Mick Hartley

Another look at Putin's Russia, from Mark Galeotti. In Ukraine they managed to look powerful because they sent their elite troops and faced little or no opposition: in Syria they're bombing disorganised rebel forces who have no significant air defence. But in truth Russia's military is much weaker than Putin wants you to think:

Today is Defenders of the Fatherland Day in Russia, a public holiday and a celebration of all things military: triumphalism about the latest weapons, about operations in Syria, about the seizure of Crimea. Meanwhile, from the West we hear bloodcurdling warnings about the threat posed by the Kremlin’s war machine.

Perceptions matter, though: Arguably being thought to be dangerous is actually a more powerful geopolitical asset than actually being it. So long as the West believes Russia could surge into Ukraine, escalate in Syria, or even roll into the Baltic states, it inevitably feels a greater pressure to make concessions and invite Vladimir Putin to the table.

No one seems willing to question just how formidable Putin’s new military really is — and he seems to be counting on that….

[S]o far, we have seen the very best of the Russian military in the ideal conditions but not the rest of the force, or how they would cope facing a real threat…

As a result, we mistake Russia’s still large but overstretched and only partly reformed armed forces for a terrifying threat to the West and to the global order as we know it — and we (over)react accordingly, giving the Kremlin far more leverage than it actually deserves.

So why is the West so worried? In part, this is the usual human habit of overcompensation. After Crimea and Syria showed unexpected Russian capabilities, assessments, once more measured, swung to the other extreme.

There are also vested interests at work. Industries talking up the Russian challenge as a way to justify more defense spending and new weapons systems. Front-line nations wanting to assert their pivotal role, their need for support. Military establishments, whose job is to think of worst-case scenarios and prepare accordingly.

This is all understandable. From Tallinn in Estonia, for example, it is hard to be sanguine about Moscow’s capabilities and intent, when Russian commandos have kidnapped one of your security officers across the border, when Russian bombers buzz your airspace, and when Russia stages snap exercises clearly wargaming a potential invasion on your border.

But the problem is that this also plays into Putin’s hands. His calculation appears to be that the scarier he seems, the more political traction he has.

After all, on most objective grounds, Russia is hardly a great power. It has nuclear weapons, but ultimately these are of little practical value. Continued rearmament depends on money, and Russia’s economy is dependent on oil that is now selling for bargain-basement prices. Russia’s economy is the 13th largest in the world, just between Australia and Spain, about half the size of France’s, about a fourteenth of the USA’s. Even before the value of the ruble collapsed, Russian military spending was around one-seventh of America’s.

What the Kremlin does have is the will to take risks, ignore the rules, and hope that the other side is more sensible, more cautious, more willing to make concessions than it is to call Russia's bluff.

In the main, this has worked so far. But Putin’s bad-boy geopolitics and military postures are wasting assets already beginning to prove to be liabilities.

The Russian defense budget as it stands is unsustainable. Already this year it has been cut by 5 percent, and a range of future projects are being quietly scaled down or pushed back.

Even with the cut, the defense budget is bleeding the Kremlin of resources needed for economic diversification and the public services needed to pacify an increasingly disgruntled population.

Russia has squandered its "soft power," its moral authority in the world, by which it once might have claimed to be an alternative to the Western-led order. It is now more unpopular than ever; only in Vietnam, Ghana, and China is it seen positively.

Precisely because Putin has been so successful at talking up his unpredictability and aggressive capabilities, NATO is now more united than it has been for a long time; defense and security spending in Europe, long neglected, is now beginning to be addressed, due to rise on average by more than 8 percent this year.

Of course, NATO needs to take the Russian challenge seriously. But that also means not giving Putin more credibility and authority than he deserves.