This is a very military history. Seeing as it also covers the decade before Vladimir Putin came to power, and that it is very focused on the minutiae of the Russian Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as details of the various reforms and reorganisations they have undergone during the Putin years, the book could more accurately have been titled ‘A History of The Russian Army, Navy and Air Force, 1990 to 2022’.
Military units
Here’s an example of what I mean by military minutiae. This is Galeotti’s description of the Russian army’s invasion of Chechnya:
From the north Major General Konstantin Pulikovsky led a mechanised force drawn from the 81st and 276th Motor Rifle regiments and a battalion of the 131st Independent Motor Rifle Brigade. From the west Major General Valery Petruk led elements of the 19th Motor Rifle Division supported by two regiments and two battalions of paratroopers along the railway tracks to seize the central station and then advance on the presidential palace. From the east, the 129th Motor Rifle Regiment and a battalion each of the 98th and 104th Airborne Divisions under Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Staskov would make a similar thrust along the railway line to Lenin Square in the heart of the city and from there take the bridges across the Sunzha river. From the north-east, Rokhlin himself would lead elements of the 255th and 33rd Motor Rifle Regiments and the 66th Reconnaissance Battalion of the 20th Motor Rifle Division to take the Central Hospital complex, while units of the 76th and 106th Airborne Division would secure the Lenin and Sheripov oil processing factories and chemical works to prevent the rebels from destroying these crucial economic assets. (p.61)
The accounts of all the wars feature lots of paragraphs like this, precise accounts of which units under which commanders went where and how they fared in the fighting.
There’s also a lot of analysis of organisational and administrative reforms from between the wars, as Galeotti gives detailed accounts of the attempts of successive Russian defence ministers, most notably Anatoly Serdyukov and then Sergei Shogai, to reform the Russian army against opposition and inertia from the military high command.
Hence the chapter titled ‘New Look Army’ (pages 142 to 152), which gives us detail of how the Defence Minister and head of the general staff implemented the 2010 plan for a new-look Russian army, half the size of its predecessor but better equipped and better trained, with better retention of conscripts, fewer but better quality senior officers.
Galeotti explains, with maps, the reorganisation of the army into half a dozen military districts, gives a detailed breakdown of what a new-look motorised rifle brigade consisted of (3,800 officers and men) plus a list of all its components (including 1 nuclear, biological and chemical company) and so on. And a similar level of description of the new-look air force and navy, followed by an organogram showing the chain of military command starting with the president and working down.
And then the last 90 or so pages of the original edition of this book (before he added a new chapter about the Ukraine War), pages 229 to 310, present a very detailed review of the current state of all Russia’s fighting forces, army, navy and air forces, along with special forces, paratroopers and black berets, nuclear weapons and so on, as of the time of writing (April 2022).
In this long final section the book turns into a version of ‘Janes Fighting Ships’ only about all aspects of the Russian fighting machine, giving mind-numbing details of the speed, size, range, design and latest versions of a wide range of military kit, from machine guns (the AK12 to replace the ageing AK74) to its sole aircraft carrier (the Admiral Kuznetsov), along with equally excessive detail of each service’s organisational structure, divisions, brigades and so on and so on. Take the opening of the Spetsnaz section:
The Spetsnaz comprise seven regular brigades of various sizes, in total constituting perhaps 19 battalion-size units called Independent Special Designation Detachments (OOSN) each with around 500 personnel. The relatively small 22nd Brigade has just two OOSN, the 173rd and 411th, for example, while the large 14th Brigade… (p.292)
And so very much on, for page after page after page of excruciating detail.
I was looking for a book about the geopolitics of Putin’s Wars and that’s certainly here, attached to his fairly brisk accounts of each conflict, and when he summarises it, Galeotti is very good. But his accounts of the political background to each conflict, and even the wars themselves, take second place to his forensic analysis of Russian fighting forces and how they have changed and evolved since 1990.
Military biographies
As for the key political and military players, as the book trundled on I realised Galeotti was devoting quite a lot of time to them. All the key players in the 30-year period of the Russian army which he covers are given potted biographies. Putin is the most obvious one, along with sometime prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, but all the defence ministers, the key generals in each of the wars, and the leaders of the respective nationalist or independence uprisings, all are given a half-page potted biography (for example, the extended profile of key defence minister Sergei Shogai on pages 155 to 159).
Slowly this builds up into a sort of indirect social history, because all of them grew up in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, their life stories include snapshots of their lives and careers during the late Cold War, the Afghan War, the chaos of the Yeltsin years and so on. It isn’t a collective biography but, taken together, the many individual biographies begin to sketch out a network of real lives, and so start to give a feel for the institutional life of the last years of the Soviet Union.
The 1990s
For Russia the 1990s were a decade of chaos at home and humiliating conflicts abroad. The army almost fell apart amid the chaos following the end of the Soviet Union and economic collapse: stories of soldiers reduced to begging in the streets and even dying of malnutrition. In February 1991 the Warsaw Pact, which had been the West’s bogeyman since its inception in 1955, was formally disbanded.
Prime example of the chaos was how nationalist President Boris Yeltsin inherited a Duma packed with communists who blocked his every move, the standoff escalating to a crisis in October 1994 when pro-communist crowds seized TV channels and the Duma building, which prompted Yeltsin, on 4 October 1993, to send in the army who shelled their own parliament building, starting a fire which ended up gutting it. Like some chaotic Third World country.
Putin was manoeuvred into power by the KGB and other forces who wanted social and political stability after a decade of chaos under Yeltsin. As you’d expect, there are pages detailing Putin’s non-descript career, how he came over as loyal, reliable and dependable to a series of powerful men, until shadowy forces in the KGB and military helped broker the deal whereby Putin was nominated by Yeltsin to be his successor as president, on condition that he passed an act of immunity freeing Yeltsin from prosecution for his umpteen acts of corruption. Putin was made president in December 1999 and his first act was to pass this immunity law for drunk Boris.
All this Russian drunkenness, chaos and corruption is amusing to read about but the point that matters is that Putin came to power determined to restore Russia’s status as a superpower. He and his sponsors wanted to Make Russia Great Again (p.169).
‘Near abroad’
Putin wants to restore the territory lost to Russia when all the other Soviet states declared independence. Galeotti quotes a Russian defence minister in 1995 talking about ‘Near abroad’, meaning the countries and territories adjacent to Russia which it dominated for over a century through its Tsarist empire, and then bossed around through the Soviet era. It’s a well enough known phrase for Wikipedia to have an article on it, defining Russia’s ‘near abroad’ as ‘the post-Soviet states (other than Russia itself) which became independent after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.’
This concept overlaps with the nationalist notion of a Greater Russia which transcends modern borders to include all the old Tsarist territories. Both of them justify Russia interfering in, invading and taking control of their neighbours.
Reuniting the Russian people
During the Soviet Union entire populations were moved around the different republics with little concern for the consequences. It didn’t matter in the borderless USSR but it became very important when all the former Soviet Republics became independent states. At a stroke no fewer than 20 million Russians found themselves stuck in ‘foreign’ countries. To put it another way, all the countries bordering Russia contain Russian minorities, sometimes quite sizeable minorities.
The most obvious examples are the large Russian-speaking communities in the Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine which gave Putin the excuse for invading both of them in 2014 but there are also vocal Russian minorities in, for example, all three Balkan states. At any moment Putin might stir them into protests and then use these protests as a pretext for invading, pretty much as Hitler invaded the Sudetenland in 1938, to reunite its protesting Germans with the Fatherland. Which is why the leaders of the Baltic states are so worried.
So Putin 1) believes Russia has total command over its sphere of influence which can be defined as 2) Greater Russia, Russia at its greatest extent under the empire and also, maybe, the Soviet Union, and 3) wants to liberate these Russian communities now in foreign countries and reunite them with the Holy Motherland.
Russian irredentism
Yet another way of describing the same thing is the term Russian irredentism:
Russian irredentism refers to territorial claims made by the Russian Federation to regions that were historically part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, which Russian nationalists regard as part of the ‘Russian world’. It seeks to create a Greater Russia by politically incorporating ethnic Russians and Russian speakers living in territories bordering Russia. This ideology has been significantly defined by the regime of Vladimir Putin, who has governed the country since 1999. It is linked to Russian neo-imperialism.
Insofar as all the old republics of the Soviet Union are now independent nation states, the Putin Doctrine represents a permanent threat to peace in Europe.
Comparison with Hitler
In many ways it’s like the situation of the German people after World War One. When the victorious Allies imposed the punitive Treaty of Versailles on defeated Germany they redrew the map of Europe so that no fewer than seven million Germans found themselves stuck in countries outside Germany. This was partly what Hitler was about with his popular promise to reunite all ethnic Germans in an expanded Fatherland. This, for example – its large German population – was why Hitler demanded the area known as the Sudetenland back from the state of Czechoslovakia, a nation which was only created by the Treaty of Versailles and which Hitler refused to recognise as a real country.
Putin is very close to Hitler’s way of thinking. He, Medvedev, foreign secretary Sergei Lavrov, members of his political party (United Russia), commentators and intellectuals, have all been lined up to claim that Ukraine simply isn’t a country, it has no claim to be a nation state. It was, is and always will be part of Greater Russia.
In his 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, Putin referred to Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians as ‘one people’ making up a triune Russian nation. He maintained that large parts of Ukraine are historical Russian lands and claimed there is ‘no historical basis’ for the ‘idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians’.
It would be one thing if this was just the view of a particular clique or party but in fact these nationalist, neo-imperial views are very popular across Russia. That’s the real worry. That even if Putin and his entire clique were vaporised it wouldn’t change the fundamental neo-imperial irredentist mindset of the entire Russian ruling class and a large part of its population. Russia is committed to being a source of instability and conflict in Eastern Europe for the foreseeable future…
Russian paranoia
To which we must add Russian paranoia. The whole premise of the Russian forces in all services, of Russian military doctrine, of the vast amount spent on arms and men, is that everyone wants to attack and destroy Russia. All Russian officials toe the Putin line that Russia is permanently under serious threat. Former head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrusheve, is on the record as saying the United States ‘would very much like Russia not to exist as a country’ (quoted p.312). As Galeotti puts it:
We can never underestimate the paranoias and resentments of Putin and his circle… (p.307)
Paranoia is defined on Wikipedia as:
an instinct or thought process that is believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety, suspicion, or fear, often to the point of delusion and irrationality. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself i.e. ‘Everyone is out to get me’.
If it’s a mental illness or psychiatric condition then the entire Russian military-political establishment is mentally ill.
Weakness of the Russian army
However, when he came to power Putin faced a simple challenge which was the army left to the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR was in very poor shape and this book is very largely about the efforts of his successive defence ministers, and hand-picked senior military staff, to reform and improve it.
Early on Galeotti mentions all kinds of reasons for the Russian army’s weakness. Obvious ones were chaos, mismanagement and universal corruption. The tradition of building a mass army of over a million using reluctant conscripts. The way the conscripts were signed up in two waves, in the spring and autumn, ensured lack of overlap and consistency. Galeotti also says the Russian army has a long-standing problem because it lacks the rank of non-commissioned officer that the British army has, the rank of men who’ve risen from private, command the trust of and speak the language of the ordinary soldiers, can convert officers’ orders into do-able actions.
Another problem was the Russian army has a centuries-old tradition of hazing, dedovshchina or ‘grandfathering’. Like everything Russian this is the legitimisation of brutal bullying designed to turn raw recruits into ‘men’. But, as well as regularly actually killing them, it of course does nothing of the sort, turns no-one into ‘men, it just brutalises them, preparing them to rape, pillage and torture whatever foreign population is unlucky enough to be occupied by them.
Then there was the vast problem of out-of-date equipment. Galeotti has passages throughout the book detailing the shortcomings of all kinds of Russian military kit, from tanks to body armour. The lack of reliable radios and communications led to friendly fire incidents in all the wars he describes. Half the Russian planes and helicopters shot down in the short Georgian war (7 to 12 August 2008) were shot down by their own side.
Hence the central thread which the book comes back to again and again, which was the efforts of successive defence ministers to reform the army, navy and air force at all levels, in all ways. Maybe the book should have been titled ‘The Reform of the Russian Army 1990 to 2022′.
Bad advice
I was amused that Yeltsin was encouraged to embark on the First Chechen War (11 December 1994 to 31 August 1996) by his advisers and Minister of Defence, who assured him they would take Grozny and pacify the country in a matter of weeks, that it would be a ‘bloodless blitzkrieg’ (p.56). The Russian attack began in November 1994 and was dogged by failure of every kind – ‘The plan was doomed from the start’.
Compare and contrast the over-optimistic advice given to George W. Bush about the invasion of Iraq, ‘they’ll be welcoming us with open arms and throwing flowers’ etc.
Compare and contrast Britain’s defence staff telling Tony Blair they could easily cope with policing Basra and sending troops to Helmand Province in Afghanistan, no problem.
Compare and contrast the Russian military establishment assuring Putin they could invade Ukraine, overthrow the government and elect a Russia-friendly administration within a week.
These military advisers, eh? Maybe the beginning of wisdom is never trust anything your military advisers tell you.
The First Chechen war (December 1994 to August 1996)
The First Chechen War was a disaster for the Russian army. It has been outsmarted and outfought, even losing cities to a ramshackle guerrilla army. All the inefficiencies, brutality and corruption of the army had been put on public display. (p.67)
The Second Chechen War (August 1999 to April 2000)
This time the Russians had a better plan and knew to advance slowly, pacifying and securing territory as they went, rather than the strategy in the first was which was to race to the capital Grozny leaving all the territory outside under the control of insurgents.
The Russo-Georgian War (August 2008 Russo-Georgian War)
The underwhelming performance of the military in Georgia… (p.88)
In 2008 when mighty Russia took on tiny Georgia, more than a quarter of all the armoured vehicles deployed simply broke down before they even reached the battlefield. (p.239)
It only lasted a week but, according to Galeotti, it was a war of blunders, including the bombing of abandoned airfields, officers lost to friendly fire and advances halted by broken-down vehicles (p.120). From his point of view – concerned with the issue of military reform – this little offensive was important because it gave Shogai and Putin the ammunition they needed to push through their sweeping reforms against resistance from the Army staff.
Annexing Crimea
Crimea had been part of the Russian empire for centuries and only (rashly) given by Nikita Khrushchev to the Ukraine Soviet Republic in 1954. So it was a prime example of the Greater Russia argument, the argument that, at the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union, many territories which had for centuries been part of Russia were abruptly included in what were suddenly newly independent nations, often against the wishes of their Russian minorities.
Thus Ukrainians in western Ukraine were thrilled when their popular Euromaidan uprising led to the overthrow of Russia-leaning president Viktor Yanukovych and the establishment of a western-friendly government, but the large Russian minority in Crimea was genuinely scared, especially when the Kiev government indicated that they were going to remove Russian as an official language, remove Russian street signs etc. All this played into Putin’s master narrative:
In his 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, Putin referred to Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians as ‘one people’ making up a triune Russian nation. He maintained that large parts of Ukraine are historical Russian lands and claimed there is ‘no historical basis’ for the ‘idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians’.
Reading Galeotti’s account of the annexation of Crimea, what’s impressive was the lack of violence and Russian brutality. Russia infiltrated special units (Galeotti, of course, gives minute detail of just what units, led by which commanders, were deployed where) to all the key command points before the Ukraine high command had cottoned on to what was happening.
Crimea was an extraordinary military success. (p.178)
Local support
A key point is that a lot of Crimeans are ethnic Russians and genuinely welcomed the annexation. Putin organised a quick referendum and claimed 97% of the population approved the annexation (p.177). Do they think the rest of the world is stupid? Or are they so trapped inside their chauvinist box that they think Soviet-era electoral fictions are viable? Maybe both. They might as well have claimed 200% of the electorate wanted reunification with Russia. This kind of thing brings down derision and contempt on the Putin administration but they don’t see it.
And all along, as Galeotti points out, it isn’t necessary. If they had held a free and fair referendum, chances are the pro-Russian vote would still have won. But the Russian political elite has no concept of what democracy is and how to use it. The heirs to 250 years of Mongol khans and 400 years of tsars and 75 years of communist totalitarianism, the Russian elite literally knows no other way of ruling except via top-down diktats.
Comparison of Russian nationalism and Islamism
A key point, and a running thread through the book, is that in all these conflicts – Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine – the situation was made messy and confusing by the involvement of local militias. Chechnya is fascinating because some of the forces fighting the Russians were straight nationalists but, given the era and the proximity to Afghanistan, many of them were Islamic groups fighting for something else entirely, for the creation of an Islamic Caliphate in the Caucasus.
In a sense this kind of Islamic ideology and Russia’s chauvinism have a lot in common in that 1) they both inspire a kind of messianic intensity of belief and, 2) on a more practical level, that they don’t believe in borders. Greater Russia chauvinism flies free of accepted borders, borders are the enemy, keeping good Russians trapped in foreign countries created by an alien settlement somehow engineered by the perfidious West. Russia will only be great when these invalid nation states are swept away and the borders redrawn to include all true Russians in the genuine Greater Russia.
Identically the same with Islamist ideology, which believes all the borders and nation states of the Middle East were created by Western imperialists and the region will only be strong and pure when all believers are united in the restored caliphate, free of the trappings of the imperial West.
It’s a match made in heaven.
The role of militias in near Russian countries
To come back to the role of local militias, something which makes all the Russia wars feel very distinctive is that they were and are fought in places which are already riven by ethnic and tribal and cultural division. To read about Chechnya and Georgia is to be impressed by how fissile those ‘nations’ already were. The authorities in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, had only nominal control over the entire region of South Ossetia which was packed with pro-Russian separatists or, over to the west, on the Black sea coast, with the region of Abkhazia, ditto.
These are ‘countries’ which 1) already featured a large pro-Russian community and 2) were and are characterised by a high level of clan and tribal attachment which converts into tribal politicians, tribe-based mafias and, by an easy extension, clan-based militias.
The complicated role played by local militias in very clan-based, feuding societies is a central feature of all these conflicts.
Donbas and beyond
And continued in the Ukraine. For even as he was infiltrating his troops into Crimea for what proved to be a surprisingly bloodless annexation (February 2014), Putin was also encouraging local pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine.
The fascinating aspect of Galeotti’s account is how the conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine began spontaneously, with coalitions of independence politicians, activists, and rag-tag militias taking on the Ukrainian authorities. It certainly wasn’t a carefully planned operation like the annexation of Crimea, the opposite, and for some time the Kremlin didn’t know how to react. To begin with they began to siphon military hardware to the more successful pro-Russian militias, followed, after some months, by military advisers.
Galeotti says that in these early phases the aim was to warn the new pro-western regime in Kiev of the consequences of allying with the West, no more. However, as the Ukraine army got its act together and, working with pro-government militias, began to drive the pro-Russia forces East, the Kremlin had to decide whether to acquiesce in their defeat or escalate. They chose to escalate and sent in regular Russian troops, breaching the sovereignty of a European nation (p.187).
Galeotti describes the two ceasefire treaties, Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, their predictable failure, and the settling down of the problem into a permanent low-level conflict. It reminded me of some of the civil wars I’ve read about in Africa, contested borders, governments relying on local militias, all sides using exemplary violence i.e. carrying out atrocities on unarmed civilians designed to warn other villages and towns to surrender without a fight.
As 2014 turned into 2015 and 2016 the Ukrainians reformed and reinforced their army with a huge recruitment drive, better training, new kit. They drove the rebels back but could never win because whenever they looked close to victory, the Russians deployed a regiment to block them.
So the pattern was one of on-off ceasefires, trench warfare, sporadic local fighting, mutual sniping and shelling, and equally mutual recrimination, until 2022 when Putin decided that it was time to break the stalemate. (p.191)
Syria, the unexpected intervention
We in the West think the Arab Spring was a spontaneous uprising of oppressed peoples across the Middle East to overthrow their corrupt old rulers. See my review of:
From the paranoid perspective of the Kremlin, though, it looked a lot like the uprisings were the work of a West systematically getting rid of traditional Soviet allies (Gaddafi, Saddam, Bashar al-Assad). At the UN, Russia acquiesced in the West’s bombing of Libyan forces but felt betrayed when this led not to a ceasefire but to the overthrow of Gaddafi. All of this, of course, was in light of America’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 which led not to a pleasant democracy but the collapse of the Iraqi state and chaos within and beyond its borders.
So Russia had at least three reasons for stepping in to prop up the Assad regime:
- the Assad family had been a friend and ally in the region: why not make him really indebted to you by saving his skin?
- as a message to America that Russia, too, could throw its weight around / be a regional force in the Middle East
- genuine concern that if Assad, too, fell, the whole Syria-Iraq strip of territory would fall to ISIS or other Islamist groups, which Russia has genuine cause to fear
Regarding ISIS, see my review of:
Regarding the international aspects of the Syrian civil war, see my review of:
The events of the Syrian civil war are complicated. But for Russia its intervention was surprisingly successful. It showed itself and the West that it could project its power significantly beyond its borders. It saved an old ally, thus bolstering its credibility. It served as a useful blooding ground for large parts of the Russian army, navy and air force, which were rotated through the theatre. It allowed the military to road test new technology, especially new drones, and to road test new doctrines and strategies for different situations and types of engagement.
It also marked the high point and maybe eclipse of the Wagner group of mercenaries, who were vital in holding the line during some attacks alongside the prone-to-run-away Syrian army, but also taught the Russian high command to keep them in their place.
Invasion of Ukraine
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the poor performance of Russia’s troops… (p.89)
Requires a post of its own…
List of post-Soviet conflicts Russia has been involved in
- Transnistria war – November 1990 to July 1992
- First Chechen war – December 1994 to August 1996
- Tajikistan civil war – May 1992 to June 1997
- Yugoslavia – 1992 to 1995 Russian forces were part of the UN peacekeeping force
- Second Chechen War – August 1999 to April 2009
- Russo-Georgian War – 7 to 12 August 2008
- Russian forces joined international anti-pirate patrols off the coast of Somalia
- Annexation of Crimea – February 2014
- Start of Donbas war – February 2014
- Syrian civil war – from 2015 Russian forces supported the Assad government
- Second Nagorno-Karabakh War – 27 September to 10 November 2020 –Russia sent peacekeeping force in 2021
- Invasion of Ukraine – 20 February 2014 to the present
Table of contents
For your information, here is a straight copy of the book’s table of contents, from which you can see its comprehensive scope and level of detail:
1. Before Putin
- Born in chaos
- The Soviet Disunion
- The August coup
- Boris Yeltsin: the man without a plan
- A military in crisis
- An army gone bad
- Nukes for sale?
- Bringing the boys back home
- Empty dreams
- ‘Pasha Mercedes’
- The first Chechen war
- Resistance and resentment
- High hopes, quick defeats
- The plan
- Taking Grozny…
- … and losing Grozny again
- The wars of Russian assertion
- Moldova’s post-Soviet hangover
- Central Asia: the Tajikistan contingent
- Balkan dash
2. Enter Putin
- Putin’s priorities
- Who is Vladimir Putin?
- Putin in charge
- Putin’s ministers
- The second Chechen war
- Round two
- Retaking Grozny
- Operation Wolf Hunt
- The creation of ‘Kadyrovstan’
- Lessons learned
- Ivanov, the Initiator
- My name’s Ivanov, Sergei Ivanov
- The spy and generals
- Ivanov’s reforms
- Size does matter
- Sedyukov, the Enforcer
- Enter the taxman
- Serdyukov’s purge
- And enter Makarov
- The Georgian excuse
- Georgia 2008: Tblisi’s move…
- Harbingers
- Provoking a war
- The Georgian advance
- The battle for Tskhinvali
- The Russian advance
- Georgia 2008: …Moscow’s counter
- The tide turns
- The Abkhaz front
- The audit
- Did anything work well?
- ‘New Look’ army
- Command and control: unified battle management
- The ground forces: divisions to brigade
- The air forces: rationalised
- The navy: integrated at last
- The airborne: survival
3. The New Cold War
- Shoigu, the Rebuilder
- Who is Sergei Shoigu?
- ‘A servant to the tsar, a father to the soldiers’
- General Gerasimov
- Rearmament and recruitment
- Ready for action
- Crimea, 2014
- Russia and Ukraine
- ‘Returning Crimea to Russia’
- Taking Crimea
- Enter the ‘little green men’
- ‘Crimea is ours’
- An audit of the operation
- Donbas, 2014-
- Strelkov’s spark
- A war of irregulars
- The ‘Northern wind’
- The fixing of the conflict
- Stalemate
- Lessons of the Donbas war
- Command and control in a proxy war is hard
- Information warfare is a powerful force multiplier
- Implausible deniability has its place
- Drones are the next big thing
- Syria 2015 (1): the unexpected intervention
- A long, bloody war
- A friend in need
- Heading to Hmeymin
- Hmeymin’s hammer
- Turning the tide
- Victory of sorts
- Syria 2015 (2); lessons of the Syrian campaign
- Airpower is not (usually) enough
- Mercenaries have their place, but need to know it
- Brutality can work, but hearts and minds matter, too
- Frenemies can find themselves in battle
- A nice little war is good for business
4. Rearming Russia
- Rumble for ruble
- When comparisons fail
- ‘Let us starve, but let us export’
- The metal-eaters
- Buyer beware
- Modernising the military
- Armiya Rossii
- The battalion tactical group
- The return of the division
- Heavy metal
- Specialised forces for specialised operations
- Logistics
- Capabilities
- The sky is Russia’s!
- Always in transition
- The aerospace forces
- Defence of the motherland
- Fist of the motherland
- Heavy lift
- Drones
- Contesting the sea
- Never a naval power
- Rusted, rebuilt
- Organisation
- Power projection: blue and black berets
- ‘Nobody but us’
- By parachute, plane or track
- The black berets
- ‘Black Devils’
- ‘Where we are, there is victory!’
- Underwater sentinels
- The Spetsnaz
- Special people, for special tasks
- Tip of the spear
- Putin’s Spetsnaz
- The special operations command
- The nuclear backstop
- Post-Soviet armageddon
- Rail, road and tube
- Under the waves
- Strategic aviation
- Modernisation and magic
- Why nukes matter so much [they bolster Russia’s sense of itself as still a superpower]
5. The Future
- Political warfare
- The rise of the spooks
- Hybrid, ambiguous, non-linear, political
- Outsourced warfighters [the Wagner group]
- Information warfare
- New generation warfare
- Small wars
- Limited deployments
- Big wars
- Escalation, de-escalation and lesser apocalypses
- The challenges of the future
- The Western flank
- … And the turbulent South Caucasus, too
- Central Asia: instability and jihad
- China, the great frenemy
- Ukraine 2022: Putin’s last war?
- Not the generals’ war
- A police action, not a war
- From Kyiv to the Donbas
- How hubris destroyed a military
- Deadlock
- Conclusions: the Eurasian Sparta?
- A nation under arms?
- The military myth
- The security state?
- A weak hand played well
- After Putin?
- Ukraine 2023: a dispatch on a war in progress
- The paradox of reform
- War Putinism
- The mutiny
- The war in Russia
- The imagination race
- Prospects
General conclusions
The whole spectacle confirms my strong feeling that human beings simply cannot govern themselves. The naive expect humanity to take some kind of concerted action against climate change. Really? With people like this in charge?
Are modern wars doomed to failure?
Are modern wars winnable? When was the last time either Russia or America actually won a war?
For the Russians – Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Syria, Ukraine.
For the Americans – Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Russian lies
I watched the BBC TV series ‘Putin and the West’ in which French president Francoise Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron baldly stated that Putin is a liar. Hollande said not only is Putin a liar but his entire approach to diplomacy is to lie, his strategy is based on lying about everything.
The Russians even lie when the lie is so blatant and absurd it damages their own cause. Galeotti’s book contains some nice examples. In 1993 during the Georgian war the Russians broke a ceasefire agreement by bombing Sukhumi while it was still held by Georgian forces.
Russian defence minister Grachyov responded with the implausible and widely derided claim that these were Georgian aircraft painted with Russian colours, bombing their own positions as a provocation. (p.122)
In moments like that you can see how lying is such second nature to the Russian establishment that it can’t see how stupid and ridiculous it makes them look to the outside world. This was captured in a recent press event in Delhi where Russian foreign minister Lavrov claimed the Ukraine war started when Ukraine attacked Russia and went on to claim that Russia was trying to halt this unfortunate war.
This is Göbbels-level lying which is so absurd that it makes you worry about the sanity of the Russian leadership. Putin ordered the military invasion of Ukraine but, having read Galeotti’s book it’s easy to think that Putin and his circle genuinely believe that they invaded the territory of a neighbouring country because they genuinely see Ukraine’s defection to the West as a kind of attack on Russia, on Russia’s idea of itself, on the Russian nationalist belief that Ukraine and Belarus aren’t independent nations at all. They felt culturally, psychologically and strategically ‘attacked’ and so sincerely believe that the military invasion was a justified response to the Ukraine government’s insult and threat to Russian hegemony.
At moments like this you can see how the Russian elite inhabits a different mindset, in effect a different reality, from the rest of the world, utterly blinded by their Greater Russia nationalism and prepared to do anything to protect it.
But there is, of course, an alternative interpretation, which is that a lot of these lies uttered in public fora are for domestic consumption. Edited by Russia’s totally cowed and quiescent media, they can then be broadcast on the nightly news, with the laughter track removed and roars of applause edited in.
Yes, it’s important to remember that the Russian government lies to everyone including its own people, and that if anyone finds out the truth and starts broadcasting it they are quickly locked up or pushed out a window or die of mystery poison. But then being lied to by your government is another venerable old Russian tradition. This isn’t my prejudice, it is a factual point Galeotti makes over and over again:
Russians have decades’ or even centuries’ experience of being lied to by their governments, especially regarding wars… (p.375)
The Russian bearhug
There’s a hoary old proverb about Mexico, ‘Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States!’ How much more true this is of every nation which borders Russia today. China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan probably needn’t be too worried, too big, nothing to steal.
But poor Georgia, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia and Finland – the Putin Doctrine, the concepts of Greater Russia, near abroad, Russian irredentism, Russian neo-imperialism, Russian nationalism – all these variations on the same theme mean the leaders and peoples of those countries must be permanently anxious about whether Russia will attack and invade them next.
It’s unlikely, seeing as most of the Russian army’s resources are deployed to – and being consumed in – Ukraine. But in planning for the future, the next five, ten years, should they be factoring in invasion by Russia?
Thank God there’s the whole length of Europe between my country and the resentful, angry, permanently aggrieved Russian bear.
War with China?
Although I’ve spent my entire life worrying about a nuclear war, subjected to movies and novels and documentaries about the horror of a nuclear war with the USSR or Russia, and although Putin and his mouthpieces go on and on about the threat from ‘the West’, Galeotti disarmingly says Russia is never going to face the threat of an invasion by NATO. Do you think the people of Belgium or Italy or Austria would ever want to attack Russia? Why? Let its people stew in the repressive authoritarian culture which they seem to love and recreate in every generation.
Galeotti argues that the real threat is China. The majority and the best Russian armed and air forces are concentrated in the west of the country, all on high alert for the mythical invasion by Holland and Denmark and Lithuania which is never going to come. But what about the vast area of Siberia?
Galeotti explains that during the imperial nineteenth century Russia seized large bits of territory from China. In principle these borders were re-agreed by a treaty of 2008, but what if China wants them back? Russia’s border with China is 4,000 kilometres long and very thinly protected (p.339).
The relationship between China and Russia is set to become more asymmetrical with China increasingly becoming the economic master and Russia the vassal. Deprived of trade with the West because of Ukraine sanctions, Russia is increasingly forced to sell its oil and gas to China which is aware of its partner’s weakness. What if China’s demands for unequal trade deals slowly, steadily increase? And apparently there has been growing concern in the FSB, some of it expressed publicly, at the growth of Chinese cyber activity against Russia, spying and hacking. And what about China’s growing influence in the five vast ‘stan’ countries to Russia’s south, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, where Chinese promises of investment and cash prove more attractive than Moscow’s penniless bullying? Likelihood is all these tensions will slowly ratchet up, the direction of travel is one way, with Russia contracting before an ever-growing China…
All of Russia east of the Urals is serviced by just two enormous train lines both of which could be easily ruptured and then none of its western forces could be redeployed. Any incursion could not be contained by forces which can’t reach the battlefield and so it is here, out East, that any escalation to battlefield nuclear weapons and beyond is most likely, or least unlikely. Discuss.
Over-optimistic?
The paperback edition of the book has a final chapter written in August 2023 covering the war in Ukraine up to that date and moving onto political conclusions. Galeotti’s account of the war (as of all the other wars he covers) is brisk and very readable, it’s his broader conclusions I question.
Writing in 2022, Galeotti pulls together a raft of evidence to suggest the war has been a disaster for Putin and Russia, it’s the end of the Russian army, public opinion is turning against him, draft dodging is up, there have been firebombing of draft offices, social media is awash with soldiers bitterly complaining about being used as cannon fodder, strongly implying that the president’s days are numbered and throwing in the old canard about him being ill, cancer, some immune disease etc.
It starts out sensible and maybe each of the strands are true, but life isn’t that sweet. There is no justice. Russia is an autocratic nation, ruled for its entire history by lying dictators. It’s not being pessimistic, it’s being coldly realistic, to assume that this will never change.
Credit
‘Putin’s Wars: from Chechnya to Ukraine’ by Mark Galeotti was published by Osprey Publishing in 2022.
Related links
- Galeotti’s blog In Moscow’s Shadows
- Putin, Russia and the West (BBC)
Related reviews
- The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips (revised edition, 2020)
- New World Disorder reviews
- Boris Mikhailov: Ukraine Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery (January 2026)
- Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline by Anastasia Taylor-Lind @ Imperial War Museum London (April 2023)
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