Whilst Russia’s self-perception as a great power and its views on the importance of being able to project global military power have not changed substantially, international views of Russia as a military actor have certainly experienced a revival. As the country’s conventional military capabilities degraded throughout the 1990s, so did its ability to project such power beyond the immediate neighbourhood. Russia’s relevance as a global military actor, with the exception of its continuing status as a nuclear power, was increasingly questioned. Following the annexation of Crimea and intervention in Syria, views on Moscow’s status in the world have changed dramatically. The international community is again regarding Russia as a serious competitor on the global stage, thus, at least partially, granting it the status recognition it has been seeking ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. From this point of view, Moscow has to some extent achieved one of its long-standing objectives. International recognition as a great power is key to Russia’s national interests and has been a central aim of its foreign policy throughout history. Now that Russia is yet again seen as a global military power, it has gained such recognition, but this is not based on respect.
Assertive uses of military power in the CIS region have served to reassert Russia’s position as the dominant actor there. At the same time, aggressive actions, such as the war with Georgia in 2008 and with Ukraine in 2014, have decreased the country’s prospects of being the hegemon in what it sees as its ‘sphere of influence’. These actions have exacerbated fears by neighbouring states about Russian dominance that date back to the early 1990s. As a result, many CIS states might even be more determined to pursue closer relations with actors other than Russia. As such, the Kremlin’s quest to gain great power recognition through the display of military power has been a double-edged sword. As lessons from the past reveal, pursuing status based on military might alone, whilst remaining weak in other areas and especially in the economic realm, has not been sustainable and never led to lasting results.
The reasons for Russia’s military revival
It cannot be taken for granted that Russia’s military revival signals a qualitative change in the Kremlin’s intentions to use force in an expansionist fashion or a bid for domination. Better capabilities create more opportunities for the use of force, but they do not necessarily increase the willingness to do so. The assumption that Russia has revived its military in order to prepare for more offensive action reflects a reductionist view on the utility of military power and the reasons why most states, including Russia, maintain strong armed forces. Developments in military doctrine show that the reasons for the military revival go beyond the desire to fight wars and defeat opponents. The requirement to defend Russian sovereignty and territorial integrity remains the number one task of the Russian armed forces. The need to have capable and sizeable armed forces to protect the country against external threats has been particularly acute for Russia throughout history, owing to its size and complex geopolitical position. During the Cold War, threat perceptions in the Soviet Union, as was the case for most countries in the West, focused on the potential of East–West confrontation. Soviet military doctrine therefore emphasized the need for preparedness to engage in large-scale conventional warfare. There is a strong degree of continuity in Russian military doctrine today with regard to the importance attached to this type of war-fighting and threat. This is at least one of the reasons why mass and quantity – a one-million-strong army – is still considered important in Russia.
Whilst during the 1990s this emphasis on ‘traditional’ war was often perceived by Western scholars as the result of the inability of Russian strategists to move on from the Cold War, it was a reflection of the idiosyncrasies of the country’s strategic priorities and threat perceptions. Especially during the 1990s and early 2000s, these differed from those of the West, where the focus had shifted to ‘new wars’ and counterinsurgency. This does not mean that the ability to deal with conflicts at the lower end of the conflict spectrum was not seen as important in Russia. The recognition that small wars and insurgencies around its troubled peripheries were an important source of insecurity and necessitated changes to the country’s military structure dates back to the early 1990s. However, it was not until the 2008 modernization programme that this issue was addressed systematically with improvements made to rapid reaction capabilities, permanent readiness, and relevant training similar to Western developments. Although ‘traditional’ perceptions of potential enemies and conflicts are still a component in Russian military doctrine, it also reflects the understanding that its armed forces are required to deal with a much broader range of sources of insecurity.
The focus on the potential implications of the military revival for Russia’s neighbours and the West overlooks the important domestic dimension of the phenomenon. The Kremlin’s concern over threats to internal order and regime stability is an expression of fears over outside, and specifically Western, meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign states. These fears date back at least to the late 1990s. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, they were enhanced by the ‘colour revolutions’ in neighbouring countries. The view of outside interference as a threat to Russia’s sovereignty and security has undoubtedly grown in significance in recent years. Threats to the ‘information space and internal sphere’ were formalized in the 2014 military doctrine as a domestic military danger for the first time. The same concern is also reflected in recent military thinking on a general level. Developments in the force structures underline the centrality of concerns over domestic and regime stability in Russian security thinking. Domestic political reasons have been a significant factor for maintaining these structures throughout the post-Soviet era. They have been used to ensure regime stability and enforce internal order, which is an important prerequisite for bolstering and upholding great power status in the eyes of the Kremlin. Force structures tasked specifically with the maintenance of public and internal order, like the FSB and the National Guard Service, continue to be strengthened. As such, the revival of Russian military power is as much about internal (in)security and stability as it is about fighting wars and the perceived need to be able to stand up against other leading powers.
Russia has also used military power, on various occasions, to cooperate and to strengthen its position in a multilateral system. Moscow’s use of the military in this capacity is often overlooked. In the early 1990s, the establishment of CIS peacekeeping forces in Moldova, Georgia and Tajikistan, and cooperation with the OSCE and UN, were a part of this picture. A number of the Russian force structures, such as the Federal Security Service (FSB), the civil defence troops under the Ministry for Emergency Situations (MChS) and the now defunct Federal Service for the Control of the Drugs Trade (FSKN) have also been used for the establishment of international security cooperation. Whilst initially force structure personnel were used predominantly to make up for shortcomings in the regular armed forces in dealing with operations at the lower end of the conflict spectrum, they have since been deployed internationally to cooperate in the areas of counter-terrorism, counter-drug operations and humanitarian operations. They have cooperated with the UN, with NATO and also within the framework of the CSTO to strengthen Russia’s multilateral engagement in the security field. The Kremlin’s support of the global war on terrorism is another important example of multilateral security cooperation. Isolation is not in Moscow’s interest and in the past, its willingness to cooperate regularly continued even at times of serious tensions. The desire for inclusion has always been an important factor in the Kremlin’s foreign policy. However, its view of multilateralism as closely linked to multipolarity, where cooperation is possible only if Russia has an equal say in decisions, has often led to conflict, rather than to an improvement in relations with the West.