Russia, War, and You!

 

“I have conquered an empire, but I have not been able to conquer myself”.

Peter the Great

September 29.  This past weekend the former head of MI5 Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said that Russia is already at war with Britain.  If Russia is at war with Britain, it is also at war with the whole of free Europe, as evinced by the violations of Danish and Estonian air space this past week by both aircraft and drones. There is an assumption in the gilded chancelleries of Western Europe that so long as Russia is embroiled in its war on Ukraine it poses no real threat to the EU and NATO.  There is a further assumption that the period of maximum danger for eastern Europe will be some five or so years after the war in Ukraine ends.  This is both complacent and wrong.

To understand why Europe’s leaders are wrong one needs to understand the Russian concept of, and relationship with war, which is very different to that of the rest of Europe. For the Kremlin war is an ever-evolving instrument of both soft and hard power. Russia’s specific war aims are not simply the re-conquest of Ukraine, but also the re-establishment of a sphere of coercive influence, a ‘strategic buffer’ over those states on its western border that it can neither conquer nor devastate.  To do that Russia needs to keep the three most potentially strategically powerful European states Britain, France and Germany at ‘strategic distance’, as the phrase goes, and not simply through the threat of military action.     

To that end, Russia has four concepts of war all of which form part of Grand Strategy, the effective application of immense means in pursuit of high strategic ends. They are wars of conquest, wars of devastation, wars of coercion, and wars of weakening. Having failed to conquer the whole of Ukraine in February 2022 Russia is now engaged in a war of conventional devastation on those parts it cannot conquer.  The Kremlin has also considered, and is still considering, the use of nuclear weapons, but is unlikely to take what would be a definingly dangerous step simply because the Kremlin still believes it would not be an effective application of an instrument of Russian power.  China, Russia’s sponsor, would profoundly disapprove and such an act would almost certainly bring the US into the war in Ukraine.

Russia’s war of coercion is being waged against all EU and NATO states on its western borders from Norway in the Arctic, to Finland, the Baltic States and all the states in and around the Black Sea Region, with the partial exception of Turkey.  Turkey is a useful conduit for sanctions-busting. Much of this war is declaratory and is being waged by one man, Dmitri Medvedev, through threats and intimidation. However, it is also reinforced up by offensive SVR (Russian foreign intelligence) and GU (Russian military intelligence) deception, disruption, and destabilisation operations, cyber operations, sabotage and espionage.  This includes exploitation of political and other divisions within targeted societies.

Russia’s war of weakening is being waged against Western Europe with the aim of progressively decoupling Britain, France and Germany from Eastern Europe.  It is a counter-deterrence war.  Russia’s war of weakening is conducted by systematically exploiting and exacerbating the many divisions that exist in such societies.  There is a particular emphasis on exploiting the incompetence of government establishments caused by the shift away over the past twenty or so years from the pragmatic pursuit of governance to the use of governance as a tool of social engineering for increasingly fractured and complex societies.  By exacerbating weakness internally Moscow believes it is also weakening the capacity of such states to engage Russia externally. Sadly, Russia does not have to try too hard to realise its war aims in Britain, France and Germany due to the lack of effective leadership therein.

Therefore, Dame Manningham-Buller is correct: Russia is at war with Britain and every other European democracy. Europeans thus need to collectively awake (as opposed to awoke) to the scale and ambition of the Russian threat.  They must act and not merely talk. Specifically, they need to push-back across the new Russia’s new/old spectrum of war.  Or what my friend Stan Sloan calls “asymmetric escalation” – information war, cyber war, economic and political war.  A word of warning: instruments of soft power are not an alternative to hard power.  They are simply one half of a new Grand Defence Europeans must mount that will only be credible in the minds of Russia’s war planners if it is also reinforced by credible European hard power…and good leadership!

Julian Lindley-French