Is Vladimir Putin a strategic genius or not? In a recent War on the Rocks article, the scholar Joshua Rovner comes down hard in the “not” camp, arguing that Putin is a terrible strategist and laying out the ramifications of his strategic incompetence for the United States and its NATO allies. This is another salvo in a long-running debate between competing Western narratives of Russia: an alarmist position perpetually worried that “the Russians are coming,” and a dismissive one that believes Russia is a giant Potemkin village destined to fall apart as a result of self-defeating behavior. Unfortunately both views are wrong, but Western analysis often see-saws between these two perspectives as soon as one falls out of favor. One of the shortfalls of Rovner’s article is that it fails to explain what Russia’s strategy is, which in turn raises a more important question: Does American failure to understand Russia’s strategy make it a poor one?
Russia in perspective
First, there needs to be a more balanced and informed understanding of Russia. A quote, variously attributed over the years to Churchill, Talleyrand, or Metternich sums it up well: “Russia is never as strong as she looks, nor as weak as she looks.” Russia is a regional power in structural decline, but retains a remarkable capacity to muddle through, hang around, and cause trouble. It has often appeared to be the sick man of Europe (a term originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century), technologically backwards, with a political system that does not meet the demands of modern society. Napoleon and Hitler, among others, have made the mistake of assuming that Russian weakness and backwardness made the country an easy mark.
Since early 2014, Russia has suffered from a recession followed by an economic crisis, largely due to a sharp decline in oil prices. While Western sanctions have multiplied the hardship, Russia’s economic problems are structural and its current economic crisis a result of global factors that have nothing to do with events in Ukraine. They are due, in fact, to Saudi Arabia’s efforts to keep oil prices low in an effort to crush the U.S. shale extraction industry (and from a U.S. point of view, this is nothing to be happy about, even if it comes at Russia’s expense). China’s economic downturn is also little cause for cheer.
Whether a good or bad strategist, Putin is no economist. Even his close associates like former finance minister Alexei Kudrin reminded him of this on a regular basis. Russia’s budget is inexorably tied to the price of energy, as was the Soviet Union’s. Vladimir Putin did not invent this dependence, but he has done little to improve it beyond some technological bright spots and the defense industry. Yet Putin’s domestic support is somewhat explained by the fact that Russia experienced an economic boom for much of his rule, which translated into higher standards of living and expendable income.
Despite economic weakness, Russia is militarily the strongest it has been since the Cold War, fielding the most capable, modernized, and well-funded force it is likely going to have for the foreseeable future. This year, spending on defense as a share of GDP will likely peak at 4.2 percent, up from 3.4 percent in 2014. The total force has been growing and could be over 800,000 today, with a consistently increasing percentage of contract soldiers that are tested through snap drills and exercises. No NATO country is increasing defense spending, the size of the force, and its readiness, and procuring new equipment , at the rate Russia has been since 2009. Due to the current economic crisis, Russia’s modernization programs will take a haircut, but its main limitations are technical rather than financial. Russia may not be able to defeat NATO, but its conventional power is sufficient to impose major costs in a conflict with the West or crush any former Soviet republic.
The Kremlin knows how to use force
Rovner argues that Russia’s annexation of Crimea is “ham-fisted” and states that Putin lacks understanding of the “relationship between military violence and political objectives.” This is a puzzling assessment given that Russia has consistently demonstrated its ability to use military force to achieve desired political ends. Russia’s counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaign in Chechnya was by all accounts brutal, but successful. It stabilized a notoriously restless region to the point that Russia could be bold enough to host the Sochi Olympics nearby in 2014. Russia’s brief war with Georgia in 2008 demonstrated terrible military inadequacies, but still achieved its strategic purpose by ending any serious consideration of NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. Eventually, that defeat also resulted in an inglorious end to President Mikhail Saakashvili’s political career in his country; Georgia seeks him on political charges and he now serves as governor of Odessa in Ukraine.
Compared with the war in Georgia, Russia’s annexation of Crimea demonstrated a decisive and competent use of force to achieve political ends. Without losing a single soldier, Moscow seized the most strategically important part of Ukraine, from which it can control almost the entire Black Sea. This secured basing rights for its fleet, and will allow it to deploy anti-access and area-denial weaponry, covering most of the sea and southern Ukraine. In and of itself, the loss of Crimea creates a permanent territorial dispute in Ukraine’s borders — a frozen conflict of sorts with strategic consequences for its aspirations of Western integration. In eastern Ukraine, Russia has demonstrated flexibility and willingness to escalate. In the span of only a few months, it has cycled from political warfare to state-sponsored insurgency, hybrid war, and limited conventional war. Granted, the first three proved ineffective in getting Ukraine and the West to negotiate a compromise that would lead to federalization, but they were economy of force measures, leaving room for escalation and improvisation as necessary.
Lawrence Freedman has also criticized Putin’s strategy in War on the Rocks. These assessments often fall victim to reading Putin’s speeches and statements as though Russia’s strategy can be found therein. Putin’s statements are not official declarations of policy, but instead a supporting theatrical role to whatever strategy is being implemented. Freedman believes it is unhelpful to call Putin a good strategist, but it is even more problematic to underestimate and misunderstand your opponent. From a purely analytical standpoint, Russia has done reasonably well in pursuit of his objectives in Ukraine. Whether weak or strong, Russia faced a basic challenge: how to impose control and influence on Ukraine, the second largest country in Europe. Certainly Moscow lacks the military strength to occupy all of Ukraine, but that is a null point. The point is to control Ukraine without owning it. The memory of the Soviet war in Afghanistan is still fresh in Russia, and its leadership has no interest in a costly proxy war with the West, especially one that would also destroy Ukraine in the process.
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In February 2014, Russia capitalized on local agitation and discord in eastern Ukraine through informal networks. Many in the West see this as a pre-planned contingency, but it is difficult to understand the basis for this theory. If it was a well planned-out special forces mission, a pudgy historical re-enactor named Igor Girkin, with a paramilitary rabble from Crimea, would not be leading it.
Instead Moscow tried to leverage the networks of business elites, oligarchs, and pro-Russian agitators that had been on the fringe of Ukraine’s politics. Ukraine was an oligarchy, with plenty of powerful non-state actors in the east that lost big when the president was ousted. They worked with Russia to take advantage of the confusion and public anxiety, setting up “people’s” mayors and governors, with Russian intelligence helping to orchestrate the protests. These self-declared anti-Maidan leaders barely lasted days and were arrested by local Ukrainian authorities. The effort was cheap political warfare, hardly the professional special forces operation that is often described in the West. The investment was actually quite low compared to what Russia hoped to gain out of it: Ukraine’s capitulation to a federalization scheme. One can conclude that this was either the worst planned and executed subversion effort in recent history, or more likely, the best Russia could come up with in a hurry.
Separatism in eastern Ukraine began as an ad hoc approach to get Ukraine on the cheap, and Russia simply kept escalating in a quest for the lowest price. After political warfare failed in March, Russia switched to direct action in April and May in the hope of scaring Ukraine into believing that a large-scale secession of “Novorossiya” was possible. Putin’s speeches were part of the effort to convince and frighten Kiev, not official statements of Russian strategy. A brief “hybrid war” followed from June to August, when Russia understood that Ukraine did indeed have the will to resist and still had some functioning military capability, enough to take on a small force of insurgents. At that point, only overt use of force would accomplish what Moscow wanted, hence it openly invaded.
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Putin doesn’t seem to be doing too badly
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Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
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