The military dimension of Russia’s connection with Europe

ABSTRACT

The Russian challenge to the European security system is internal rather than external, because despite all the political efforts at distancing Russia from Europe, the indivisibility remains undiminished. The underlying assumption for Russia’s course is that the West is in irreversible decline, and the conclusion about the dissolution of the West-controlled world order is established in the key doctrinal documents. Instead of passively waiting for this meltdown to develop, it makes perfect sense for the Russian leadership to accelerate it pro-actively, using various levers, including military force. Moscow acts on the assumption that its “unconventional” methods could yield results only if augmented by military threats, against which the Europeans cannot master convincing counter-argument. The imperative to sustain and update credibility of these threats necessitates allocation of greater share of available resources to military build-up, which clashes with economic rationale of reducing this burden in the situation of protracted stagnation.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• Europe
• security
• military
• confrontation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Dr Pavel K. Baev is a Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).

Notes

1 Official translation at the presidential website (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/54667).

2 This insistence is conceptualised as “overcoming Euro-centrism” in Miller and Lukyanov (2016).

3 The metaphor was coined by Alexander Pushkin in Medny Vsadnik (the Copper Horseman), where the construction of St. Petersburg on a desolate place prone to flooding is poetically immortalised.

4 One outstanding examination of this phenomenon is Etkind (2011).

5 One of the best academic examinations of this success is Lieven (2011).

6 It was Chancellor Alexander Gorchakov who coined the formula “La Russie ne boude pas; elle se recueille”. Opening the monument to this outstanding diplomat in October 2014, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov mentioned his idea that “we should follow the European vector of Russian foreign policy”, which on the background of the Ukraine crisis was rather counter-intuitive. The translation of his remarks can be found on the MID website (http://www.mid.ru/en/web/guest/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/717230).

7 On successes and setbacks in military reforms in that period, see Menning (2000).

8 Military cooperation with the USSR was one of the key drivers for rebuilding the German military machine; a useful recent assessment is Jonson (2016).

9 The Treaty of Brotherhood was signed in Moscow already in 1921; on the initiative for cancelling it in the course of quarrel triggered by the air clash in November 2015; see Shakarian (2017).

10 A thorough examination of the breakdown of the Soviet-Turkish proto-alliance can be found in Hasanli (2011).

11 One useful source on this hugely controversial twist in Russia’s European policy is Nekrich (1997).

12 One of the first Russian data-based arguments on the balance of forces in the Western theatre was Shlykov (1988).

13 The role of that alliance remains a controversial issue in the present-day Russian re-reading of the history of WWII, so that about two-thirds of respondents still express confidence that the USSR was able to achieve victory without any help; see “Great Patriotic War” (2017). One concise and sound historic argument is Chaplygin (2017).

14 Unique collection of relevant document is Mastny and Byrne (2005).

15 One sharp re-reading of that statement at the start of the Ukraine crisis is Cohen (2014).

16 Lucas (2017) reflects on the impact of his The New Cold War (1998) book (Lucas, 1998).

17 Russia finalised its withdrawal in March 2015; see Anthony (2015).

18 One important contribution to the ever-evolving debates on this issue is Kramer (2009).

19 On the significance of the Kosovo war in Russia’s relations with the West, see Chapter 3 in Allison (2013). Sharp analysis can also be found in Medvedev and van Ham (2002).

20 One of the most alarmed and informed reflections on that war is Asmus (2010).

21 On the cancellation of the latter program, see Bodner (2014).

22 One detailed investigation of the engagement of Russian forces in the war in Eastern Ukraine is Czuperski et al. (2015).

23 The case is presented in an investigative reporting by Novaya gazeta; see Kostyuchenko (2015).

24 A recent contribution to these rather quixotic debates is Karaganov (2017).

25 Official data on both costs and casualties are entirely unreliable, but such news as the death of Lt-General Valery Asapov in September 2017 still make an impact on public opinion; see Sharkov (2017).

26 Every proposition in this “Doctrine” is open to interpretation; see McDermott (2016).

27 Excellent data on military exercises are collected in Hemicker (2017).

28 The assessments in Shireff (2016) can perhaps be treated as alarmist, but the conclusions of NATO’s 2017 Progress Report are definitely sober. See Gebauer et al. (2017).

29 Refreshing criticism of these views is Kortunov (2017).

30 Good impression of the initial projects in the Helsinki CoE can be gained by visiting its website (https://www.hybridcoe.fi/).

31 Alexei Kudrin, former finance minister, keeps arguing that only a reduction of defence expenditures can lift Russia from the trajectory of stagnation; see Lomskaya (2017).

32 Useful collection of expert views on this trajectory can be found in Wimbush and Portale (2017).