Russia's Army Today: From Empty Shell to Sophisticated and Lethal Machine

In the early years of Vladimir Putin's presidency, the Russian military was an empty shell but armed with nuclear weapons.

They were having difficulty keeping submarines afloat in the Arctic and holding off the Chechen insurgency. Senior officers sometimes lived in moldy, rat-infested tenements. And instead of stockings, poorly trained soldiers often wrapped their feet in strips of cloth, as their Soviet and Czarist predecessors did.

Two decades later, very different fighting forces have massed near the Ukrainian border. Under Putin's leadership, they have been transformed into a modern and sophisticated army, capable of deploying rapidly and with deadly effect in conventional conflicts, according to military analysts.

They have precision-guided weapons, a newly streamlined command structure, and well-fed, professional soldiers. And they still have nuclear weapons.

These modernized forces have become a key tool of Putin's foreign policy: the capture of Crimea, intervention in Syria, peacekeeping between Armenia and Azerbaijan and, earlier this month, support for a leader favorable to Russia in Kazakhstan.

They are now in the midst of their most ambitious operation yet: using threats and potentially force to return Ukraine to Moscow's sphere of influence.

"The mobility of the armed forces, their preparation and their equipment are what allow Russia to put pressure on Ukraine and the West," said Pavel Luzin, a Russian security analyst. "Nuclear weapons are not enough."

Without firing a shot, Putin has forced the Biden administration to set aside other foreign policy priorities and grapple with demands from the Kremlin that the White House has long dismissed: in particular, reversing Ukraine's rapprochement with West in the post-Soviet period.

This is the most important use that Putin gives to the armed forces for Russia to recover the global relevance it lost with the end of the Cold War. Putin expounded on that doctrine in 2018, when he used his annual state of the nation address to introduce new nuclear weapons that can fly at twenty times the speed of sound.

"No one listened to us," Putin said in his speech, which included a video simulation showing a Russian missile heading toward the United States. "Listen to us now."

Today, it is the reform of conventional forces that has given it the upper hand in the Ukraine crisis.

The T-72B3 tanks assembled on the Ukrainian border have a new thermal vision system for night combat, as well as guided missiles with twice the range of other tanks, according to Robert Lee, a veteran of the U.S. Infantry Corps. US Navy and PhD candidate at King's College London who is an expert on the Russian military.

Kalibr cruise missiles, deployed on ships and submarines in the Black Sea, and Iskander-M rockets, arrayed along the border, can hit targets almost anywhere in Ukraine, Lee said.

More than 1,000 new planes

In the past decade, the Russian air force has acquired more than 1,000 new planes, according to a 2020 article by Alexei Krivoruchko, Deputy Defense Minister. These include the country's most advanced fighters, the SU-35S. A squadron of them has been sent to Belarus for next month's joint military exercises.

The new capabilities became apparent in Russia's intervention in Syria in 2015. Not only were they effective, but they caught some US troops off guard.

"I am ashamed to admit that I was shocked a few years ago when Kalibr missiles flew out of the Caspian Sea and hit targets in Syria," said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former US Army Europe commander. "That was a surprise to me, not only because of the capacity, but also because I didn't even know they existed."

The Kremlin's thinking has also evolved regarding the size of the armed forces. They depend less on a dwindling number of conscripts and more on a small, well-trained core of some 400,000 contract soldiers.

These soldiers get better treatment. On his visit to the Defense Ministry in December, Putin bragged that the average lieutenant now earned just over the equivalent of $1,000 a month, more than the average salary in other sectors. The federal government, he added, spent about $1.5 billion subsidizing private housing for the military.

And all Russian soldiers must now be provided with heavy stockings for military use.

What's new is not just Russia's modernized equipment, but also the evolving theory of how the Kremlin uses it. The military has perfected an approach that Dmitry Adamsky, an international security specialist at Israel's Reichman University, calls "cross-domain coercion."

This combines the actual or threatened use of force with diplomacy, cyberattacks, and propaganda to achieve political goals.

That combined strategy plays into the current crisis surrounding Ukraine. Russia is pressing for the West to make far-reaching and immediate concessions. Russian troop movements into allied Belarus put a potential invasion force less than 100 miles from kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

Weapons, diplomacy and hackers

Russian state media warn that Ukrainian forces are preparing acts of aggression.

And on January 14, hackers took down dozens of Ukrainian government websites, posting a message on one of them that read: "Be afraid and expect the worst."

"You see some cybernetics, you see diplomacy, you see military exercises," Adamsky said. "They are all intentionally related."

Not all the forces deployed along the Ukrainian border are the most advanced in Russia. Those congregating in the north have older weaponry and are there mainly to intimidate and drain Ukrainian resources, said Oleksiy Arestovych, a former Ukrainian military intelligence officer who is now a political and military analyst.

The most equipped and modernized units, he said, have moved to the area close to two breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine, where Russia in 2014 instigated a breakaway war that continues today.

Russia's military modernization is also intended to send a message to the United States, projecting power beyond Eastern Europe, frustrating and sometimes surprising American officials.

For example, it took just hours for Russian military transport planes to start moving some 2,000 Russian peacekeepers, along with heavy armor, to the South Caucasus after Putin mediated to end the war 2020 between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

In Syria, where Russia intervened in 2015 using devastating airstrikes and limited ground troops to protect President Bashar Assad, Russia's progress demonstrated that it could effectively deploy precision-guided weaponry, an advantage Western military had had over Russia for a long time.

Syria, a testing laboratory

According to experts, Russia used the war in Syria as a laboratory to refine its tactics and weapons and to provide combat experience to much of its forces.

More responsibility was delegated to lower-ranking officials, a degree of autonomy that contrasts with the structure of civilian government in the Putin era. Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu said last month that all ground troop commanders, 92% of air force pilots and 62% of navy pilots had combat experience.

"They proved to themselves and to the entire world that they are capable of carrying out large-scale operations with long-range, precision weapons, and with the intelligence capability to support them," said Adamsky, the Israel-based expert .

The Weak Point

Despite all the advances in recent years, the Russian military retains a crucial weakness from its Soviet predecessor: the civilian part of the country's economy, almost devoid of high-end manufacturing. technology and business investment in research and development.

The military spends a much higher percentage of gross domestic product than in most European countries, leaving other sectors without resources.

When the Ukrainian military shot down Russian reconnaissance drones, for example, they discovered electronic components and motors purchased from Western European hobbyist drone companies, according to a report published in November by Britain-based Conflict Armament Research, which specializes in weapons tracking.

Russia has few new weapons systems built entirely from scratch, analysts say. Much of its modernization consists of reforming old equipment.

But the weapons systems themselves are less important than the innovative use of knowledge gained from each of the conflicts that occurred during Putin's tenure, said Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, who was a NATO commander when it broke out the Ukrainian war in 2014.

"The compliment we have to pay Russia is that they are a force that learns and adapts," Breedlove said. "Every time we see them in conflict, they get a little better."

It was only a few months into Putin's first presidency when he faced a military catastrophe. On August 12, 2000, a torpedo exploded inside the Kursk nuclear submarine, sending it to the bottom of the Barents Sea with 118 sailors inside.

The failed rescue mission by the Russian navy, which led to the death of all crew members and an unusual mea culpa from Putin, exposed the ineptitude of the armed forces.

The shipwreck defined Putin's first term, along with a ruthless and bloody war in Chechnya, where it took years for the Russian military to put down an Islamic insurgency.

A major turning point came in 2008, when a long-standing conflict over disputed territories in the Republic of Georgia escalated into war.

Russian forces quickly outnumbered their much smaller Georgian neighbors, but the war exposed deep deficiencies in the Russian military.

The ground troops were not in radio contact with the air forces, which led to several serious episodes of friendly fire. Communications were so bad that some officers had to use their personal cell phones. Tanks and armored personnel carriers broke down frequently.

The failures led to a major reorganization of the Russian military. The Soviet army's prowess in ground warfare has rebounded with improvements such as revamping artillery technology, according to Mathieu Boulègue, a researcher with the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House in London.

Just over a decade later, Russia's electronic warfare tools, which can be used to intercept or jam enemy communications and knock drones off course and out of the sky, are considered far superior to those of the US military. , according to analysts.

"Now we're trying to catch up," Hodges said. "For the last 20 years, we have focused on iPhones or cell phones and terrorist networks, as they continue to develop significant and powerful jamming and interception capabilities."

There have been some setbacks for Moscow, among them troubling weapon failures. In 2019, a prototype nuclear-powered cruise missile - hailed by Putin as the centerpiece of a new arms race with the US - exploded during a test, killing at least seven people and spewing radiation miles away.

But as Kremlin rhetoric increasingly portrayed Russia as locked in an existential conflict with the West, no expense was spared. Investment in the military was accompanied by a militarization of Russian society under Putin's rule, entrenching the concept of a homeland surrounded by enemies and the possibility of a coming war.

All these developments, according to analysts, make it difficult for the West to stop Putin from attacking Ukraine, if he is determined.

"There is very little we can do to deny Russia's ability to wage a new war against Ukraine," Boulègue said. "We cannot discourage a worldview."

The New York Times

Translation: Elisa Carnelli