President Putin at first refused any help from other countries to lift the wreckage, which was of course full of sensitive military information but also implied human tragedy and political mismanagement. After a few days of humiliating ineffectiveness and failure, including official lies about the sailors still being alive and Russian rescue teams working their way close to them, a Norwegian offer was finally accepted and a salvage company from Norway brought in, but the divers were not allowed to go anywhere near where the Russian naval command knew the sensitive information was hidden. Putin did not at first find it necessary to interrupt his holiday at the Black Sea. After six days of handling the crisis from a distance, however, he realized that this indifference would not be forgiven by the man in the street, the sailors’ widows and the men in uniform, so he took action to avoid the impression that the political authorities were heartless and out of touch, that the naval command was only interested in saving its skin, and that, Soviet system or no, human lives did not count. It is to Putin’s credit that he finally decided to invite the Norwegians in, regardless of the admirals’ interest in letting the Kursk – and the truth – rest on the bottom of the sea. Of course, Putin also wanted Russian naval engineers to find out what had really sent the pride of the Russian navy to its early grave. Finally, he took the decision to allot substantial payments to the families of the dead men to help them rebuild their lives. It was late in the day when he preserved at least the appearance of competence and caring.
Beyond the world of conspiracy theories the Kursk prompted speculation that an ultra-modern torpedo with liquid fuel had been mishandled on loading, that the captain realized danger was looming and did not deem the submarine seaworthy, and that the few sailors who had survived the initial blast never had a chance to escape from the grave 120 metres below the stormy surface of the Barents Sea.
The loss of the monster submarine, twenty metres high, had many implications. It revealed not only the crew’s poor training, inadequate for handling such high-tech wizardry as the Kursk and its dangerous cargo. It also revealed dramatic failure on the part of the Kremlin to handle the sense of frustration, doubt and open unrest set in motion by the disaster. Above all, it forced the General Staff as well as the Ministry of Defence into some serious rethinking as to the future of nuclear deterrence. Any effective modernization of the navy, which would also involve refurbishing the satellite systems guiding the nuclear-tipped missiles, would by far exceed the modest USD 16 billion defence budget of the time. So the Kursk disaster not only tested the government, the admirals and the President, it put a question mark over Russia’s future nuclear strategy.
Moreover, ever since Peter the Great naval ambition had been Russia’s attempt to overcome the limitations of a landlocked power and develop a naval capability second to none. The Kursk would have been one of the vessels accompanying the aircraft carrier that Putin had intended to send into the Mediterranean in order to demonstrate a naval presence approaching that of the mighty US Sixth Fleet. It was the navy that seemed to promise the Russians a chance to keep up with NATO forces and the very ambitious naval programme of the Chinese. That dream had disappeared off the coast of Murmansk for a long time to come. The refusal to admit defeat in the high-tech race for naval supremacy was the reason for both the initial clumsiness of the response to the crisis and the long-term inability to come up with a coherent strategy for the future of the navy and, by implication, the fine-tuning of the nuclear balance.
The strategic implications of the disaster were far-ranging. The political shockwaves could be felt even behind the red-brick walls of the Kremlin, and crisis management was visibly inadequate and poor. The Kursk catastrophe left Russians as well as the rest of the world asking, once again: who is Putin? It took the shine off the carefully crafted appearance of strong and decisive leadership. A naval officer in Murmansk complained openly: ‘I thought I had a president. Now it turns out he is merely another state official.’ Meanwhile, by the time Putin was up for re-election in 2004, the miserable death of the 118 sailors had been all but forgotten.
A claim to world power
Russia’s claim to world power rests on three assumptions: its permanent seat on the UN Security Council, with the power of veto in matters big and small; the wealth of mineral resources; and the strength of its armed forces, especially the nuclear arsenal. The UN veto, however, has not been effective in stopping NATO from conducting the Kosovo war in 1999 or the US attacking Iraq in 2003, nor has it prevented the government in Pristina from declaring Kosovo’s independence in 2008, followed by immediate recognition by the US and most Western countries – despite, in this case, very valid doubts on the part of Russia. Russia’s participation in the Lebanon UNIFIL peacekeeping effort amounted to a meagre 400-man engineers battalion – as compared with 3000 Italians, 2000 from France, 1200 naval personnel from Germany, 1200 from Spain, 500 from Poland and 400 from Belgium. Is this the role of a country claiming to be a world power? Instead of displaying great power status, wielding the UN card can invite public humiliation and domestic frustration, while the nuclear arsenal looks rather inadequate and out of proportion in most of today’s and tomorrow’s regional and asymmetric conflicts: big toys for big boys, not good for export promotion and utterly useless in the nasty little wars Russia is facing.
After the end of the Cold War the thinking of the Russian General Staff and the Ministry of Defence in Moscow has gone through changes that amount to a revolution. In the Soviet past, the basic philosophy was that more is always better, until in the nuclear race the obvious question was raised: when is enough enough? The answer was obvious, that production and deployment of nuclear weapons had far exceeded any military rationale and had become a self-propelling process devouring ever scarcer resources. This sober assessment, when it dawned on both sides in the nuclear arms race, was fundamental in promoting and shaping the arms control processes throughout the 1970s and’80s and helped both sides to continue and in fact accelerate the reduction after the end of the Cold War.
No more military overreach
Modern Russian military policy is a component of national security policy, based on two lengthy documents, the National Security Concept and the Foreign Policy Concept of Russia. The Security Council, presided over by the President, adopted the official new version (after the first revision in 1993) of the National Security Concept in January 2000 – not long after NATO had reformulated its own Strategic Guidelines for the first time since 1991. Soon after, Russia’s Security Council approved the military doctrine. Everything, however, continued to be dictated by the shortage of human, material and organizational resources. In short, military readiness was not a high priority.
It was at a Russian-Finnish military seminar in 2004 in Helsinki that the rationale behind Russian strategic thinking and military doctrine was partially revealed. High-ranking General Staff officers from Moscow brought a sombre analysis to the conference table, saying that contrary to much wishful thinking the significance of military power in the post-bipolar world had not diminished. On the contrary, they said, they observed more and more states, released from the grim discipline of the nuclear stand-off between the superpowers, asserting their economic and political interests through military power, while the overarching political institutions were clearly in decline. The US was not mentioned, but it was clearly implicated. The Russians expressed the need to fundamentally revise their thinking about international security and it sounded like an invitation to the West to help in the process and not stir up new conflicts.