Putin: WTH does he want anyway?

[Bengalzona]

Putin. What the heck does this dude want anyway? Why is he screwing around with elections? What is this all leading to?

I've been doing a little reading about this dude and modern Russia. I'll throw out some of the things that I've found.

Like all politicians, Putin craves power. His vehicle for achieving that (his power base) is his country Russia. Like all leaders, there are people in his country who like him and those who dislike him. And like all dynamic leaders those who support him really love him while those who dislike him really hate him. But his power base is pretty secure. Western governments generally estimate his approval rating within Russia at over 60%.

His measure of success in how much power he has is directly linked to how much power Russia has in the world. His goal is to make Russia more influential in the world. But his manner of raising Russia's influence and power in the world differs radically with how the Soviets tried to do that.

Putin subscribes in part to a lesser known (in the West) political doctrine: Eurasianism. Eurasianism is a doctrine created by Aleksandr Dugin, the former Head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at Moscow University. Dugin was a dissident under the Soviets, but viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as a geopolitical disaster. In his view, the collapse left a power vacuum with no one in the world able to challenge the power of the unified American and Western European bloc.

Dugin created the Eurasian Movement in 2001 which calls for the creation of a new "Russian Empire". The movement seeks to create a buffer zone of client states around Russia using former Soviet states such as Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Georgia, Azerbaijan, etc. The goal with these clients states is for Russia to exert control over the politics in these countries so that they are friendly to Russia and its goals without having to exert the same level of physical and direct control that the former Soviet Union had to exert over the Warsaw Pact nations. In other words, they want the populations of those areas to feel that they are freely making choices favorable to Russia. Some proponents of Eurasianism also propose eventually including other countries which share borders with Russia into this bloc, including Iran, Afghanistan, Mongolia and Turkey.

The purpose of creating this bloc is to create a power that can geopolitically challenge the U.S. and the West politically, economically, militarily and culturally and, ultimately, create a Russian style Monroe Doctrine over Europe and much of Asia. Russia would lead and dictate what goes on in Eurasia without militarily conquering it in much the same way the U.S. leads and dictates what goes on in the Western Hemisphere. Under the doctrine, Russia would necessarily support the traditional nationalities and religions in these areas.
In the Eurasian view, globalization, NATO and the European Union are the enemies to creating this entity. These are taught to be constructs of the "Atlantic World": groups that support hegemony of the U.S. and Western Europe. To combat these 'constructs', proponents of Eurasianism actively advocate nationalist movements and groups throughout the world. This interference is a 'win-win' situation for Eurasianists as, even if they are not able place a political group favorable to their goals into power in a country, they can disrupt the affairs of a country by creating internal political disruption and strife and thus keeping the population focused on its own problems and not on world affairs.

Because of their goals, Eurasian influence isn't limited solely to nationalist groups. They can reach out to right wing, leftists, Christian and even Muslim groups. In short, any group they feel they can recruit to fight globalization. They will also infiltrate opposing groups to influence or undermine their causes. This falls into line with Phase One goals of the current Russian military doctrine of Multi-Phase (or Full Spectrum) Warfare: the use of deception and information warfare to mobilize support and undermine an opponent's morale.

[Rotobeast]

Well done !
Totally agree with that assessment.

Sent from my SM-S820L using Tapatalk

[Dill]

(05-06-2017, 03:20 PM)Bengalzona Wrote: Putin. What the heck does this dude want anyway? Why is he screwing around with elections? What is this all leading to?

I've been doing a little reading about this dude and modern Russia. I'll throw out some of the things that I've found.

Like all politicians, Putin craves power. His vehicle for achieving that (his power base) is his country Russia. Like all leaders, there are people in his country who like him and those who dislike him. And like all dynamic leaders those who support him really love him while those who dislike him really hate him. But his power base is pretty secure. Western governments generally estimate his approval rating within Russia at over 60%.

Good work, again, B-zona. We can all take a break from domestic bickering and discuss geopolitics.

I am still soaking up all these points. Here is one I am not so sure about, though.  Is it possible that Putin's power base is not all that secure, since Russia is turning into a kind of mafia state which inhibits economic development, certainly any broad sharing of the wealth?

Putin is pretty hard on journalists, killing and imprisoning them. But I don't think he can stifle the points they make about the short and long term costs of his policies. The sanctions, for example, do hurt the county. Executive Order 13865 kills, among other things, the big EXXON deal with Gazprom. Energy is the biggest sector of their economy. Their energy sector would grow faster, enabling the rest of the economy to grow faster as well, if they had access to Western technology and Western companies could drill in the Black Sea and Arctic. Bu they can't.  People have to know this.

You think maybe national pride offsets this? Once again Russia appears a "playuh" on the world stage, fencing with the US on rhetorically equal terms, at least.  (Americans can be diverted from domestic problems by nationalist rhetoric and symbolic actions. Surely Russians can too.) Maybe the social and economic development are still so far behind the West that authoritarianism can thrive there in a way it could not in France or Great Britain or California?
 

[SunsetBengal]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This sort of represents my interpretation of leaders like Putin and Un.

[Rotobeast]

(05-06-2017, 05:56 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote:

You know rubber pants are not made in their size, right ?

Narf !

[Bengalzona]

The Russian military is a fraction of the size it was under the Soviets. The Army shrank from over 200 divisions to just 55 brigades. The Russian Navy and Air Force have had similar reductions. Part of that shrinkage was the loss of manpower from former Soviet Republics. The remainder was a concentrated draw-down to save money in the 90's.

But the Russians have deliberately kept their military small since that time and have elected to concentrate on improving quality and professionalism over increased numbers. These efforts have paid off. Their active duty forces are leaner and meaner than they have ever been and they have troops with recent combat experience from Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. Their active forces are quite capable of fighting on equal terms with any similar sized Western force on a unit-by-unit basis.

The Russians have maintained division-level cadres of officers and equipment to rapidly mobilize the equivalent of up to roughly 100 divisions in the event of war. Those call-up units would be of lower quality than comparable Western reserves, however. Additionally, one problem that the modern Russian Army has is a lack of non-commissioned officers. They have an overage of commissioned officers (a situation which the Soviets never had as the communist system had disdain for the whole concept of officers). Commissioned officers are are often called upon to do jobs that would typically be NCO work in Western armies.It is a problem that the Russians are working to change.

The primary maneuver force for the Russians has changed from the division to the brigade. They have retained a handful of larger formations due to their historic legacies (such as the First Guards Tank Army), but they have been remade into smaller formations. The purpose in the reformation is to create units which can provide a more flexible and rapid response (commands to brigades come directly from the Kremlin through Theater-level commanders).

The Russian Air Force has reformed its command structure into base and air defense brigade groupings which directly support the Russian Army brigade system. They maintain an air fleet of approximately 3,000 aircraft. The numbers are lower than the former Soviet Air Force. However, they still maintain one of the largest air forces in the world (primarily to cover the vast Russian land mass). The Russians have concentrated on consistently updating their fighter, interceptor and attack aircraft during the past two decades and these aircraft are generally thought to be reasonably comparable to their Western counterparts. They maintain several hundred ancient strategic bombers, some of which have been adapted to carry cruise missiles. However, their usefulness in current Russian strategy is limited almost solely to being part of the country's nuclear deterrent.

The Russian Navy is a shell of its former self. The budget cuts of the 1990's hit the Navy more than any other service. It is estimated that the Russian Navy currently consists of 56 major and minor surface combatant ships and 63 submarines. Of those numbers, only about 60% are thought to be operational. In 2012, Vladimir Putin announced plans to build an additional 51 surface combatants and 24 submarines by 2020. Western experts are skeptical of Russia's ability to accomplish this as the country's shipbuilding and repair capabilities have degraded so much during the past 25 years. The Russian Navy has four districts (Northern, Western, Southern and Eastern) with a fleet centered around each (Northern Fleet, Baltic Fleet, Black Sea Fleet and Pacific Fleet, respectively). Their fleets, however, are a joke in comparison to U.S. fleets. For example our 7th Fleet in the Pacific is only one of our five numbered fleets and contains more ships, aircraft and personnel than the entire Russian Navy. With the current Russian strategic concentration on operations in the Eurasian sphere (see OP), it is highly doubtful that the Russians will challenge U.S. naval supremacy anytime within the next 50 years.

The Russian forces have been redesigned with flexibility and speed in mind to reflect the current modern trend of non-linear combat and the reduced likelihood of force-on-force conflict with a country able to field a larger force (i.e. they are not expecting to fight land battles with the U.S. or China in the near future). Modern Russian strategy has turned away from global force projection, instead concentrating only within Russia itself and countries they consider to be within the Eurasian sphere of influence (see OP). The current Russian force in Syria is about as far from home as you can expect to see Russian troops anymore.

The Russians have adopted a doctrine of multi-phase warfare similar to our concept of full-spectrum conflict. The first phase is deception and information warfare to mobilize support and demoralize the enemy. Next, special operations forces and intelligence agents are covertly used to undermine infrastructure and create paramilitary forces in the targeted area. When the situation appears ripe, conventional forces are utilized. A primary goal is to achieve such successful results in the first two phases that the conventional forces move in with little bloodshed or conflict. Failing that, the conventional forces will engage using joint services to cordon off the targeted area and to use precision strikes to disable command and control as well as air defenses. The final move is using overwhelming firepower to defeat any remaining opposition. The Russians have successfully used this strategy recently in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.

The Russians have enough of a military to make invading Russia an unattractive prospect. Beyond nuclear weapons, they do not pose a military threat to the U.S. or Western Europe. They do, however, pose a severe threat for nations which border Russia and for those within the Eurasia sphere. And their efforts to infiltrate and create dissension in other nations (including the U.S.) have been wildly successful beyond Putin's dreams... meaning we can expect much more of this in the future.