared to be part of a strategy to interfere with Japan’s expansive plans reinforced a growing Japanese belief that going to war was just a matter of time.

In the years immediately before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bristled at several U.S. actions which were undertaken to warn the island country off of its aggressive regional adventuring, especially its brutal offensive campaign in China. When the United States moved its mighty, battleship-heavy Pacific fleet from San Diego to Hawaii in 1940, Japan viewed the decision as a direct challenge. When the United States followed the next summer with an oil embargo and by freezing Japan’s assets, the emergent Japanese military “war faction” was primed to lash out. Even Harvard-educated Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto joined in the war preparations—albeit with misgivings—planning every aspect of the surprise attack into Hawaii designed to shock its target to the core from the first second of hostilities.

With great secrecy, the Japanese First Air Fleet sortied with six aircraft carriers in November 1941 and within two weeks arrived early on December 7, about 230 miles northwest of Honolulu. They launched their air attack in two waves, catching the United States off-guard and completely shattering the battleship fleet. By sheer providence, our aircraft carriers were out of harbor and spared destruction. Simultaneously well-coordinated Japanese forces launched a massive military sweep through resource-rich British and Dutch Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore and the U.S.-protected Philippines.

How could a smaller, less-developed nation wreak so much havoc in such a short time? By capitalizing on a U.S misperception of Japan and by using surprise and deep study—critical elements for any nation that feels out-manned, outgunned and out-resourced as Japan did in 1941. Its military leaders studied and learned our key vulnerabilities, and then planned and brilliantly executed their preemptive surprise attack. They leveraged every possible innovation and lesson-learned. These included making the most of new carrier tactics and aircraft weapons innovation at Pearl Harbor, as well as unprecedented amphibious operations across the western Pacific. On land, Japan’s fast-marching light infantry outflanked major defended bastions such as Singapore in Southeast Asia.

At Pearl Harbor early on a peaceful Sunday morning, the underestimated Japanese Navy dramatically changed notions of naval warfare and military history by wrecking an entire battleship fleet by air attack. Well-designed airplanes with trained pilots launched from Japanese aircraft carriers dropping armor-piercing bombs and shallow-running aerial torpedoes that knifed into our helplessly-moored battleships. Photos taken at the time showed major Japanese rehearsals with Pearl Harbor mock-ups on the eve of the attack. The Japanese appeared also to take a lesson from a smaller, but effective British operation a year earlier, when torpedo-laden biplanes took aim at Axis Italy’s Taranto Harbor.

How does what happened at Pearl Harbor relate to the state of the world today? How are we being studied today? Once again we’re seeing some of the same drivers of the conflicts of the 1930s bubbling to the surface. An insatiable need for resources. Ambitions for growth. Ideologies that put the accent on nationalism and “destiny.” And rising frustration among ambitious players who resent the United States with its allies and partners standing firm against aggressive behaviors and extralegal territorial claims.

Pearl Harbor was a textbook demonstration of the powerful advantage of surprise and asymmetry when employed by a self-aware lesser power against a seemingly stronger adversary. With today’s globally deliverable weapons of mass destruction, add in a mindset that sees war as unavoidable and our world faces a recipe for disaster. Asymmetric surprise today would likely begin in a blink using cyber, artificial intelligence (AI) and other new-age technologies designed to stagger and paralyze in the initial phase of a conflict. By throwing a large adversary off-balance, this strategy would even the playing field in any major non- or pre-nuclear war…or worse. Emboldened by success, the seemingly lesser power might believe—as Japan did—that it can preemptively subdue one or more rivals or foes.

As an open, liberal democratic nation we remain prone to being surprised and therefore must always be on watch with high readiness. As such, military exercises and other defense preparations with our numerous like-minded allies and partners remain vital and non-negotiable. We must also stay attuned, however, to the drivers and perceptions that could make a potential adversary believe conflict is unavoidable. Accordingly, and especially in negatively trending relationships between major powers, firm, patient work via frank, persistent and low-publicized dialogue combined with unambiguous actions must continue even while frustrating. While no guarantee of staving off a crisis, such measures designed to chip away at core sources of deep distrust and misunderstanding could go a long away at reducing perceptions of unavoidable war as occurred within Japan before Pearl Harbor.

Such was my pensiveness while standing and thinking about what happened at Pearl Harbor just after traveling across complex and historically volatile Northeast Asia.

National Interest – Published December 6, 2018

Audio: The Andrew Schatkin Show

10/26/2018

http://schatkinshow.com/podcast-with-gen-peter-zwack/

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Russia and China’s Growing Military Interaction; Surprised?

09/24/2018

Why does Russia place such emphasis and media attention on incredibly large military exercises with China?

Russia and China’s Growing Military Interaction; Surprised?

The drums are already rolling for the upcoming Russian “Vostok” (east) wargames commencing on September 11. With its focal point in the Trans-Baikal region of eastern Siberia adjoining Chinese Manchuria and Mongolia, this is a nationwide Russian military and societal event.

Touted by Russian minister of defense Sergei Shoigu as “unprecedented in scale, both in terms of area of operations and numbers of military command structure, troops, and forces involved,” Russian state press is declaring that up to three hundred thousand troops and one thousand aircraft will be involved, with the majority from the Eastern and Central Military Districts. This would be even larger than the near-legendary Zapad-81 maneuvers held in the western USSR during the depths of the Cold War.

Announcements about this type of event are not new to me. I’ve been to several of them. In July 2014, just before I departed Moscow as the U.S. defense attaché to Russia, news began to buzz concerning the upcoming Vostok 2014 wargames in the Far East. It was a tense time. Heralding new gray zone applications of so-called hybrid war, Ukraine’s Crimea had just been illegally annexed by Russia and battles raged between unattributed Russian regulars and beleaguered Ukrainian defenders across eastern Ukraine. At that time the upcoming Asian exercise was also billed as Russia’s largest military exercise since Soviet times, though its declared numbers turned out lower than proclaimed.

One important wrinkle this year is that reportedly up to 3,200 Chinese personal with ninety vehicles, including tanks and thirty fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, will participate. Most are coming from China’s Northern Command. This will be the first time the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will take part in this formerly purely Russian quadrennial Asia-oriented exercise. The bulk of participating Chinese personal have already transited from Manchuria into Russia, escorted by Russian military police to the Tsugol training range near Chita. The Mongolians have also sent a small contingent.

“From such it’s quite evident that the trajectory of Chinese-Russian relations have certainly improved since I encountered in 1997 a former Soviet T-54 tank gunner in Spassk, an old garrison town north of Vladivostok located on the eastern shore of sizable Lake Khanka. Besotted with vodka drunk from coffee cups in a gritty railway bar, the gnarled veteran spoke of the fierce Ussuri River border clashes in 1969 near Khabarovsk where he claimed his tank destroyed several Chinese vehicles – three men in his company also died. Other citizens in a familiar refrain complained of a major cross-border influx of Chinese traders and settlers, illegal Chinese logging, illicit fishing in Lake Khanka’s fresh waters where both nations share a common aquatic border, and poaching of the region’s revered Siberian Tigers. Despite local concerns of this nature, this was a period of improving diplomatic relations between the two nations, with China on a slow upward trajectory after the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 and Boris Yeltsin’s diminished Russia still struggling to regain its footing after the USSR’s break-up in 1991.”

It is important to note that Russia has no territorial claims in Asia. Rather, she is a status quo power in the Far East. With substantially fewer conventional forces along the Sino-Russian border than the Cold War, she is essentially in a strategic defensive posture. Her nuclear deterrent is her regional guarantor while a sophisticated anti-access, aerial denial network centered on the nuclear ballistic missile submarine bastion in and around the Sea of Okhotsk makes attacking the overall region a thorny proposition.

Russia’s burgeoning “strategic partner” Beijing, however, is distinctly revisionist in its behavior in Asia and the Pacific, much as Russia aggressively conducts its business in the West. A key generational question is how Russia manages the rising, resource-hungry hegemon that is looming China—one that has far-reaching aspirations throughout Asia, including its announced Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that runs in part though former Soviet Central Asian regions. China, the only “great power” with a seemingly long-term national vision, has also declared its interest in a Polar Silk Road as well.

The Russia-China military relationship continues to evolve and is a logical progression following deepening political and economic ties. Pragmaticallym the Amur-Ussuri territorial disputes were diplomatically resolved in 2004–5, enabling enhanced military cooperation though long-term generational issues remain. While Chinese-Russian military activities have in the past been mostly symbolic and representational, they appear increasingly interactive. The PLA, not blooded since its brusque 1979 defeat by Vietnam, likely hopes to learn from Russia’s newly gained fighting expertise derived since 2014 in eastern Ukraine and Syria. What is key to determine is if their interaction evolves more ominously into interoperability exercises where substantial and varied forces can operate in tandem and jointly in coordinated operations.

Dating back to 2005, Russia and China have exercised modest forces together in a mostly “counterterrorist” role in Central Asia and in Russia as part of the Chinese-driven Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Notably, SCO Exercise Peace Mission 2018, involving China, Russia and six other nations, including newly added India and Pakistan, is currently underway in Chelyabinsk (just east of the Ural Mountains). Bilaterally, they have participated in several small scale naval exercises in the Baltics (2017), South China Sea (2016) and eastern Mediterranean (2015), where they have been mostly “show the flag” operations designed more to convey sharp signals abroad and show partner support. Presaging Vostok-18, Russian air transport and elite airborne units conducted a snap readiness exercise in August in likely preparation of deployment east for the exercise. Additionally, a widely publicized Russian naval exercise in the Mediterranean to support Syria operations will be ongoing with twenty-five vessels of various sizes and likely will be included in the overall Vostok-18 personnel count.

It is important to understand that the Russians have a declared four-year cycle with long-planned exercises rotating annually between four Military Districts: Zapad (Western), Vostok (Eastern), Kavkaz (Southern) and Tsentr (Center). They are widely advertised, command major media attention domestically and abroad, and numerous international military attaches are invited as observers as I was to Kavkaz (Black Sea region) in 2012 and Zapad (Kaliningrad) in 2013. These are much different than the potentially more dangerous and destabilizing unannounced “snap” readiness exercise that have proliferated in recent years. The newly established Northern Fleet Military District focused on Russia’s “High North” also sorties assets during these exercises. The ramp-up for these major “Cecil B. DeMille” type extravaganzas are widely choreographed and involve much more than just conducting maneuvers and a big concluding firepower demonstration. They are in fact, major Russian national endeavors involving many thousands of civilians and support personnel, such as railway troops that figure into the exercise’s overall numbers. They include marshalling and moving forces and supplies over Russia’s vast railway, air and immature road networks, mobilizing reserves, organizing logistics including medical facilities, laying tactical fuel pipelines, sortieing ships and even exercising nuclear command and control as occurred in last year’s Zapad 2018. Quarterbacking the effort will be senior leaders and general staff operating within Moscow’s new National Military Command Center. Amidst heavy media coverage, President Vladimir Putin will also assuredly visit the exercise. In sum, these are society-wide efforts in which the full civil-military go-to-war apparatus of the Russian state is exercised. This does not mean Russia wants war, but is preparing for such in a way that is difficult for our more liberal-democratic societies to comprehend.

Why does Russia place such emphasis and media attention on these large set-piece exercises? Why this expensive, resource burning annual effort that unnerves Russia’s neighbors while both motivating and unsettling Russian citizenry?

One way to tackle this dichotomy is to go back to fundamentals regarding a Russia that lives through a prism of real, perceived . . . and contrived . . . existential threats. When wondering what drives the Russians to their seemingly counterintuitive and even self-defeating xenophobic behaviors, we must remember to review their geography, history and demography from which flow the nature of their regime and resultant social system and economy. Today’s resource-rich Russia, with its relatively small, western-weighted population, is set within a gigantic eleven-time zone Eurasian landmass that was mostly cut from the hide of nations and civilizations by former Czarist and Soviet rulers over the past five hundred years or so. As such, Russia has immensely long terrestrial borders . . . think of them as exposed flanks . . . with the melting Arctic widening into a northern flank as well. Its approximately 145 million citizens are about 40 percent of the population of the United States (320 million), one-third of the European Union (500 million) and about one-ninth of China (1.3 billion). China’s ground border with Russia alone runs over 2,300 miles, and while not an issue today, much of Moscow’s Far East was annexed from a weak Qing dynasty in the mid-1800s. This demographic imbalance between Russia and China is starkly apparent in the Russian Far East and Siberia, and as domestic Chinese natural resources inexorably diminish could be a major factor in the years ahead.

Again, to remind, Russia—in part due to its own imperial and Soviet expansion—has throughout its millennia of history been at war along its borders with massive loss of life. She barely survived several bouts of near annihilation including the Mongols from which some Russians organically still retain a visceral phobia of the East. Bookending this medieval horror, within the lifetime of today’s older grandparents, came the merciless Nazis from the West, from whom a staggering twenty million to twenty-six million Soviets perished. These factors clearly play in how the Russian people view external threats and how the regime leverages these perceptions to help mobilize the population. They should not, however, be used, or accepted as a pretext for aggressive revisionist actions.

Challenges regarding its smaller population and sanctions hobbled finances mean that Russia is hard-pressed to field in peace-time a one-million active duty military force. Additionally, over 30 percent of its personnel consist of difficult to manage one-year conscripts. This main force competes with robust security services and an approximately 250,000-strong National Guard. While a considerable force, Russia’s vastness, and widespread military commitments in places like Syria, Eastern Ukraine, Transnistria, Armenia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan rapidly diffuse it’s standing force, requiring major mobilization and training exercises such as this year’s Vostok-18 that will entail rapid shunting of forces across Russia’s colossal Eurasian landmass. This is a major reason Russia regularly drills as it does for potential war in a nationwide effort and why so much emphasis is put on territorial mobilization and defense.

All these factors reveal why it was absolute prudent, transactional foreign policy for China and Russia to resolve the border disputes that plagued their relations. While vulnerable to potential future problems including an increasing resource imbalance especially with oil and natural gas, both nations have bigger fish to fry, whether Russia’s issues to the west and south, and in China’s case, in the southeast Pacific, and with India to a lesser extent. Both needed calm borders and a more insulated trading relationship such as their massive $400 billion natural gas deal signed in 2014. Making increased military interaction more attractive is also the shared perception that the United States and its allies are squarely blocking their more autocratic aspirations and directly threatening their regimes. Neither have major allies or are part of a well-organized security alliance as is NATO. They are loath about being internationally isolated or contained, which explains why both, even while pursuing different agenda, are usually lockstep with each other on major security issues in the UN and other international fora.

Therefore, U.S. and allied policy regarding both Russia and China should continue to be strong and predictable focused on the specific issues that both challenge and benefit relations. Allies must be firmly defended and partners supported. Legal international boundaries and protocols must be respected and if need be enforced. What we should not do, however, is default toward treating both nuclear-tipped Russia and China as a conjoined threat thereby creating a future potential “self-fulfilling prophecy” where they could—especially if they perceive being isolated—temporally ally in some type of powerful, transactional pact. We should watch and learn from these military exercises, assure allies and partners, but not overreact to their actions and rhetoric nor appear to try to drive a wedge between them. The wedges are already there, those of the vast regions history, geography demography and resources which will inevitably play out in the generations ahead.

Brig. Gen. (retired) Peter Zwack writes from the Institute for National Security Studies within the National Defense University. He served as the United States Senior Defense Official and Attaché to Russia during contentious 2012-2014. Dating back to 1997, 2000 and 2012 he has traveled extensively throughout Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. These are his personal views and perspectives.

All rights reserved © Peter B Zwack

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