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Read the full chapter here.
Russia is vast. It is vastest. Immense. It is six million square miles vast, eleven time zones vast; it is the largest country in the world. Its forests, lakes, rivers, frozen tundra, steppe, taiga and mountains are all vast. This size has long seeped into our collective consciousness. Wherever we are, there is Russia, perhaps to our east or west, to our north or south - but there is the Russian Bear. It is no coincidence that the bear is the symbol of this immense nation. There it sits, sometimes hibernating, sometimes growling, majestic, but ferocious. Bear is a Russian word, but the Russians are also wary of calling this animal by its name, fearful of conjuring up its darker side. They call it medved, ‘the one who likes honey’. At least 120,000 of these medveds live in a country which bestrides Europe and Asia. To the west of the Ural Mountains is European Russia. To their east is Siberia, stretching all the way to the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Even in the twenty-first century, to cross it by train takes six days. Russia’s leaders must look across these distances, and differences, and formulate policy accordingly; for several centuries now they have looked in all directions, but concentrated mostly westward. When writers seek to get to the heart of the bear they often use Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends, ‘but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’ Seven years later he used that key to unlock his version of the answer to the riddle, asserting, ‘I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.’ He could have been talking about the current Russian leadership, which despite now being wrapped in the cloak of democracy, remains authoritarian in its nature with national interest still at its core. |
When Vladimir Putin isn’t thinking about God, and mountains, he’s thinking about pizza. In particular, the shape of a slice of pizza - a wedge. The thin end of this wedge is Poland. Here, the vast North European Plain stretching from France to the Urals (which extend 1,000 miles south to north, forming a natural boundary between Europe and Asia) is only 300 miles wide. It runs from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south. The North European Plain encompasses all of western and northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, northern Germany and nearly all of Poland.
From a Russian perspective this is a double-edged sword. Poland represents a relatively narrow corridor into which Russia could drive its armed forces if necessary and thus prevent an enemy from advancing towards Moscow. But from this point the wedge begins to broaden; by the time you get to Russia’s borders it is over 2,000 miles wide, and is flat all the way to Moscow and beyond. Even with a large army you would be hard-pressed to defend in strength along this line. However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction, partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812, and that Hitler repeated in 1941…
You might think that no one is intent on invading Russia, but that is not how the Russians see it, and with good reason. In the past 500 years they have been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the North European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1708, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. Looking at it another way, if you count from Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853-6 and the two world wars up to 1945, then the Russians were fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years.
At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Russians occupied the territory conquered from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which then became part of the USSR, as it increasingly began to resemble the old Russian Empire. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by an association of European and North American states, for the defence of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression. In response, most of the Communist states of Europe - under Russian leadership - formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defence and mutual aid. The Pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight by the early 1980s was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust.
President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the break-up of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as ‘a major geopolitical disaster of the century’. Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has crept steadily closer, incorporating countries which Russia claims it was promised would not be joining: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia in 2004 and Albania in 2009. NATO says no such assurances were given.
When the Soviet Union broke apart, it split into fifteen countries. Geography had its revenge on the ideology of the Soviets and a more logical picture reappeared on the map, one in which mountains, rivers, lakes and seas delineate where people live, are separated from each other and thus how they develop different languages and customs…
Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all in NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states which suffered most under Soviet tyranny. Add to these Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, which would all like to join both organisations but are being held at arm’s length because of their geographic proximity to Russia and because all three have Russian troops or pro-Russian militia on their soil. NATO membership of any of these three could spark a war. All of the above explains why, in 2013, as the political battle for the direction of Ukraine heated up, Moscow concentrated hard.
As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in Kiev, the Russians could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the North European Plain. Even a studiedly neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the EU or NATO and to uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable. That Ukraine was reliant on Russia for energy also made its increasingly neutral stance acceptable, albeit irritating. But a pro-Western Ukraine with ambitions to join the two great Western alliances, and which threw into doubt Russia’s access to its Black Sea port? A Ukraine that one day might even host n NATO naval base? That could not stand. President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine tried to play both sides. He flirted with the West, but paid homage to Moscow thus Putin tolerated him. When he came close to signing a massive trade agreement with the EU, one which could lead to membership, Putin began turning the screw.
For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership of the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership of NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership of NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an offer he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal and made a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests which were eventually to overthrow him. The Germans and Americans had backed the opposition parties, with Berlin in particular seeing former world boxing champion turned politician Vitaly Klitschko as their man. The West was pulling Ukraine intellectually and economically towards it whilst helping pro-Western Ukrainians to push it westward by training and funding some of the democratic opposition groups. Street fighting erupted in Kiev and demonstrations across the country grew. In the east, crowds came out in support of the President, while in the west of the country, in cities such as L’viv (which used to be in Poland), they were busy trying to rid themselves of any pro-Russian influence.
By mid-February 2014 L’viv and other urban areas were no longer controlled by the government. Then, on 22 February, after dozens of deaths in Kiev, the President, fearing for his life, fled. Anti-Russian factions, some of which were pro-Western and some pro-fascist, took over the government. From that moment the die was cast. President Putin did not have much of a choice - he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but, most importantly, the port of Sevastopol. This geographic imperative, and the whole eastward movement of NATO, is exactly what Putin had in mind when, in a speech about the annexation, he said, ‘Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. You must always remember this.’
Sevastopol is Russia’s only true major warm-water port. However, access out of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean is restricted by the Montreux Convention of 1936, which gave Turkey - now a NATO member - control of the Bosporus. Russian naval ships do transit the strait, but in limited numbers, and this would not be permitted in the event of conflict. Even after crossing the Bosporus the Russians need to navigate the Aegean Sea before accessing the Mediterranean, and would still have either to cross the Gibraltar Straits to gain access to the Atlantic Ocean, or be allowed down the Suez Canal to reach the Indian Ocean. The Russians do have a small naval presence in Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast (this partially explains their support for the Syrian government when fighting broke out in 2011), but it is a limited supply and replenishment base, not a major force despite being extended and modernised in 2019.
Another strategic problem is that in the event of war the Russian navy cannot get out of the Baltic Sea either, due to the Skagerrak Strait, which connects to the North Sea. The narrow strait is controlled by NATO members Denmark and Norway; and even if the ships made it, the route to the Atlantic goes through what is known as the GIUK gap (Greenland/Iceland/ UK) in the North Sea - which we will see more of when we look at Western Europe.
Having annexed Crimea, the Russians are wasting no time. Under the updated 2011 terms of their lease agreement for the port of Sevastopol Kiev had the power to block the modernisation of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. No longer - hundreds of millions of roubles are being poured into upgrading the fleet, modernising and extending the naval port in the Russian city of Novorossiysk, which, although it does not have a natural deep harbour, will give the Russians extra capacity. By 2020 eighteen new warships are expected to be operating out of the two ports with another eighty vessels in the pipeline. The fleet will still not be strong enough to break out of the Black Sea during wartime, but its capacity is clearly increasing.
To counter this, in the next decade we can expect to see the USA encouraging its NATO partner Romania to boost its fleet in the Black Sea whilst relying on Turkey to hold the line across the Bosporus. Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries before being transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a time when it was envisaged that Soviet man would live forever and so be controlled by Moscow for ever. Now that Ukraine was no longer Soviet, or even pro-Russian, Putin knew the situation had to change. Did the Western diplomats know? If they didn’t, then they were unaware of Rule A, Lesson One, in ‘Diplomacy for Beginners’: when faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force. If they were aware, then they must have considered Putin’s annexation of Crimea a price worth paying for pulling Ukraine into modern Europe and the Western sphere of influence.
A generous view is that the USA and the Europeans were looking forward to welcoming Ukraine into the democratic world as a full member of its liberal institutions and the rule of law, and that there wasn’t much Moscow could do about it. That is a view which does not take into account the fact that geopolitics still exists in the twenty-first century, or that Russia does not play by the rule of law.
Flushed with victory, the new interim Ukrainian government had immediately made some foolish statements, not least of which was the intention to abolish Russian as the official second language in various regions. Given that these regions were the ones with the most Russian speakers and pro-Russian sentiment, and indeed included Crimea, this was bound to spark a backlash. It also gave President Putin the propaganda he needed to make the case that ethnic Russians inside Ukraine needed to be protected.
The Kremlin has a law which compels the government to protect ‘ethnic Russians’. A definition of that term is, by design, hard to come by because it will be defined as Russia chooses in each of the potential crises which may erupt in the former Soviet Union. When it suits the Kremlin, ethnic Russians will be defined simply as people who speak Russian as their first language. At other times the new citizenship law will be used, which states that if your grandparents lived in Russia, and Russian is your native language, you can take Russian citizenship. Given that, as the crises arise, people will be inclined to accept Russian passports to hedge their bets, this will be a lever for Russian entry into a conflict.
Approximately 60 per cent of Crimea’s population is ‘ethnically Russian’, so the Kremlin was pushing against an open door. Putin helped the anti-Kiev demonstrations, and stirred up so much trouble that eventually he ‘had’ to send his troops out of the confines of the naval base and onto the streets to protect people. The Ukrainian military in the area was in no shape to take on both the people and the Russian army, and swiftly withdrew. Crimea was once again a de facto part of Russia.
You could make the argument that President Putin did have a choice: he could have respected the territorial integrity of Ukraine. But, given that he was dealing with the geographic hand God has dealt Russia, this was never really an option. He would not be the man who ‘lost Crimea’, and with it the only proper warm-water port his country had access to. No one rode to the rescue of Ukraine as it lost territory equivalent to the size of Belgium, or the US state of Maryland. Ukraine and its neighbours knew a geographic truth: that unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near, Washington DC is far away. For Russia this was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, the West could.
The EU imposed limited sanctions - limited because several European countries, Germany among them, are reliant on Russian energy to heat their homes in winter. The pipelines run east to west and the Kremlin can turn the taps on and off. Energy as political power will be deployed time and again in the coming years, and the concept of‘ethnic Russians’ will be used to justify whatever moves Russia makes.
In a speech in 2014 President Putin briefly referred to ‘Novorossiya’ or ‘New Russia’. The Kremlin-watchers took a deep breath. He had revived the geographic title given to what is now southern and eastern Ukraine, which Russia had won from the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century. Catherine went on to settle Russians in these regions and demanded that Russian be the first language. ‘Novorossiya’ was only ceded to the newly formed Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922. ‘Why?’ asked Putin rhetorically, ‘Let God judge them.’ In his speech he listed the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odessa before saying, ‘Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.’
Several million ethnic Russians still remain inside what was the USSR, but outside Russia. It is no surprise that, after seizing Crimea, Russia went on to encourage the uprisings by pro-Russians in the Ukrainian eastern industrial heartlands in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia could easily drive militarily all the way to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River in Kiev. But it does not need the headache that would bring. It is far less painful, and cheaper, to encourage unrest in the eastern borders of Ukraine and remind Kiev who controls energy supplies, to ensure that Kiev’s infatuation with the flirtatious West does not turn into a marriage consummated in the chambers of the EU or NATO.
Covert support for the uprisings in eastern Ukraine was also logistically simple and had the added benefit of deniability on the international stage. Barefaced lying in the great chamber of the UN Security Council is simple if your opponent does not have concrete proof of your actions and, more importantly, doesn’t want concrete proof in case he or she has to do something about it. Many politicians in the West breathed a sigh of relief and muttered quietly, Thank goodness Ukraine isn’t in NATO or we would have had to act.’
The annexation of Crimea showed how Russia is prepared for military action to defend what it sees as its interests in what it calls its ‘near abroad’. It took a rational gamble that outside powers would not intervene, and Crimea was ‘doable’. It is close to Russia, could be supplied across the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and could rely on internal support from large sections of the population of the peninsula.
Russia has not finished with Ukraine yet, nor elsewhere. The Donbass region remains volatile and sporadic fighting continues. An outbreak of violence there in the summer of 2017 left several Ukrainian soldiers dead, leading the USA to consider upping its military assistance to Ukraine, and the Russians to conduct significant military exercises on the Ukrainian border. In late 2018, the Russian coastguard intercepted three Ukrainian ships heading from Odessa, in the Black Sea, towards the Ukrainian base in Mariupol, in the Sea of Azov. The Russians fired on the Ukrainians, wounding three sailors, and rammed a tugboat before taking the ships and crews into custody. They then blocked access in and out of the Sea of Azov by anchoring a cargo ship under the bridge over Kerch Strait. The seized ships were not returned and six months after the incident twenty-four Ukrainian sailors were still in a Russian jail.
International condemnation followed, with NATO powers suggesting they would ensure the waterway was kept open. In April 2019, the US permanent representative to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, said the alliance was working on a range of measures to ‘beef up’ air surveillance and that NATO would increase the number of its ships in the Black Sea to ensure safe passage. A Crimean representative to the Russian parliament, Ruslan Balbek, responded by saying, ‘No matter how much NATO beats its chest, the ships will pass through it only in accordance with Russian rules.’ Unless it feels threatened, Russia will probably not send its troops all the way into the Baltic States, or any further forward than it already is in Georgia; but it will push its power in Georgia, and in this volatile period further military action cannot be ruled out.
However, just as Russia’s actions in its war with Georgia in 2008 were a warning to NATO to come no closer, so NATO’s message to Russia in the summer of 2014 was, ‘This far west and no further.’ A handful of NATO war planes were flown to the Baltic States, military exercises were announced in Poland and the Americans began planning to ‘pre-position’ extra hardware as close to Russia as possible. At the same time there was a flurry of diplomatic visits by Defence and Foreign Ministers to the Baltic States, Georgia and Moldova to reassure them of support.
Some commentators poured scorn on the reaction, arguing that six RAF Eurofighter Typhoon jets flying over Baltic airspace were hardly going to deter the Russian hordes. But the reaction was about diplomatic signalling, and the signal was clear - NATO is prepared to fight. Indeed it would have to, because if it failed to react to an attack on a member state, it would instantly be obsolete. The Americans - who are already edging towards a new foreign policy in which they feel less constrained by existing structures and are prepared to forge new ones as they perceive the need arises - remain deeply unimpressed with the European countries’ commitment to defence spending. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump suggested NATO was ‘obsolete’; as president he rowed back on that in the spring of 2017 but it’s clear he intended to make the other NATO countries nervous and there has been a small increase in defence spending by a handful of the members.
President Trump had also failed to clarify whether the USA would automatically come to the aid of a fellow NATO ally, but again, as the realities and complexities of defence, warfare, propaganda and geopolitics became clear, he finally guaranteed NATO’s Article 5 in the spring of 2017. In the case of the three Baltic States, NATO’s position is clear. As they are all members of the alliance, an armed attack against any of them by Russia would trigger Article 5 of NATO’s founding charter, which states: ‘An armed attack against one or more [NATO member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’, and goes on to nay NATO will come to the rescue if necessary. Article 5 was invoked after the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001, paving the way for NATO involvement in Afghanistan.
President Putin is a student of history. He appears to have learnt the lessons of the Soviet years, in which Russia overstretched itself and was forced to contract. An overt assault on the Baltic States would likewise be overstretching and is unlikely, especially if NATO and its political masters ensure that Putin understands their signals. But in 2016, the Russian president sent his own signal. He changed the wording of Russia’s overall military strategy document and went further than the naval strategy paper of 2015: for the first time, the USA was named as an ‘external threat’ to Russia. By 2019 NATO’s fears had grown and discussions about building a permanent US military base in Poland were well advanced, with Warsaw offering to pay up to $2 billion towards the costs.
Russia does not have to send an armoured division into Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia to influence events there, but if it ever does it would justify the action by claiming that the large Russian communities there are being discriminated against. In both Estonia and Latvia approximately one in four people are ethnically Russian and in Lithuania it is 5.8 per cent. In Estonia the Russian speakers say they are under-represented in government and thousands do not have any form of citizenship. This does not mean they want to be part of Russia, but they are one of the levers Russia can pull to influence events.
The Russian-speaking populations in the Baltics can be stirred up to making life difficult. There are existing, fully formed political parties already representing many of them. Russia also controls the central heating in the homes of the Baltic people. It can set the price people pay for their heating bills each month, and, if it chooses, simply turn the heating off. Russia will continue to push its interests in the Baltic States. They are one of the weak links in its defence since the collapse of the USSR, another breach in the wall they would prefer to see forming an arc from the Baltic Sea, south, then south-east connecting to the Urals.
This brings us to another gap in the wall and another region Moscow views as a potential buffer state. Firmly in the Kremlin’s sights is Moldova.
Moldova presents a different problem for all sides. An attack on the country by Russia would necessitate crossing through Ukraine, over the Dnieper River and then over another sovereign border into Moldova. It could be done - at the cost of significant loss of life and by using Odessa as a staging post - but there would be no deniability. Although it might not trigger war with NATO (Moldova is not a member), it would provoke Carpathian Mountains curve round south-west to become the Transylvanian Alps, to the south-east is a plain leading down to the Black Sea. That plain can also he thought of as a flat corridor into Russia; and, just as the Russians would prefer to control the North European Plain at its narrow point in Poland, so they would like to control the plain by the Black Sea - also known as Moldova - in the region formerly known as Bessarabia.
After the Crimean War (fought between Russia and Western European allies to protect Ottoman Turkey from Russia), the 1856 Treaty of Paris returned parts of Bessarabia to Moldova, thus cutting Russia off from the River Danube. It took Russia almost a century to regain access to it, but with the collapse of the USSR, once more Russia had to retreat eastward.
However, in effect the Russians do already control part of Moldova - a region called Transnistria, part of Moldova east of the Dniester River which borders Ukraine. Stalin, in his wisdom, settled large numbers of Russians there, just as he had in Crimea after deporting much of the Tatar population. Modern Transnistria is now at least 50 per cent Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking, and that part of the population is pro-Russian. When Moldova became independent in 1991, the Russian-speaking population rebelled and, after a brief period of fighting, declared a breakaway Republic of Transnistria. It helped that Russia had soldiers stationed there, and it retains a force of 2,000 troops to this day. A Russian military advance in Moldova is unlikely, but the Kremlin can and does use its economic muscle and the volatile situation in Transnistria to try to influence the Moldovan government not to join the EU or NATO. Moldova is reliant on Russia for its energy needs, its crops go eastward and Russian imports of the excellent Moldovan wine tend to rise or fall according to the state of the relationship between the two countries.
Across the Black Sea from Moldova lies another wine-producing nation: Georgia. It is not high on Russia’s list of places to control for two reasons. Firstly, the Georgia- Russian war of 2008 left large parts of the country occupied by Russian troops, who now fully control the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Secondly, it lies south of the Caucasus Mountains and Russia also has troops stationed in neighbouring Armenia. Moscow would prefer an extra layer to their buffer zone, but can live without taking the rest of Georgia. 'That situation could potentially change if Georgia looked close to becoming a NATO member. This is precisely why it has so far been rebuffed by the NATO governments, which are keen to avoid the inevitable conflict with Russia.
A majority of the population in Georgia would like closer ties with the EU countries, but the shock of the 2008 war, when then President Mikheil Saakashvili naively thought the Americans might ride to his rescue after he provoked the Russians, has caused many to consider that hedging their bets may be safer. In 2013 they elected a government and president, Giorgi Margvelashvili, far more conciliatory to Moscow. As in Ukraine, people instinctively know the truism everyone in the neighbourhood recognises: that Washington is far away, and Moscow is near.
Russia’s most powerful weapons now, leaving to one side nuclear missiles, are not the Russian army and air force, but gas and oil. Russia is second only to the USA as the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States. This policy has been used so aggressively, and Russia has such a hold over Europe’s energy needs, that moves are afoot to blunt its impact. Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves off their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports.
On average, more than 25 per cent of Europe’s gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency. This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia are 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania are 80 per cent dependent, and Greece, Austria and Hungary 60 per cent. About half of Germany’s gas consumption comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticise the Kremlin for aggressive behaviour than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 per cent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply…
This is an economic battle based on geography and one of the modern examples where technology is being utilised in an attempt to beat the geographic restraints of earlier eras. A lot was made of the economic pain Russia suffered in 2014 when the price of oil fell below $50 a barrel, and lower still in 2015. Moscow’s 2016 budget and predicted spending for 2017 was based on prices of $50, and even though Russia began pumping record levels of oil, it knows it cannot balance the books. Russia loses about $2 billion in revenue for each dollar drop in the oil price and the Russian economy duly took the hit, bringing great hardship to many ordinary people, but predictions of the collapse of the state were wide of the mark. Russia will struggle to fund its huge increase in military spending, but despite the difficulties it faces, the World Bank predicts that in the second half of this decade the economy will grow slightly. If the new discoveries of vast amounts of oil in the Arctic’s Kara Sea can be brought to shore, that growth will be healthier.
At home, Russia is facing many challenges, not least of which is demographic. The sharp decline in population growth may have been arrested, but it remains a problem. The average lifespan for a Russian man is below sixty-five, ranking Russia in the bottom half of the world’s 193 UN member states, and there are now only 144 million Russians (excluding Crimea).
From the Grand Principality of Muscovy, through Peter the Great, Stalin and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is tsarist, Communist or crony capitalist - the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat.
Strip out the lines of nation states, and the map Ivan the Terrible confronted is the same one Vladimir Putin is faced with to this day.
From a Russian perspective this is a double-edged sword. Poland represents a relatively narrow corridor into which Russia could drive its armed forces if necessary and thus prevent an enemy from advancing towards Moscow. But from this point the wedge begins to broaden; by the time you get to Russia’s borders it is over 2,000 miles wide, and is flat all the way to Moscow and beyond. Even with a large army you would be hard-pressed to defend in strength along this line. However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction, partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812, and that Hitler repeated in 1941…
You might think that no one is intent on invading Russia, but that is not how the Russians see it, and with good reason. In the past 500 years they have been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the North European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1708, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. Looking at it another way, if you count from Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853-6 and the two world wars up to 1945, then the Russians were fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years.
At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Russians occupied the territory conquered from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which then became part of the USSR, as it increasingly began to resemble the old Russian Empire. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by an association of European and North American states, for the defence of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression. In response, most of the Communist states of Europe - under Russian leadership - formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defence and mutual aid. The Pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight by the early 1980s was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust.
President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the break-up of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as ‘a major geopolitical disaster of the century’. Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has crept steadily closer, incorporating countries which Russia claims it was promised would not be joining: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia in 2004 and Albania in 2009. NATO says no such assurances were given.
When the Soviet Union broke apart, it split into fifteen countries. Geography had its revenge on the ideology of the Soviets and a more logical picture reappeared on the map, one in which mountains, rivers, lakes and seas delineate where people live, are separated from each other and thus how they develop different languages and customs…
Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all in NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states which suffered most under Soviet tyranny. Add to these Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, which would all like to join both organisations but are being held at arm’s length because of their geographic proximity to Russia and because all three have Russian troops or pro-Russian militia on their soil. NATO membership of any of these three could spark a war. All of the above explains why, in 2013, as the political battle for the direction of Ukraine heated up, Moscow concentrated hard.
As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in Kiev, the Russians could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the North European Plain. Even a studiedly neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the EU or NATO and to uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable. That Ukraine was reliant on Russia for energy also made its increasingly neutral stance acceptable, albeit irritating. But a pro-Western Ukraine with ambitions to join the two great Western alliances, and which threw into doubt Russia’s access to its Black Sea port? A Ukraine that one day might even host n NATO naval base? That could not stand. President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine tried to play both sides. He flirted with the West, but paid homage to Moscow thus Putin tolerated him. When he came close to signing a massive trade agreement with the EU, one which could lead to membership, Putin began turning the screw.
For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership of the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership of NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership of NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an offer he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal and made a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests which were eventually to overthrow him. The Germans and Americans had backed the opposition parties, with Berlin in particular seeing former world boxing champion turned politician Vitaly Klitschko as their man. The West was pulling Ukraine intellectually and economically towards it whilst helping pro-Western Ukrainians to push it westward by training and funding some of the democratic opposition groups. Street fighting erupted in Kiev and demonstrations across the country grew. In the east, crowds came out in support of the President, while in the west of the country, in cities such as L’viv (which used to be in Poland), they were busy trying to rid themselves of any pro-Russian influence.
By mid-February 2014 L’viv and other urban areas were no longer controlled by the government. Then, on 22 February, after dozens of deaths in Kiev, the President, fearing for his life, fled. Anti-Russian factions, some of which were pro-Western and some pro-fascist, took over the government. From that moment the die was cast. President Putin did not have much of a choice - he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but, most importantly, the port of Sevastopol. This geographic imperative, and the whole eastward movement of NATO, is exactly what Putin had in mind when, in a speech about the annexation, he said, ‘Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. You must always remember this.’
Sevastopol is Russia’s only true major warm-water port. However, access out of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean is restricted by the Montreux Convention of 1936, which gave Turkey - now a NATO member - control of the Bosporus. Russian naval ships do transit the strait, but in limited numbers, and this would not be permitted in the event of conflict. Even after crossing the Bosporus the Russians need to navigate the Aegean Sea before accessing the Mediterranean, and would still have either to cross the Gibraltar Straits to gain access to the Atlantic Ocean, or be allowed down the Suez Canal to reach the Indian Ocean. The Russians do have a small naval presence in Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast (this partially explains their support for the Syrian government when fighting broke out in 2011), but it is a limited supply and replenishment base, not a major force despite being extended and modernised in 2019.
Another strategic problem is that in the event of war the Russian navy cannot get out of the Baltic Sea either, due to the Skagerrak Strait, which connects to the North Sea. The narrow strait is controlled by NATO members Denmark and Norway; and even if the ships made it, the route to the Atlantic goes through what is known as the GIUK gap (Greenland/Iceland/ UK) in the North Sea - which we will see more of when we look at Western Europe.
Having annexed Crimea, the Russians are wasting no time. Under the updated 2011 terms of their lease agreement for the port of Sevastopol Kiev had the power to block the modernisation of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. No longer - hundreds of millions of roubles are being poured into upgrading the fleet, modernising and extending the naval port in the Russian city of Novorossiysk, which, although it does not have a natural deep harbour, will give the Russians extra capacity. By 2020 eighteen new warships are expected to be operating out of the two ports with another eighty vessels in the pipeline. The fleet will still not be strong enough to break out of the Black Sea during wartime, but its capacity is clearly increasing.
To counter this, in the next decade we can expect to see the USA encouraging its NATO partner Romania to boost its fleet in the Black Sea whilst relying on Turkey to hold the line across the Bosporus. Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries before being transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a time when it was envisaged that Soviet man would live forever and so be controlled by Moscow for ever. Now that Ukraine was no longer Soviet, or even pro-Russian, Putin knew the situation had to change. Did the Western diplomats know? If they didn’t, then they were unaware of Rule A, Lesson One, in ‘Diplomacy for Beginners’: when faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force. If they were aware, then they must have considered Putin’s annexation of Crimea a price worth paying for pulling Ukraine into modern Europe and the Western sphere of influence.
A generous view is that the USA and the Europeans were looking forward to welcoming Ukraine into the democratic world as a full member of its liberal institutions and the rule of law, and that there wasn’t much Moscow could do about it. That is a view which does not take into account the fact that geopolitics still exists in the twenty-first century, or that Russia does not play by the rule of law.
Flushed with victory, the new interim Ukrainian government had immediately made some foolish statements, not least of which was the intention to abolish Russian as the official second language in various regions. Given that these regions were the ones with the most Russian speakers and pro-Russian sentiment, and indeed included Crimea, this was bound to spark a backlash. It also gave President Putin the propaganda he needed to make the case that ethnic Russians inside Ukraine needed to be protected.
The Kremlin has a law which compels the government to protect ‘ethnic Russians’. A definition of that term is, by design, hard to come by because it will be defined as Russia chooses in each of the potential crises which may erupt in the former Soviet Union. When it suits the Kremlin, ethnic Russians will be defined simply as people who speak Russian as their first language. At other times the new citizenship law will be used, which states that if your grandparents lived in Russia, and Russian is your native language, you can take Russian citizenship. Given that, as the crises arise, people will be inclined to accept Russian passports to hedge their bets, this will be a lever for Russian entry into a conflict.
Approximately 60 per cent of Crimea’s population is ‘ethnically Russian’, so the Kremlin was pushing against an open door. Putin helped the anti-Kiev demonstrations, and stirred up so much trouble that eventually he ‘had’ to send his troops out of the confines of the naval base and onto the streets to protect people. The Ukrainian military in the area was in no shape to take on both the people and the Russian army, and swiftly withdrew. Crimea was once again a de facto part of Russia.
You could make the argument that President Putin did have a choice: he could have respected the territorial integrity of Ukraine. But, given that he was dealing with the geographic hand God has dealt Russia, this was never really an option. He would not be the man who ‘lost Crimea’, and with it the only proper warm-water port his country had access to. No one rode to the rescue of Ukraine as it lost territory equivalent to the size of Belgium, or the US state of Maryland. Ukraine and its neighbours knew a geographic truth: that unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near, Washington DC is far away. For Russia this was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, the West could.
The EU imposed limited sanctions - limited because several European countries, Germany among them, are reliant on Russian energy to heat their homes in winter. The pipelines run east to west and the Kremlin can turn the taps on and off. Energy as political power will be deployed time and again in the coming years, and the concept of‘ethnic Russians’ will be used to justify whatever moves Russia makes.
In a speech in 2014 President Putin briefly referred to ‘Novorossiya’ or ‘New Russia’. The Kremlin-watchers took a deep breath. He had revived the geographic title given to what is now southern and eastern Ukraine, which Russia had won from the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century. Catherine went on to settle Russians in these regions and demanded that Russian be the first language. ‘Novorossiya’ was only ceded to the newly formed Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922. ‘Why?’ asked Putin rhetorically, ‘Let God judge them.’ In his speech he listed the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odessa before saying, ‘Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.’
Several million ethnic Russians still remain inside what was the USSR, but outside Russia. It is no surprise that, after seizing Crimea, Russia went on to encourage the uprisings by pro-Russians in the Ukrainian eastern industrial heartlands in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia could easily drive militarily all the way to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River in Kiev. But it does not need the headache that would bring. It is far less painful, and cheaper, to encourage unrest in the eastern borders of Ukraine and remind Kiev who controls energy supplies, to ensure that Kiev’s infatuation with the flirtatious West does not turn into a marriage consummated in the chambers of the EU or NATO.
Covert support for the uprisings in eastern Ukraine was also logistically simple and had the added benefit of deniability on the international stage. Barefaced lying in the great chamber of the UN Security Council is simple if your opponent does not have concrete proof of your actions and, more importantly, doesn’t want concrete proof in case he or she has to do something about it. Many politicians in the West breathed a sigh of relief and muttered quietly, Thank goodness Ukraine isn’t in NATO or we would have had to act.’
The annexation of Crimea showed how Russia is prepared for military action to defend what it sees as its interests in what it calls its ‘near abroad’. It took a rational gamble that outside powers would not intervene, and Crimea was ‘doable’. It is close to Russia, could be supplied across the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and could rely on internal support from large sections of the population of the peninsula.
Russia has not finished with Ukraine yet, nor elsewhere. The Donbass region remains volatile and sporadic fighting continues. An outbreak of violence there in the summer of 2017 left several Ukrainian soldiers dead, leading the USA to consider upping its military assistance to Ukraine, and the Russians to conduct significant military exercises on the Ukrainian border. In late 2018, the Russian coastguard intercepted three Ukrainian ships heading from Odessa, in the Black Sea, towards the Ukrainian base in Mariupol, in the Sea of Azov. The Russians fired on the Ukrainians, wounding three sailors, and rammed a tugboat before taking the ships and crews into custody. They then blocked access in and out of the Sea of Azov by anchoring a cargo ship under the bridge over Kerch Strait. The seized ships were not returned and six months after the incident twenty-four Ukrainian sailors were still in a Russian jail.
International condemnation followed, with NATO powers suggesting they would ensure the waterway was kept open. In April 2019, the US permanent representative to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, said the alliance was working on a range of measures to ‘beef up’ air surveillance and that NATO would increase the number of its ships in the Black Sea to ensure safe passage. A Crimean representative to the Russian parliament, Ruslan Balbek, responded by saying, ‘No matter how much NATO beats its chest, the ships will pass through it only in accordance with Russian rules.’ Unless it feels threatened, Russia will probably not send its troops all the way into the Baltic States, or any further forward than it already is in Georgia; but it will push its power in Georgia, and in this volatile period further military action cannot be ruled out.
However, just as Russia’s actions in its war with Georgia in 2008 were a warning to NATO to come no closer, so NATO’s message to Russia in the summer of 2014 was, ‘This far west and no further.’ A handful of NATO war planes were flown to the Baltic States, military exercises were announced in Poland and the Americans began planning to ‘pre-position’ extra hardware as close to Russia as possible. At the same time there was a flurry of diplomatic visits by Defence and Foreign Ministers to the Baltic States, Georgia and Moldova to reassure them of support.
Some commentators poured scorn on the reaction, arguing that six RAF Eurofighter Typhoon jets flying over Baltic airspace were hardly going to deter the Russian hordes. But the reaction was about diplomatic signalling, and the signal was clear - NATO is prepared to fight. Indeed it would have to, because if it failed to react to an attack on a member state, it would instantly be obsolete. The Americans - who are already edging towards a new foreign policy in which they feel less constrained by existing structures and are prepared to forge new ones as they perceive the need arises - remain deeply unimpressed with the European countries’ commitment to defence spending. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump suggested NATO was ‘obsolete’; as president he rowed back on that in the spring of 2017 but it’s clear he intended to make the other NATO countries nervous and there has been a small increase in defence spending by a handful of the members.
President Trump had also failed to clarify whether the USA would automatically come to the aid of a fellow NATO ally, but again, as the realities and complexities of defence, warfare, propaganda and geopolitics became clear, he finally guaranteed NATO’s Article 5 in the spring of 2017. In the case of the three Baltic States, NATO’s position is clear. As they are all members of the alliance, an armed attack against any of them by Russia would trigger Article 5 of NATO’s founding charter, which states: ‘An armed attack against one or more [NATO member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’, and goes on to nay NATO will come to the rescue if necessary. Article 5 was invoked after the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001, paving the way for NATO involvement in Afghanistan.
President Putin is a student of history. He appears to have learnt the lessons of the Soviet years, in which Russia overstretched itself and was forced to contract. An overt assault on the Baltic States would likewise be overstretching and is unlikely, especially if NATO and its political masters ensure that Putin understands their signals. But in 2016, the Russian president sent his own signal. He changed the wording of Russia’s overall military strategy document and went further than the naval strategy paper of 2015: for the first time, the USA was named as an ‘external threat’ to Russia. By 2019 NATO’s fears had grown and discussions about building a permanent US military base in Poland were well advanced, with Warsaw offering to pay up to $2 billion towards the costs.
Russia does not have to send an armoured division into Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia to influence events there, but if it ever does it would justify the action by claiming that the large Russian communities there are being discriminated against. In both Estonia and Latvia approximately one in four people are ethnically Russian and in Lithuania it is 5.8 per cent. In Estonia the Russian speakers say they are under-represented in government and thousands do not have any form of citizenship. This does not mean they want to be part of Russia, but they are one of the levers Russia can pull to influence events.
The Russian-speaking populations in the Baltics can be stirred up to making life difficult. There are existing, fully formed political parties already representing many of them. Russia also controls the central heating in the homes of the Baltic people. It can set the price people pay for their heating bills each month, and, if it chooses, simply turn the heating off. Russia will continue to push its interests in the Baltic States. They are one of the weak links in its defence since the collapse of the USSR, another breach in the wall they would prefer to see forming an arc from the Baltic Sea, south, then south-east connecting to the Urals.
This brings us to another gap in the wall and another region Moscow views as a potential buffer state. Firmly in the Kremlin’s sights is Moldova.
Moldova presents a different problem for all sides. An attack on the country by Russia would necessitate crossing through Ukraine, over the Dnieper River and then over another sovereign border into Moldova. It could be done - at the cost of significant loss of life and by using Odessa as a staging post - but there would be no deniability. Although it might not trigger war with NATO (Moldova is not a member), it would provoke Carpathian Mountains curve round south-west to become the Transylvanian Alps, to the south-east is a plain leading down to the Black Sea. That plain can also he thought of as a flat corridor into Russia; and, just as the Russians would prefer to control the North European Plain at its narrow point in Poland, so they would like to control the plain by the Black Sea - also known as Moldova - in the region formerly known as Bessarabia.
After the Crimean War (fought between Russia and Western European allies to protect Ottoman Turkey from Russia), the 1856 Treaty of Paris returned parts of Bessarabia to Moldova, thus cutting Russia off from the River Danube. It took Russia almost a century to regain access to it, but with the collapse of the USSR, once more Russia had to retreat eastward.
However, in effect the Russians do already control part of Moldova - a region called Transnistria, part of Moldova east of the Dniester River which borders Ukraine. Stalin, in his wisdom, settled large numbers of Russians there, just as he had in Crimea after deporting much of the Tatar population. Modern Transnistria is now at least 50 per cent Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking, and that part of the population is pro-Russian. When Moldova became independent in 1991, the Russian-speaking population rebelled and, after a brief period of fighting, declared a breakaway Republic of Transnistria. It helped that Russia had soldiers stationed there, and it retains a force of 2,000 troops to this day. A Russian military advance in Moldova is unlikely, but the Kremlin can and does use its economic muscle and the volatile situation in Transnistria to try to influence the Moldovan government not to join the EU or NATO. Moldova is reliant on Russia for its energy needs, its crops go eastward and Russian imports of the excellent Moldovan wine tend to rise or fall according to the state of the relationship between the two countries.
Across the Black Sea from Moldova lies another wine-producing nation: Georgia. It is not high on Russia’s list of places to control for two reasons. Firstly, the Georgia- Russian war of 2008 left large parts of the country occupied by Russian troops, who now fully control the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Secondly, it lies south of the Caucasus Mountains and Russia also has troops stationed in neighbouring Armenia. Moscow would prefer an extra layer to their buffer zone, but can live without taking the rest of Georgia. 'That situation could potentially change if Georgia looked close to becoming a NATO member. This is precisely why it has so far been rebuffed by the NATO governments, which are keen to avoid the inevitable conflict with Russia.
A majority of the population in Georgia would like closer ties with the EU countries, but the shock of the 2008 war, when then President Mikheil Saakashvili naively thought the Americans might ride to his rescue after he provoked the Russians, has caused many to consider that hedging their bets may be safer. In 2013 they elected a government and president, Giorgi Margvelashvili, far more conciliatory to Moscow. As in Ukraine, people instinctively know the truism everyone in the neighbourhood recognises: that Washington is far away, and Moscow is near.
Russia’s most powerful weapons now, leaving to one side nuclear missiles, are not the Russian army and air force, but gas and oil. Russia is second only to the USA as the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States. This policy has been used so aggressively, and Russia has such a hold over Europe’s energy needs, that moves are afoot to blunt its impact. Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves off their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports.
On average, more than 25 per cent of Europe’s gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency. This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia are 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania are 80 per cent dependent, and Greece, Austria and Hungary 60 per cent. About half of Germany’s gas consumption comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticise the Kremlin for aggressive behaviour than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 per cent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply…
This is an economic battle based on geography and one of the modern examples where technology is being utilised in an attempt to beat the geographic restraints of earlier eras. A lot was made of the economic pain Russia suffered in 2014 when the price of oil fell below $50 a barrel, and lower still in 2015. Moscow’s 2016 budget and predicted spending for 2017 was based on prices of $50, and even though Russia began pumping record levels of oil, it knows it cannot balance the books. Russia loses about $2 billion in revenue for each dollar drop in the oil price and the Russian economy duly took the hit, bringing great hardship to many ordinary people, but predictions of the collapse of the state were wide of the mark. Russia will struggle to fund its huge increase in military spending, but despite the difficulties it faces, the World Bank predicts that in the second half of this decade the economy will grow slightly. If the new discoveries of vast amounts of oil in the Arctic’s Kara Sea can be brought to shore, that growth will be healthier.
At home, Russia is facing many challenges, not least of which is demographic. The sharp decline in population growth may have been arrested, but it remains a problem. The average lifespan for a Russian man is below sixty-five, ranking Russia in the bottom half of the world’s 193 UN member states, and there are now only 144 million Russians (excluding Crimea).
From the Grand Principality of Muscovy, through Peter the Great, Stalin and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is tsarist, Communist or crony capitalist - the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat.
Strip out the lines of nation states, and the map Ivan the Terrible confronted is the same one Vladimir Putin is faced with to this day.