The MChS has been compared to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and both organizations are fulfilling a number of corresponding tasks. However, FEMA is a civilian organization and, with its around 14,000 personnel, considerably smaller than its Russian counterpart (FEMA website). As a quasi-military organization, the MChS does not really have a direct equivalent in the West to which it can be compared. The decision to keep a military element in this ministry as well as in a range of other force structures can be explained at least partially by the political leadership’s need to avoid exacerbating the problem of creating vast numbers of unemployed former service personnel after the ‘downsizing’ of the armed forces at the end of the Cold War. Moreover, the military experience of civil defence troops was also likely to be useful in the traumatic environment of disaster situations. During the Soviet era, specialized civil defence subunits were maintained in order to provide assistance to the population in the event of bombing raids and nuclear, biological or chemical attacks (Aleinik 2006). Throughout the post-Soviet period the civil defence troops and Military Rescue Units retained such a wartime role by law and continue to be tasked with the organization and coordination of Russian military forces for the purpose of civil defence not only during natural and man-made disasters, but also during wartime.
Right from the start of the ministry’s existence, its civil defence troops were able to gain considerable experience in providing crisis response and assisting civilian populations caught up in armed conflicts, both in Russia and internationally. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and as discussed in detail in chapter 4, ethnic conflicts erupted on the former Soviet territory and within Russia’s own borders. MChS troops were involved in aiding civilian populations in Tajikistan, Transnistria, North and South Ossetia as well as Abkhazia during the 1990s. Civil defence soldiers also operated alongside regular armed forces, MVD and FSB troops during both Chechen conflicts, where they restored vital services in the Chechen capital Grozny, provided shelter, food, water and medical aid and engaged in de-mining activities for humanitarian purposes (Grau and Thomas 1999).
In the aftermath of Russia’s five-day war with Georgia in August 2008, MChS troops provided aid to civilians in South Ossetia and to refugees that had fled the war zone and diffused mines and other explosives in civilian areas. The MChS also soon contributed to international crisis response and humanitarian operations. As such, it was a central component in a nascent Russian multilateralism which, as discussed in chapter 1, is an important function of the country’s military power. The ministry’s international activities are formalized in forty intergovernmental agreements and fifteen international statutes, detailing its partnerships with a range of international organizations, including the UN, NATO, the European Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. A major area of MChS’s international activity since 1993 has been in the sphere of humanitarian operations under the aegis of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme (WFP). In cooperation with these UN agencies, MChS troops have built and equipped refugee camps, airlifted aid and participated in humanitarian de-mining efforts during conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Central Africa and Lebanon. Until all practical cooperation was stopped in the aftermath of the Crimea crisis in spring 2014, the MChS had also sought close ties with NATO in the sphere of civil emergency response. The MChS’s cooperation with NATO focused on emergency preparedness, civil-military cooperation and disaster management. Following a Russian proposal, the Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre was established at NATO headquarters within the framework of the Partnership for Peace programme in 1998 (NATO 2006). In addition to large-scale exercises, which have previously involved both MChS and NATO forces, the Centre coordinates requests and offers of assistance from NATO members and partner states. It has been involved in numerous operations involving the coordination of relief supplies to refugees, and providing assistance to civilian populations following natural disasters, such as forest fires, floods and earthquakes.
What distinguishes the MChS from many other force structures is that the ministry and the activities of its troops have attracted very little criticism throughout the post-Soviet era, both in Russia and abroad. This has mostly to do with the specificity of the tasks assigned to the ministry, which are to provide aid to civilians and organize rescues and have therefore been seen as ‘laudable and uncontroversial’ (Galeotti 2002: 50). In comparison to the failures, especially of the regular Russian armed forces involved in military conflicts throughout much of the post-Soviet era, the civil defence troops have also distinguished themselves with their efficiency. During the Chechen campaigns, for example, MChS troops were seen to be the most organized and effective federal force (Stepanova 2005: 142). Internationally, the MChS’s focus on humanitarian operations has made its participation in cooperative efforts relatively straightforward. As discussed in more detail in chapter 4, the ‘peacekeeping activities’ of regular Russian armed forces in other former Soviet states throughout the 1990s were criticized in the West for being heavy handed and contravening generally accepted standards. The deployment of MChS troops had less potential for causing political tension than peacekeeping or stabilization tasks, because it did not include the application of military force.
The non-political nature of the MChS’s international engagements has allowed the Russian leadership to engage even in those conflicts that it saw as too contentious for the involvement of regular armed forces. As such, it has been MChS troops above all other Russian military formations that have been used for cooperation in multilateral military cooperation. For example, in 2001 and 2002, the MChS provided humanitarian and medical aid to Afghanistan in cooperation with the UN and individual states (the United Kingdom, France and Germany) (Stepanova 2005: 145). In 2005, it delivered medical supplies to Iraq as part of a Russian–German operation under the auspices of the UN (Blinova 2005). The international image of the MChS as an uncontroversial provider of humanitarian aid was severely tainted when it was put in charge of sending ‘humanitarian convoys’ to eastern Ukraine in August 2014. These were widely suspected of being used as a cover for the delivery of Russian weapons to separatist rebels and accused of breaching international rules on the delivery of humanitarian aid (Roffey 2016: 45–7).
The FSB is the major institutional successor of the Soviet KGB and the largest and most influential of the Russian security services. As a federal service it is headed not by a minister, but by a director answerable directly to the president. Given the heavily influential role the KGB had played in the Soviet regime and the involvement of its leadership in the 1991 coup attempt, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin made the dismantling of the KGB a priority. Gorbachev abolished the KGB as an institution in 1991 (Bennett 2000b). It was split into a number of smaller units and, following several rounds of reorganization, the FSB was established by federal law in 1995. The FSB’s size and sphere of responsibility grew significantly following Putin’s election as president in 2000. As part of extensive reforms of the security sector in 2003, the FSB absorbed a significant portion of the assets and functions of the Federal Agency for Government Communication and Information (FAPSI), which had been established as one of the KGB’s successor organizations in 1993. During the same round of reforms, the Border Guard Service, including the Border Guard Troops, was integrated into the FSB, increasing its numerical strength by approximately 160,000 personnel. During Soviet times the border guards operated under the auspices of the KGB and they had been transformed into a separate service by Yeltsin in 1993 (Bennett 2002). The reintegration of the Border Guard Service into the FSB significantly strengthened the latter’s power and potential influence, leading to increasing concerns about the recreation of the KGB (Bacon and Renz 2003).