lost an empire that consumed Germany after losing World War I, history may judge Putin’s remark as an understatement.
Russia’s subjugation of Georgia in 2008, along with Moscow’s recognition of two breakaway Georgian regions as sovereign states (one of which—Abkhazia—possesses more than 100 miles of coastline on the Black Sea), was a lackluster military operation. But it sent a clear message that Russia’s economic, demographic, and political misfortunes would not prevent her rulers from rekindling the fear of domination that has been a fact of life in the region since before the Russian Revolution.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, along with his military support for the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who needed no prodding to take up arms against their own government, emphasized Moscow’s ambition to reassert regional hegemony. The armed conflict between Ukraine’s democratically elected government and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine continues today.
Putin’s ambitions do not end in Ukraine. Extending their reach beyond border states, Russian military forces intervened on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2015, four years after the Syrian civil war began. The intervention improved Moscow’s access to a Syrian port, Latakia, on the Mediterranean and a nearby airfield that is used to conduct missions in support of Assad. It also enabled Iran to plant a violent foot in Syria in the form of an expanding network of Shiite terror groups.
The late-2016 fall of Aleppo, the center of Syrian resistance to Assad, was a major success for Putin. Where U.S. policy makers saw only failed outcomes, Putin gambled that Russia would not become enmeshed in a prolonged civil conflict. He won. The victory established Russia as the major external power in the Levant, consolidated his position of strength in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, and underlined the retreat of the United States from its previous influence in the region.
Russia’s access to the world’s great seas and oceans offers at once opportunities to complicate the effectiveness of the United States and its allies operating in the same bodies of water, to disrupt communications between the United States and its allies, and to project global force. A revanchist power couldn’t ask for much more. Russia has largely succeeded in monopolizing the energy output of its former possessions in Central Asia. Neutering NATO, replacing the United States as the major external power in the Middle East, and reestablishing control over the Baltic States as well as Ukraine would help right the wrongs that Vladimir Putin believes were perpetrated when the Russian Federation replaced the Soviet Union.
Putin is acting as purposefully at sea as he has on land. Usually the two are linked. With its seizure of the Crimea, Russia regains the access to the Black Sea that the USSR exploited to keep its littoral client states in line and to make Turkey nervous. Today, as before, the Black Sea provides a gateway to the Bosphorus and the Mediterranean. Moreover, Russia understands the same lesson that China, Iran, North Korea, and every other potential adversary learned from Desert Storm: defeating the United States at sea today is much harder than denying it the access needed to apply American land and seapower. Russian possession of the Crimea allows its modern effective anti-surface and surface-to-air missiles to challenge access to the region by NATO vessels, including those of the United States, which conduct presence and deterrence missions in the Black Sea. Moscow’s maritime and continental efforts to restore its position in the Black Sea region are particularly effective as Western national security policy makers concentrate their attention on Russia’s increasing threat to the Baltic States.
Examples of Russian military preparation in the Baltics include increased long-range anti-ship missiles and beefed-up air-defense systems in the Kaliningrad military district. In April 2016, Russian tactical jets flew several high-speed passes dangerously close to the destroyer USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea.30 The Russian defense ministry is also tightening its belt; its month-long investigation into its Baltic Sea fleet command led to the firing of fifty senior naval officers for leadership and operational misjudgment in early July 2016.31
But in the revised Russian Marine Doctrine that was published in July 2015, Putin’s naval focus is the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic. “We emphasize the Atlantic,” states the document, “because NATO has been developing actively of late and coming closer to our borders, and Russia is . . . responding to these developments.”32 This is meant for a domestic audience that is receptive to Putin’s claim that he protects them from Western states bristling with weaponry and bent on subduing Russia. It’s nonsense. Eighty-five percent of NATO’s member states currently fail to meet the alliance’s goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. NATO’s largest single military power, the United States, is experiencing sufficient difficulty in keeping a single aircraft carrier deployed in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf so that intervals have been introduced into the carriers’ operational schedules, during which no carrier is on station.
Closer to the truth is the Russian document’s seeming non sequitur that follows its point about the Atlantic’s importance: “The second reason [for emphasizing the Atlantic] is that Crimea and Sevastopol have been reunited with Russia and we need to take measures for their rapid integration into the national economy. Of course, we are also restoring Russia’s naval presence in the Mediterranean.”33
The Atlantic is important to Russia’s revanchist goals because an Atlantic presence challenges America’s ability to sustain NATO if there is a war on the European continent. Russia has two routes to the Atlantic: through the Baltic Sea and through the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Moscow’s ability to command these long passages, or, at a minimum, to deny NATO and U.S. seapower the ability to operate in them, opens the Atlantic to the kind of warfare that the Nazis conducted in World War II, during which more than 72,000 allied sailors and merchant seamen lost their lives and 3,500 ships were sunk, with a loss of 14.5 million gross tons.
The other focus of Russia’s stated maritime doctrine is the Arctic Sea. The overwhelming preponderance of Russia’s nearly 24,000-mile coast lies between Severodvinsk on the White Sea bay of the Arctic and the Bering Sea, where the Arctic Sea empties into the North Pacific. The Arctic today is open to Russian shipping for a couple of months a year, if that, but ships there still require assistance from the world’s only nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet—Russia’s.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic contains 1.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, of which 84 percent lies offshore.34 Plentiful mineral resources, such as bauxite, copper, iron ore, and nickel, also lie beneath the seabed. Russia manufactures little. Its economy depends largely on using Western technology to exploit its abundant natural resources. The contest for these resources and control of the seas above them is a certain point of future international friction.
Russian maritime doctrine supports Putin’s goal of reestablishing Russia as a great power by using its navy to challenge the United States’s ability to communicate with its European allies, fill the power vacuum left in the Mediterranean by the United States, and threaten NATO on its northern and southern flanks. Expanding its fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers and assigning more naval combatants to Arctic duty advances Russia’s goals as it seeks to establish Moscow as the preeminent Arctic power.
Vladimir Putin is building a modern and technologically sophisticated fleet. Russia’s combatants and its ground and air forces are competitive in air defenses, unconventional warfare, electronic warfare, and naval gunfire. Moscow’s cyber abilities have proved sufficiently advanced to influence American and other democratic states’ politics. The program is guided by a strategic vision of advancing Russia’s economic interest in further cornering the world’s energy market while reestablishing a dominant Russian naval presence in the seas that flank the European peninsula. Simultaneously, Putin seeks to offset the ability of U.S. seapower to counter these threats and to shake NATO by interrupting the sea lines of communication that link the United States to its European allies. Along with China’s sale of its capable modern weaponry to such states as Iraq and North
