Breakfast Debate on Russia with Anne de Tinguy
organised by the IDEHN National Alumni Association and EuroDéfense-France
Anne de Tinguy is an Emeritus Professor at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO) and a researcher at the CERI (Centre for International Research) at SciencesPo (University of Social Sciences) Paris. She was a participant at the 42nd session of the IHEDN (Institute of Advanced Studies in National Defence) and has written several books, the most recent of which being "Le Géant empêtré. La Russie et le monde de la fin de l'URSS à l'invasion de l'Ukraine ", published by Editions Perrin. The following is a report on the key points emerging from the breakfast debate on 20 October 2022, at the École Militaire in Paris.
Russia has been power-hungry since 1991 and the issue of its relationship with the rest of the world never more topical than since it decided to invade Ukraine. What exactly does power mean for Russia? How is it trying to make itself into a major world force? Is it seeking to become a multidimensional global powerhouse along similar lines to the United States? Or has it simply decided to don the mantle of a leading world power? To provide some answers to these questions, it will be helpful to analyse the instruments Russia has at its disposal to drive its foreign policy and influence-seeking strategy.
Russia is a behemoth that can boast enormous assets. Strategically, it can count on the sheer extent of its territory (spanning an area 32 times the size of France), its vast subterranean raw material resources (including gas and oil), its ranking as the world’s 11th economy with an attractive labour market and a well-educated population, and its status as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, to name but a few. A vital player in international relations, Russia still has far-reaching ambitions. For centuries, it has thought of itself as a great power. Even in 1991, ruined and in need of complete reconstruction, it lost none of its ambition. Russia’s ruling elites have a mental image of a country, which, because of its history, culture, its physical size, raw materials and human capital, is naturally destined for greatness. This image colours their world view and their vision of the country’s place on the international scene. Opinion polls also show this belief to be well entrenched in the minds of Russian society. But Russia is also paradoxically what the economist Georges Sokoloff calls a "poor" power, a power which continues to trail, among other things both economically and technologically, well behind the United States and the countries of the European Union.
Vladimir Putin is obsessed with greatness. Since he came to power, he has made no bones about Russia’s determination to obtain the recognition he thinks it rightly deserves and to be treated as an equal by the world’s leading nations. How does this ambition translate into action? How does Putin manage the aforementioned combination of strength and weakness? How does he exploit Russia’s many valuable assets? And with what results? Three of the options he has selected are especially relevant.
First option: to make hard power and conflictual dynamics a priority.
Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, a sovereign state that posed no threat to Russia, and to engage in a high-intensity war that has rocked Europe and disrupted international equilibrium is a clear indication that, for the Kremlin, power is still largely associated with hard power. To be recognised as an essential player and attain some of its goals, Russia has opted to return to the preferred modus operandi of the USSR in its heyday: the military machine, coercion, conflict and powerplay.
This approach is in stark contrast to that adopted in the final days of the USSR and the years following its collapse. Aware of the havoc wreaked by the continuing emphasis on defence, Mikhail Gorbachev was resolutely committed to disarmament – for example, the historic treaty on elimination of intermediate-range nuclear forces signed in Washington in 1987 – and was against the use of force to stamp out developments in Eastern Bloc countries. This paradigm shift marked the end of the Cold War. Boris Yeltsin took up where Gorbachev left off: in straitened financial circumstances and an international environment momentarily pacified by the end of the Cold War, military resources were no longer a central feature of the country's political and international system.
Vladimir Putin has taken a completely different tack. As soon as he came to power, he expressed his conviction that, to be respected, his country had to be strong. The August 2008 war in Georgia was the catalyst for an ambitious reform with the aim of making the armed forces more mobile, more efficient, and better equipped. This reform also appears to have been the prelude to a further paradigm shift that occurred in 2014 and was confirmed in 2022. In 2014, Russia adopted a new strategy, not hesitating to challenge international order and defy public opinion by annexing Crimea and marching on into the Donbass. A year later, it launched a military operation in Syria, the first on such a scale in a foreign country since 1991. In doing so, it made hard power once again central to its external action and signalled the importance of the military machine through a hybrid strategy that also involved the use of non-military instruments (cyberattacks, manipulation of information, etc), and blurred the line between peace and war. The military machine was used to further the country’s foreign policy in many other ways, not least the defence and military cooperation agreements reached with a large number of states in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. By 2019, it had already signed 39 such agreements, among which 19 with African countries.
Second option (following logically on from the first and also with far-reaching consequences): to put domestic development on the back burner.
Economics play a major role in Russia's outside action, but this role consists primarily of exploiting the leverage offered by its abundant energy resources. Until the invasion of Ukraine, energy was the cornerstone of Russia’s relationship with the EU. In the post-Soviet era, it was one of the main levers in its attempts to preserve a dominant position and bring its influence to bear on the domestic and foreign policies of its partners. Economic instruments are often used a means of exerting pressure and causing disruption, Ukraine being the latest example. Since the beginning of the war, Russia has been doing its utmost to cause instability by starving the Ukrainian economy of oxygen, blockading Ukrainian ports and organising a maritime blockade of the country, occupying its rich agricultural lands, bombing energy infrastructure, etc. It has also been using gas and oil to colour European public opinion, divide and weaken EU Member States, force an end to the sanctions so detrimental to its economy by branding them a waste of time, and discourage military aid for Ukraine.
By contrast, the Kremlin seems largely unconcerned about Russia's domestic development. While its obsession with power should logically have led it to make modernisation of the country a top priority, this is not the approach selected. The decision to invade Ukraine, clearly taken without any consideration for the economic and financial cost of the conflict, is confirmation that, for the Russian government, the economy is neither a priority nor a major concern. Vladimir Putin is clearly incapable of steering his country towards the reforms it so badly needs. His chosen policy will make decline inevitable, yet another way in which he is at odds with his predecessors. Mikhail Gorbachev realised the need for radical reform of the economic system if the USSR were not to become a third-rate power. Boris Yeltsin was equally insistent about the necessity for domestic reform and for using foreign policy as a means of driving the modernisation process. Nothing of the sort with Vladimir Putin, for whom making the country an economic power is the least of his concerns. For example, research and development expenditure in Russia lags far behind that of the Western democracies and China. The Russian economy only ranks 11th in the world. Its status as a “rentier” economy still heavily dependent on oil and gas exports puts it in a position of vulnerability. There is little economic diversification and scant capacity for innovation and attracting activities capable of creating substantial added value. It is also handicapped, among other things, by widespread corruption, a worrying demographic decline and serious environmental problems. As a result, it is unable to catch up with Western Europe and North America. This is nothing new: the gap between Russia and the Western world has been sizeable for centuries. And matters are only made worse by the fact that the country is now losing ground to China.
ThIrd option affecting its relationship with the outside world: soft power has been transformed into an offensive weapon.
Soft power is a term now commonly used to describe power based on appeal and attraction. It is an area where Russia has a number of assets that it could use to conduct very active public diplomacy, to win over hearts and minds. One of the most important of these is culture: Russia has an exceptionally rich cultural heritage. Literature, music, dance and art are all fields where for centuries it has long been renowned. Religion is a further lever, the Russian Orthodox Church exerting an influence in the world that strengthens that of Russia, particularly as the Patriarch of Moscow, a very active player on the international scene, is almost unfailing in his support for Kremlin foreign policy.
In the 2000s, the Kremlin seemed to attach considerable importance to developing soft power. It took several initiatives and deployed a large number of tools. But its actions failed to produce the desired results, for at least two reasons. The first is that Moscow has chosen to transform soft power into an offensive weapon, now seeing it not so much as a means of appealing to the West but as a form of competition, creating the type of conflict that is gradually coming to characterise its relationship with the Western world. In so doing, the Kremlin has absorbed public diplomacy into a policy of hard power, no longer seeking to be loved but to be feared. The second reason is that, in many areas, its policy has been inconsistent and therefore counterproductive. This can is visible, for example, with regard to Orthodoxy, sport, and culture.
- The conflict with Ukraine has had a very negative impact on the position of the Moscow Patriarchate in that country. The most serious setback was the implosion of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2018 when the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was declared autocephalous, which the Kremlin was powerless to prevent. For Russia, this decision was a terrible blow and the direct consequence of its policy with regard to Ukraine.
- In Russia, sport is seen as a way of enhancing the country’s prestige. It is another area where Russian policies have been at odds with its objectives, the objectives it intended to achieve through the prowess of its athletes and through hosting numerous major international sporting events. This policy foundered, firstly when it annexed Crimea a few days after the end of the Sochi Olympic Games and, secondly, when news broke of a massive and institutionalised doping system affecting all Russian sporting disciplines between 2011 and 2015, a system orchestrated at the highest level of the state apparatus.
- Culturally, Russia's potential strengths are hamstrung by a very conservative and repressive policy that stifles artistic creation.
Conclusion
Despite its formidable assets, Putin's Russia is power hungry to a degree that seems completely disproportionate to its total disregard for national development and infrastructure modernisation. It has made no effort to secure the real leverage needed to be truly influential, namely powerful economic and technological instruments and soft power. Nor has it made any attempt to secure overall power through a combination of mutually complementary factors. It remains a poor, incomplete and paradoxical power and seemingly happy to have achieved nothing more than the appearance of greatness, an appearance now heavily besmirched by the invasion of Ukraine.
Why is reform so impossible in Russia? Since Alexander II, assassinated in 1881, the various perestroika processes, whether tsarist, Soviet or post-Soviet, have all culminated in extreme events. In this huge country reform is both difficult and politically risky. In a country as corrupt Russia, the ruling elites also have to gauge how far they can go without forfeiting the many benefits of power.
Before the war in Ukraine, Russia was a behemoth plagued by a variety of problems, including the inability to be other than a corrupt “rentier” state, a political system with a stranglehold on innovation, a past as yet unassumed. With this senseless war, the country has holed itself into a corner. Its military power has been greatly overestimated and, contrary to popular belief, it has yet to succeed in bringing down Ukraine. The highly unpopular “partial mobilisation” has destabilised Russian society. Losses in Ukraine, divorce from Europe, growing dependence on China, etc., are all serious strategic errors. The future is now fraught with uncertainty: who and what political concepts will follow those of Vladimir Putin? What will the country’s economic prospects be? Where will the borders of Ukraine lie in the future? What relations will Russia have with Europe, the United States and China? What will reactions be inside Russia? Yet, even in such a gloomy context, Anne de Tinguy would still like to believe that “another Russia is possible”.
Report provided by Jean-François Morel (EuroDéfense-France)
Article translated into English by students at ISIT Paris, and proofread by Christine Cross (EuroDéfense-France Council member).
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