The weeks after the Crimean annexation saw Russian military power on brash display. Soldiers and hardware paraded down the central thoroughfare of Sevastopol. In eastern Ukraine the show was restrained to hold to the fiction that only Russian volunteers had joined the rebel side. Defence Minister Shoigu trumpeted the achievement of Russia’s forces in protecting Russian interests: there was nothing the Americans could do, he and Putin declared, to frighten Russia into timidity. Not only were its army, navy and air force capable of defending the country but also, when the situation called for it, they could attack. In global politics, Putin wanted America to learn, power was henceforth going to be shared.
Modernization of the military had begun in earnest after the Georgian war of 2008. Saakashvili had been humbled and Georgia’s security and foreign policy lay in tatters, but Putin and his advisers were unimpressed by the success. It had been an ill-coordinated performance by their armed forces. The Russian army had superior equipment and the advantage of surprise, and yet although it won the war in a matter of days, it had still failed to deliver its blows with satisfactory efficiency. Since the late 1980s the country’s capacity for military deterrence had largely depended on its strategic nuclear firepower. But its conventional forces had seen a steady decline, and even the intercontinental nuclear warheads and their rockets and submarines required modernization. This was not something Putin would tolerate any longer, especially now the Defence Ministry was boasting that Russia was no longer confining its ambitions to Russia and its ‘near abroad’. On 26 February 2014, the very day before Russian troops took over the whole of Sevastopol, Shoigu talked of Russia’s intention to station its armed forces in faraway Singapore, the Seychelles, Nicaragua and Venezuela.1
Putin refused to listen to those who wanted defence spending to remain at the old level. In the early 2000s there was a steady rise in Russian military expenditure: by 2013 it was 172 per cent higher than in 2000, achieved largely through increased revenue from oil and gas exports. In 2000 3.6 per cent of gross domestic product had been allocated to the military. Thirteen years later it was 4.2 per cent,2 and by 2016, despite the recession that had taken hold two years earlier, it was raised to 4.5 per cent.3 Predictably, this would prove hard to sustain, and the projection for 2017 was to pull it down to 3.1 per cent to staunch the haemorrhaging of funds from the Finance Ministry.4
All this jarred with the strategic assumptions made by America since the 1990s, when the recent arms reduction treaties had induced the Americans to scale down their presence in Europe. Yeltsin’s ardour for a partnership with the Western powers had fostered an assumption among politicians and military planners in the United States and allied countries that it was safe to strip back the dimensions of defensive readiness. The trend continued into the new millennium after the terrorist destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, with NATO’s main activity redirected to Afghanistan. Iraq was added to the West’s agenda in 2003, and the United States soon found itself engaged in armed intervention across a vast zone stretching from Libya in north Africa through the Middle East and across to Afghanistan. From autumn 2011 President Obama revealed his intention to break free of this entanglement, and ordered a revision of American global policy to shift priorities towards the Asia-Pacific region and America’s increasing rivalry with the People’s Republic of China. This became known as a strategic ‘pivot’ away from Europe and the Middle East, and was confirmed by Obama in an address to the Australian parliament in November. The following year, albeit reluctantly and on a limited scale, Obama intervened in the Libyan revolt against Gaddafi. America, Kremlin analysts concluded, was no longer committed to clasping Europe to its bosom.
The Americans now kept only fifty-three tanks and forty-eight helicopters on European soil, and the number of German tanks fell from 2,815 to 322. NATO’s European member states were generally cutting their defence expenditure – by 2013 on average they devoted 1.6 per cent of national gross domestic product to such purposes, down from 2.7 per cent in 1990.5 In 2014–16 only the United Kingdom and Poland complied with NATO’s agreed target of at least 2 per cent budget expenditure on defence, with Estonia committing itself to attaining that level by 2020. Most of the allies showed no sign of getting even near.
Measured by the number and quality of tanks, Russian military preponderance was unmistakable. But the appearance of decline in the American armed forces was illusory. At the same time as America was running down its conventional forces in Europe, it was also overhauling and extending its anti-missile defence system. By 2007 this annoyed the Russians enough for them to suspend their commitment to the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. Signed in 1990, it had been one of the milestones on the road to ending the Cold War. Russia’s definitive withdrawal in 2015 was a warning from the Kremlin that it was willing to retaliate against a threat to the Russian national interest – and by then, faced with the West’s reaction to the Crimean annexation in the previous year, Putin and his associates felt they had nothing to lose.
In Soviet times the working assumption had been that the larger its armed forces, the greater the USSR’s security. Efficiency was lost in the drive for size. The policy had changed under Gorbachëv and then Yeltsin, but now Putin ordered the Defence Ministry to formulate a plan for Russian forces to become a realistic match for any potential enemy.6 Quantity now gave way to quality, with the overall number of Russian troops reduced. Serving officers and soldiers fell from a million to 845,000; the number of battle tanks tumbled even more drastically, from 12,920 to 2,550. By the end of 2016, all NCOs in the Russian army were professional recruits rather than ex-conscripts.7
On 26 December 2014 Putin had signed off some amendments to the ‘military doctrine’ in place since 2010,8 to take account of the change in world politics, especially after Russia’s armed action against Ukraine. A week earlier Putin had laid out his ideas at the Defence Ministry Board:
. . . we must develop all the components of our strategic nuclear forces, which constitute the most important factor in maintaining global balance and truly rule out the possibility of large-scale aggression against Russia. In 2015, more than fifty intercontinental ballistic missiles will join the strategic nuclear forces – you can imagine what a powerful force this is. The task is to continue modernizing our strategic aviation and put the two missile-carrying submarines Vladimir Monomakh and Alexander Nevski on combat alert.
He went on to list a further commitment to modernize Russia’s ground-based nuclear forces, developing new strategic bombers and overhauling the Russian missile defence system.9 The doctrine was unequivocal about Russia reserving the right to deploy its nuclear forces against any external offensive, nuclear or otherwise, that threatened the existence of the state – and it would be the president who would take the ultimate decision.10
On 4 June 2014 Putin defended Russia against the charge of militarism, arguing that the defence budget had risen by barely 0.1 per cent of gross domestic product.11 The following year, in an interview with Corriere della Sera, he stressed that America vastly outstripped Russia in its budget for its armed forces:
The USA’s military expenditure is higher than that of all the countries in the world put together. The total military expenditure of the NATO countries is ten times – please note that it’s ten times higher than the military expenditure of the Russian Federation.
Russia has practically no bases abroad. We have the remnants of our armed forces which have stayed on since Soviet times in Tajikistan to deal with the dangerous terrorism situation on the border with Afghanistan. The same role is played by our military air base in Kyrgyzia; it too is aimed at dealing with the terrorism threat and was created at the request of the Kyrgyz authorities after an attack on Kyrgyzstan by terrorists from Afghanistan. We have kept a military unit since Soviet times at a military base in Armenia. It plays a certain stabilizing role in the region, but it is not targeted against anyone. We have liquidated our bases in various regions of the world, including Cuba, Vietnam and so on. This means that our policy in this respect doesn’t carry a global offensive, aggressive character.
Putin asked the newspaper to publish a map of all the American military bases round the world so that everyone could see the contrast between America and Russia.12
There had been hopes in Moscow, at the start of Obama’s first presidency in 2009, that the new administration might agree to suspend or even terminate the anti-missile plans his predecessor George W. Bush had introduced. Despite a lack of personal chemistry between Obama and Putin a softening of Russo-American relations did indeed take place, eased by the fact that it was Medvedev, not Putin, who was Russian president from 2008. Obama and Medvedev got on well socially as well as politically from their first meeting. Neither intended to pass up the chance for improved relations. Quiet progress was made in talks about nuclear missiles, and by 8 April 2010 the two presidents were able to sign the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), limiting the United States and the Russian Federation to 1,550 strategic warheads apiece. Scheduled to last for ten years, the treaty was the most impressive achievement in decreasing the risk of thermonuclear war, whether through political confrontation or by accident, since the years of Gorbachëv, Reagan and Bush Sr.13
Yet both the Americans and Russians knew that nuclear military power was one of the keys to global influence, and both sides pressed on with the modernization of their warheads.14 Obama was as enthusiastic about it as Medvedev and Putin. Putin had always understood that Russia’s strategic missiles were essential for the maintenance of his country’s international authority. They were a high-value chip in negotiations over Ukraine. Russian ground forces were superior to anything the Ukrainians could assemble, but Moscow’s strategic and tactical nuclear forces were completely unmatched. Putin might be willing to reduce his arsenal, but he would never bargain it away entirely. In 2015, when it became known that the United States had failed to run down its stock of weaponry in line with the New START schedule, Putin said he would consider withdrawing Russia from the treaty, omitting to acknowledge that the Russians had been equally slow to comply with their obligations.
While disquiet was voiced about international tensions, no countries were picked out by the Kremlin as real or potential enemies: Putin and his inner group had decided to avoid giving needless offence by naming the United States as Russia’s likeliest future adversary. Instead, Russia’s official military doctrine merely noted the global menace NATO posed by its infringement of the norms of international law and its eastward growth towards Russia’s frontiers – a reference to NATO forces in the Baltic States.15 But to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with world politics it was obvious Putin held America in his sights, and though the doctrine made no direct reference to Ukraine, alarm was expressed about the danger of destabilization in neighbouring states. The doctrine highlighted the menace of the ‘political and military pressure’ being applied to Russia. Moscow also continued to object to the Americans’ anti-missile defence systems in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic.
Putin likes to appear unperturbed about Western economic sanctions, but on 3 October 2016 he momentarily gave a different impression. A bill he passed for publication by the Federal Assembly ostensibly aimed to suspend the long-standing agreement with the United States on international commerce in plutonium nuclear material – but why would Russia want to end the restrictions on such a dangerous trade? The answer came in what Moscow required of Washington for the agreement to be reinstated. Putin’s demands reflected simmering resentments. The Americans had to reduce their forces and ‘military infrastructure’ in the countries that joined NATO after 2000 to the levels they had been at before. Having complained for years about NATO enlargement, the Russians were at last spelling out their terms for a settlement of security questions in eastern and east-central Europe,16 and essentially what Putin wanted was a return to the status quo. Russia’s actions in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria had given notice of its status and authority as a great power.
If Washington wanted to have better relations with Moscow, American concessions were essential, and maybe at that point in the American presidential election campaign Putin believed there could be only one winner, Hillary Clinton, and only a miracle could save Donald Trump from defeat. The Russian president’s aim, then, was apparently to send an intimidating message to the presumed next American president. He was preparing for a bare-knuckle contest when Clinton entered the White House.
Putin could have sharpened his case about Russia’s peaceful intentions by calling attention to the cut made in Russian military spending in 2016, but this would have undermined his parallel desire to assure Russian public opinion that he was standing firm in defence of the national interest. The Finance Ministry was strongly in favour of reducing expenditure on the armed forces as the dip in world market prices for oil and gas started to bite, but, according to reports, was hotly resisted by Defence Minister Shoigu, who shouted at Finance Minister Siluanov that he was jeopardizing crucial agreed plans for the modernization of the armed forces.17 Siluanov replied that there was no longer the money for them: they would cost double what the Finance Ministry thought prudent. Putin listened as the two sides clashed. If Shoigu got his way, Siluanov explained, social welfare expenditure would have to be hacked back.18 This touched a raw nerve: Putin and Kudrin, Siluanov’s predecessor, had quarrelled over Kudrin’s call to speed up the reduction of welfare payments, and Putin had accused Kudrin of underestimating the political risks. But Siluanov had chosen his argument carefully, knowing Putin was chary about annoying those parts of the electorate who depended on the government’s welfare payouts. Putin chaired working groups to come up with a compromise, and eventually came down in favour of decreasing military expenditure,19 though the details of the discussion remain secret.
Meanwhile he was continuing to press the West to recognize the aggressive posture it appeared to Russia’s eyes to be taking in recent years: ‘American submarines are on permanent alert off the Norwegian coast – the flight time of the missiles to Moscow is seventeen minutes. But we long ago dismantled all our bases in Cuba, even those without strategic importance. And you want to say that we behave aggressively?’20
Defence Minister Shoigu weighed in by drawing attention to the American anti-missile systems installed in Poland and Romania, and asked why NATO’s surveillance activity along Russian borders had intensified. Only 107 flights were recorded in the entire decade of the 1990s, but in 2016 alone 852 entered the register. It was this, contended the Defence Ministry, that had forced Russia to increase the number of fighter flights by 61 per cent to prevent violations of Russian air space in the Baltic, on the Black Sea and in the Arctic. The increase in maritime reconnaissance by Western powers offered the same grounds for reacting. Shoigu announced with horror that the British were holding training exercises on Salisbury Plain with Russian-produced tanks and Russian army uniforms: always Russia the designated enemy.21
Shoigu also highlighted the decision by the Warsaw NATO Summit in July 2016 to deploy some of its forces to countries of eastern Europe, an exercise codenamed Enhanced Forward Presence. The next year Estonia acquired a battalion of 800 troops led by British commanders and strengthened by Danish and French units, and Typhoon war planes were sent from Germany. The Canadians led a battalion of 1,200 troops to Latvia that included Albanians, Italians, Poles, Spanish and Slovenians; the German battalion of the same size that went to Lithuania contained units from Belgium, Croatia, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Norway. The largest battalion was the American one in Poland that came with 250 tanks. At the same time the governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania announced their intention to bring their military expenditure up to 2 per cent of their gross national product.22 Russia’s forces still vastly outnumbered those of the Baltic countries, but NATO had to show its solidarity, went the thinking, with those members who felt under threat after the Crimean annexation. It was also calculated that Russia would refrain from conducting an operation that might result in deaths of soldiers from the wider NATO alliance.
But Baltic politicians continued to worry about the fragility of their countries’ security, especially when the Russians announced their plan to hold a military exercise in Belarus in September 2017 involving 100,000 of its troops. Zapad-2017, as it was called, was a joint exercise with the Belarusian armed forces, and aimed against an imagined enemy known as Vneshegoria. The chosen terrain, commentators noted, bore a distinct resemblance to parts of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.23 In Poland there was concern that the Russian plan envisaged a nuclear attack on Warsaw.24
In advance of the exercise, Ukraine’s President Poroshenko told his parliament the Kremlin was preparing for ‘an offensive war of continental proportions’. There was speculation that the Kremlin was planning, not too discreetly, for a potential international crisis when it might move Russian air and ground forces into the Baltic countries.25 Nor did the Ukrainians discount the possibility that the Russians might deliberately foment such a crisis. Unsurprisingly, Poroshenko continued to plead for the delivery of advanced lethal weaponry from the West. Putin was accompanied by his Chief of General Staff for the operations, which were held near St Petersburg. Defence Minister Shoigu pronounced the whole exercise a success and spoke out against the ‘lies’ in the Western media about Russia’s aggressive intentions. Proud that their latest equipment and training performed up to expectations and pleased by the agitation caused in the capitals of NATO members, Russia enjoyed the attention from Western politicians and military planners.
In summer 2018 the Russian General Staff held another such exercise in Siberia, this time involving Chinese and Mongolian forces.26 The obvious purpose was to stress that Russia remained as much an Asian as a European power. Obama’s announcements in 2011–12 of his new priority of the so-called Pacific Rim had underscored the strategic importance of the Siberian territories for Russia and now, with this Vostok-2018 exercise, Putin intended to show the Americans he was serious about protecting Russia’s interests throughout and even beyond its domains.
Evidence accumulated that the Russians were developing and testing new cruise missiles that could threaten the security of countries in Europe. Two battalions of the missile system were based near Volgograd in southern Russia.27 Putin ignored American complaints about infringements of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachëv, and nothing was done by the American side until October 2018, when President Trump, who had unexpectedly triumphed over Hillary Clinton in the election, announced his intention to retaliate by withdrawing unilaterally from the treaty. This appeared a tit-for-tat exchange between the two signatories, but there was more to it. China had never been included in the provisions of the treaty despite Gorbachëv’s complaints about the omission, and by the time of Obama’s presidency it was not the Russians but the Americans who spoke of the Chinese as a menace. Trump and his National Security Advisor John Bolton had searched for ways to counter China’s growing military strength, and now Putin’s cheating gave them some cover for their decision to withdraw from the treaty without naming the Chinese as an enemy. Tensions mounted. The triangular rivalry of America, China and Russia was set to be a cause of global tension throughout the twenty-first century – and the Russians had as much reason for agitation as everyone else.