Although the airstrikes in Syria showed that Russia had regained the power to pursue an independent foreign policy beyond the borders of the CIS region, concerns over domestic sovereignty also informed the decision to use force. As Allison explained the Russian intervention in Syria, ‘Putin’s commitment to a global order which prizes the sovereignty of incumbent rulers remains to a large extent an external expression of his preoccupation with Russian domestic state order’ (2013b: 818).
Finally, the war in Syria is another example of the complex interplay of cooperation and conflict in Russia’s approach to the West. As Charap and Colton noted, rather than the intent to confront, the airstrikes represented a desire for inclusion, ‘to break out of the diplomatic isolation and demonstrate that Russia could not be denied its rightful place at the high table of international politics’ (2017: 163). On the one hand, Moscow’s use of the military instrument as a means for enforcing cooperation predictably increased tensions and fuelled suspicions in the West of Russia’s aggressive intentions. On the other hand, it made inevitable its inclusion as a central actor in future multilateral efforts to solve the crisis through diplomacy, like in the peace talks of the International Syria Support Group since autumn 2015, which involved Russia, the US, the EU, China, Iran and Syria, amongst others (Baunov 2015).
Conclusion
The wars in Ukraine and Syria have been interpreted as a ‘paradigm shift’ in foreign policy, where a ‘revanchist’ Kremlin, enabled by better military capabilities, is seeking to forcefully expand the country’s influence in the CIS region and to confront the West in a bid for domination. The chapter has argued that a more contextualized analysis of these conflicts, taking into account Russian uses of military force since the early 1990s, is required for a better understanding of these events. It showed that there is little evidence of a fundamental change in Russian views on the utility of military force, or in its fundamental ambitions, both in the ‘near abroad’ and on a global level. Moscow has become more confident and assertive in using the military in pursuit of its national interest, not least because better capabilities have given it more opportunity to do so. However, today as has been the case in the past, the Kremlin perceives the military as a flexible tool of foreign policy and not only as an instrument to fight offensive wars.
Russian uses of military force in the CIS region have never been driven by the desire to materially recreate the Soviet Union. Moscow has used the military in this region for conflict resolution, to secure itself and other states against a variety of security threats, to protect its strategic and material interests, and to ensure the integrity of what it has consistently portrayed as its legitimate ‘sphere of influence’. Russian military operations during the 1990s were couched in the language of peacekeeping. Even if these conflicts were dominated by Moscow, both by necessity and by design, attempts were made to gain legitimacy through a degree of multilateral cooperation. This approach was seen as both desirable and sufficient at the time, because Moscow worked on the assumption that its pre-eminent status in the region would be accepted by both its neighbours and the international community. Russia’s conduct in the ‘near abroad’ became more assertive when the foreign policies of some CIS states took a decisive turn to the West, a process which, in the eyes of the Kremlin, the latter actively encouraged. Fearing the loss of its ‘sphere of influence’, Moscow abandoned the character of benign security guarantor and demonstrated, both in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, that its status in the region was non-negotiable.
Russia’s experience of using military force beyond the CIS region is limited. However, past and recent examples suggest that the Kremlin’s view on the utility of military power on an international level is not determined by the desire for global domination. In the Balkans, Russian peacekeepers contributed to conflict resolution in a multilateral setting. This enabled closer cooperation with the West and also improved the security situation in the region. In Syria, strategic interests and the growing influence of terrorist groups as a threat to stability in the region and beyond informed Russia’s decision to intervene. On the global level, a major value of military power in the eyes of the Kremlin is its utility in ensuring the country’s status as a great power. In Kosovo, the lack of such power resulted in humiliation and set in motion the process of military modernization. In Syria, a revived military ensured that Russia could not be sidelined in discussions and its views as a global power had to be taken into account.
Although Russia’s military revival is unlikely to lead to further territorial expansion or an aggressive bid for global domination, the Kremlin’s new confidence and assertiveness poses serious challenges to its neighbours and to the West. Moscow’s preparedness to protect what it sees as its ‘sphere of influence’, if required by military force, is a threat to the sovereignty of the states in this region. It restricts their ability to pursue an independent foreign policy, and in particular their decision to join NATO or the European Union. With regard to the West, the danger of spiralling tensions and escalation cannot be dismissed. As the chapter showed, however, Russia is not an essentialist actor. Its foreign policy is not predetermined, but the result of interaction and, especially in the case of the West, of a mutual misunderstanding of intentions (Tsygankov 2016: 295). This does not mean that the West or anybody else is to blame for the Kremlin’s actions. However, it shows that the nature of reactions and responses to Russia is likely to influence the course of future events.
Chapter 5
Russian military thinking and ‘hybrid warfare’
The annexation of Crimea prompted a debate in the West about Russia’s military revival and ‘new military prowess’ (Gordon 2014). As discussed in previous chapters, the operation revealed that the Russian armed forces had strengthened their capabilities in several areas, including ‘enhanced deployability (tactical and strategic airlift), a relatively high level of training, and professional forces’ (Reisinger and Golts 2014: 10). The air campaign over Syria, moreover, demonstrated that Russia now had the capability to engage in limited out-of-area operations beyond the area of the former Soviet Union for the first time (Gorenburg 2016). The perception of Russia’s ‘new military prowess’, however, has been based not only on the augmentation of conventional capabilities. Structural and technological capabilities alone do not make a military powerful. As the history of warfare has shown time and time again, superiority in terms of equipment and manpower does not guarantee victory in war. Such superiority is an advantage and an important asset. However, military success also requires doctrinal and strategic thinking that is able to translate available assets into a tool relevant for the achievement of objectives in different and specific conflict scenarios.
What caught the attention of observers of the Crimea operation, above all, was the heightened sophistication in strategic and operational planning and conceptual development, denoted by the deployment of what has been described since then as ‘hybrid’ (Reisinger and Golts 2014), ‘asymmetric’ (Holmes 2014), ‘ambiguous’ (House of Commons Defence Committee 2014b), ‘non-linear’ (Galeotti 2014a), or ‘next-generation’ (Weitz 2014) warfare. It is the development of such ‘new’ approaches to warfare that is now widely seen as the most immediate potential threat to Russia’s neighbours and to the West (Renz 2016b). This chapter discusses the concept of Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ in the context of developments in thinking on war and the utility of military force throughout the post-Soviet years. It will show that although there have been notable developments in Russian military thinking and doctrine in recent years, the concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ neither originates in Russian thinking, nor does it offer an adequate description of contemporary Russian strategy. The success of Russia’s approach in Crimea should not be overstated. The operation showed that Russian military thinking has not been as stuck in Cold War concepts on conventional war-fighting as often presumed. However, it does not mean that Russian strategists have found the key to military success or a new war-winning formula that have put them ahead of the West in this respect.