National Post
Peter Goodspeed
October 1, 2007
After more than a decade of turmoil following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is again asserting itself on the international stage. In a threepart series, National Post reporter Peter Goodspeed will examine the ways in which Russia is moving to reclaim its former status as a great power, and the consequences for Canada and the West.
On Aug. 17, President Vladimir Putin announced Russian nuclear bombers were resuming long-distance patrols suspended in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Combat duty has begun,” he declared. Within weeks, Russian planes were flying over the North Pole and along the edges of Canadian airspace.
On Sept. 4, defence officials in Moscow announced plans for 12 bombers to practise firing cruise missiles over the Arctic Circle.
The next day, as two Tupolev Tu-95 long-range bombers rumbled over the Beaufort Sea toward Canada’s air defence identification zone near Inuvik, the Canadian Forces scrambled a pair of CF-18 Hornets to intercept the Russian aircraft.
The incident, the first significant midair confrontation between Russian and Canadian pilots in nearly 16 years, ended when the Russian bombers turned back before entering Canadian airspace.
“It’s not exactly a new challenge,” says Lieutenant-General Angus Watt, Canada’s Chief of the Air Staff. “It’s an old challenge that has returned.”
After more than a decade of economic and political turmoil, Russia is asserting itself in a way not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union 16 years ago.
After more than a decade of turmoil following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is again asserting itself on the international stage. In a threepart series, National Post reporter Peter Goodspeed will examine the ways in which Russia is moving to reclaim its former status as a great power, and the consequences for Canada and the West.
On Aug. 17, President Vladimir Putin announced Russian nuclear bombers were resuming long-distance patrols suspended in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Combat duty has begun,” he declared. Within weeks, Russian planes were flying over the North Pole and along the edges of Canadian airspace.
On Sept. 4, defence officials in Moscow announced plans for 12 bombers to practise firing cruise missiles over the Arctic Circle.
The next day, as two Tupolev Tu-95 long-range bombers rumbled over the Beaufort Sea toward Canada’s air defence identification zone near Inuvik, the Canadian Forces scrambled a pair of CF-18 Hornets to intercept the Russian aircraft.
The incident, the first significant midair confrontation between Russian and Canadian pilots in nearly 16 years, ended when the Russian bombers turned back before entering Canadian airspace.
“It’s not exactly a new challenge,” says Lieutenant-General Angus Watt, Canada’s Chief of the Air Staff. “It’s an old challenge that has returned.”
After more than a decade of economic and political turmoil, Russia is asserting itself in a way not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union 16 years ago.
Backed by the wealth of his country’s vast energy resources — Russia is the world’s second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia — Mr. Putin has adopted a combative tone as he moves to reclaim for Russia the great power status of its Soviet predecessor.
In the past eight months, the Russian leader — hugely popular at home despite his thin regard for democratic principles — has lashed out at the West for ignoring Russia’s security sensitivities. He is particularly annoyed by a U.S. proposal to create a new anti-missile defence system by siting radar and anti-missile bases in the Czech Republic and Poland.
He has denounced U.S. “unilateralism,” obliquely comparing Washington’s foreign policy to Nazi Germany; torn up a conventional arms agreement with NATO; grabbed a symbolic chunk of the Arctic by sending two minisubmarines to plant the Russian flag beneath the North Pole; and accused Britain of stupidity in the handling of the murder investigation into the nuclear-poisoning death in London of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
Former Soviet satellites are also feeling the pressure — Russia briefly turned off gas supplies to Ukraine, has restricted water and wine imports from Georgia, and in what has been called the world’s first cyber-war, attacked government Web sites in Estonia.
Mr. Putin radically changed the geopolitical map when he engineered a rapprochement with China in 2004, ending decades of distrust, deepening economic ties and settling border disputes.
Last month that adjustment altered the international balance of military power when Russia, China and four former Soviet republics in Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) turned their Shanghai Cooperation Organization into a new Eastern version of the old Warsaw Pact by staging joint military exercises in Russia’s Ural Mountains.
Russia is asserting itself on many fronts. It has threatened to use its UN veto to reject Western demands for an independent Kosovo and balked at imposing sanctions on Iran for its Russiansponsored nuclear program. It has also sold modern weapons systems to Syria.
“For too long, Russian elites felt humiliated, rejected and ridiculed,” says Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Just 10 years ago, the talk of the global village was of a world without Russia. Today it is about a Russia resurgent.”
In 2006, Russia’s gross domestic product grew by approximately 6.7%, surpassing average growth rates in all other G8 countries, marking the country’s seventh consecutive year of economic expansion.
“There is no question that Russia is back on its feet, at long last,” Mr. Trenins says. “The post-Soviet economic slump is almost history.
“The macroeconomic indicators are stellar. Moscow is no longer a supplicant at the International Monetary Fund. It is on the threshold of joining the World Trade Organization and is setting its aim on the Organization for Economic Co-operation & Development.”
Flush with cash from a booming world energy market, Mr. Putin is resorting to a muscular foreign policy after the humiliations of Russia’s economic collapse in the 1990s.
Nowhere is that new assertiveness more noticeable than in defence. Mr. Putin has overhauled the Russian military, which was nearly crippled with corruption and incompetence when he first came to power in 1999.
A decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s armed forces were disintegrating. Soldiers went unpaid for months, morale was poor, equipment was aging and poorly maintained. The navy was rusting in dry dock and the air force, cut to half its size, lacked fuel for training and had not had any new planes for more than a decade.
That has changed. This year, Mr. Putin announced a US$200billion, seven-year rearmament plan to buy new missiles, planes, aircraft carriers and submarines. He has quadrupled the defence budget since 2001 and is planning to double combat aircraft production by 2025.
According to Jane’s Sentinel Country Risk Assessments, Russia’s military shopping list includes two new submarinelaunched nuclear ballistic missiles, an anti-aircraft missile, the S-400, which some experts claim is more effective than U.S. Patriot missiles in shooting down incoming missiles, and a new generation of TU-160 strategic bombers which can fire cruise missiles.
In addition, there are plans to build the SU-34 Fullback fighter bomber, which is capable of allweather attacks against heavily defended targets, and a new fifthgeneration Sukhoi T-50 fighter, which will become Russia’s main lightweight attack aircraft.
There have been calls for the Russian navy to get six nuclearpowered aircraft carriers and eight ballistic missile submarines.
On Sept. 11, Russian officials boasted they now have “the father of all bombs” after testing what they claim is the world’s most powerful “vacuum bomb,” an airborne weapon that reportedly has the explosive power of a nuclear weapon, without the radioactivity.
Earlier in the year, Russian defence officials announced they had begun production of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-24, which could “overcome any potential missile defence system developed by foreign countries.”
In August, Admiral Vladimir Masorin, the Navy’s commander, announced Russia intends to reestablish a permanent naval presence in the Mediterranean and suggested Moscow could reactivate two mothballed Cold War naval bases in the Syrian ports of Tartus and Latakia.
“Since taking office, Putin has set his sights on re-establishing Russia as a global force — on par with the U.S., China and the European Union,” says Peter Brookes of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
“To do this, Putin’s Kremlin has reined in power at home and asserted itself abroad.”
Mr. Putin has been vigorously pushing back on what he sees as an encroachment on Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in Eastern and central Europe, the Baltic, the Caucasus and central Asia, he says — what Moscow calls its “near abroad.”
To many, Mr. Putin’s sabre-rattling is intended more for domestic consumption and as a warning to the West than as an actual military threat.
“The Russians desperately need to spend more on their armed forces,” says Christopher Westdal, Canada’s ambassador to Moscow from 2003 to 2006.
“They must secure their nuclear weapons and that requires confidence and money. Secondly, they require the option of using force effectively, within their own territory against crazy fanatical terrorists and within their neighbourhood if necessary.”
The West needs a militarily capable Russia to maintain stability throughout the Caucasus and central Asia, he adds.
“We’re just learning what it means to keep order in Kandahar. Do we really want to keep order in Tbilisi [Georgia] or Xankandi [Azerbaijan]?”
For all his bluster, Mr. Putin simply wants to reassert Russia’s historic role as a strategic counterweight to Washington.
“Putin’s emphasis on strength and unity is designed precisely to counter Russia’s lingering sense of insecurity occasioned by the financial collapse of the 1990s, NATO expansion, the rise of terrorism inside Russia and aggressive U.S. unilateralism,” says Jeffery Mankoff of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.
“Putin’s goal is to make Russia an independent actor in international affairs by strengthening the state and maintaining a world order in which traditional notions of power continue to matter.”
