27 January 2009: Times
By Michael Evans, Defence Editor
Russia may be flexing its military muscle once again, sending warships into international waters and dispatching long-range bombers on reconnaissance trips, but the former superpower remains a paper tiger, a respected London think-tank has concluded.
The recent warship manoeuvres in the Mediterranean and Latin America were just “symbolic” gestures, carried out by the former maritime giant that was able to deploy only a small number of ships while the rest of the fleet was tied up at home without enough money to keep them in business, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said.
In February last year, a naval force led by the carrier Admiral Kuznetsov completed a two-month deployment, including a period in the Mediterranean – one of the longest of its kind since the Cold War, the IISS said in its annual Military Balance. A second naval deployment took place in October en route to an exercise with the Venezuelan Navy, and a Russian warship has joined the anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden.
Oksana Antonenko, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the institute, however, told a press conference at the launch of the Military Balance: “In military terms it was all very modest. This is not a major military comeback, it was just a symbolic deployment.”
She cast doubt on Russia’s ability to project force, and despite the “victory” of Russian troops in Georgia last August, their performance had highlighted their limited capabilities. She predicted that next year Moscow’s defence budget would suffer from an even greater deficit. “It’s hard to envisage a substantial increase in defence spending,” she said.
The IISS assessment clashes with the high-profile foreign policy approach adopted by Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister. There was not enough money, she said, for Russia to achieve what it wanted in military terms.
There was also “a lack of consensus” between different sections of the Russian Armed Forces, with some elements of the army hierarchy wanting to remain focused on territorial defence, and the nuclear establishment insisting on the Army training for force projection beyond Russia’s security borders.
Radical reform, however, was being introduced, with the aim of converting the “top-heavy divisions” into more flexible brigades, and the Military Balance said that national pride in Russia’s military forces was being restored.
Russia remained “very sensitive”, Ms Antonenko said, to Nato’s enlargement programme, particularly since Georgia and Ukraine had been put on the list of potential new members of the alliance. Dialogue with the Russian military was suspended after the brief war in Georgia and is only now being reinstated.
Ms Antonenko, however, said that there was no clear understanding in Moscow of what Nato was trying to do with its enlargement programme, and she called for a totally different dialogue between Russia and the alliance. Up until now there had only been a “virtual
relationship” with Moscow.
She saw signs of a better working arrangement with the announcement that Russia was willing to consider allowing Nato to use a northern corridor through Russian territory for ferrying supplies to alliance troops in Afghanistan.
John Chipman, director-general and chief executive of IISS, said that in the aftermath of the conflict in Georgia, the Russians had announced plans for radical reforms, including turning the Army into a fully professional force. “This restructuring could make Russian armed forces more capable to operate against modern threats and potentially better interoperable with western forces,” he said.
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