Threats and Rumours of War

“Why are we reacting to NATO expansion so emotionally? We are concerned by NATO’s decision-making… What should we do? We have, therefore, to take countermeasures, which means to target with our missile systems the facilities, that, in our opinion, start posing a threat to us.”9

Vladimir Putin, November 2016

For a country formally committed to global amity, Russia speaks the language of military threat with striking frequency. Sometimes blunt to the point of thuggish, sometimes elegantly veiled, nonetheless Moscow is not reluctant to issue warnings of dire military consequences through government figures, parliamentarians, or other authoritative voices considered to speak for the Kremlin.

For example, countries contemplating joining NATO or hosting elements of its anti-missile system have consistently been threatened with becoming targets. In 2015, both Denmark and Norway faced a stream of threats, implicit and explicit. First deputy prime minister Dmitri Rogozin warned that:

“Politicians in Poland and Scandinavia should think very carefully about the decisions they make regarding NATO’s Washington-directed missile defence weapons project. Irresponsible decisions will inevitably cause an escalation in military threats in Europe that Russia would be required to respond to in a military way.”10

Russia’s ambassador to Copenhagen, Mikhail Vanin, even more bluntly said:

“Denmark would be part of the threat against Russia. It would be less peaceful and relations with Russia will suffer. It is, of course, your own decision – I just want to remind you that your finances and security will suffer.”11

Recent debates within Sweden and Finland have generated even more depth and density of aggressive rhetoric, with both countries being warned that any such moves would elevate them into targets for Russian retaliation. Ambassador to Stockholm Viktor Tatarintsev pointedly noted that while at present, “Sweden is not a target for our armed forces,” were the country to join NATO “there will be consequences” and “the country that joins NATO needs to be aware of the risks it is exposing itself to.”12 Likewise, Putin himself asked: “Do you think we will continue to act in the same manner” if Finland joins NATO? Noting that Russian troops had been pulled back from their common border, he added: “Do you think they will stay there?”13

Likewise, the decisions by both Romania and Poland to house facilities associated with Europe’s missile shield prompted the explicit warning that they will “know what it means to be in the cross-hairs.”14 Such language goes well beyond the usual diplomatic lexicon, but that is the point: it is deployed to shock and dismay. However, after a certain point it also risks becoming formulaic. As one Western ambassador put it, “once you’ve spent a year working with the Russians, you come to realise this is bark more than bite.”15 In order to maintain the impact, a certain “rhetoric race” becomes necessary, and, especially to this end, Moscow often looks to alternative voices. Parliamentarians, media commentators known to be close to the Kremlin, and authoritative think-tankers and academics become surrogate threateners.

The great virtue of these second-string heralds of doom is that they are not only more free to speak in even more incendiary terms, but they can also easily be denied, if their interventions become inconvenient. Dmitri Kiselev, host of the weekly Vesti Nedeli television news programme and head of the Rossiya Segodnya media network, has become infamous for his outspoken and often vicious attacks on the West and post-Maidan Ukraine, not least his claims of pogroms of Russian-speakers organised by Kyiv.

On the day of the Crimean annexation referendum, 16 March 2014, he pointedly warned that “Russia is the only country in the world capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash,” a soundbite that has been endlessly repeated, so much so that this became inconvenient even for the Kremlin. In October 2016, Putin personally distanced himself from Kiselev’s language, disingenuously calling it “harmful rhetoric, and it’s not something I welcome.”16

Of course, this raises the problem of knowing quite when some commentator is truly speaking for Russia, or when he or she is actually simply expressing personal views or, more complex yet, expressing views that the speaker assumes will please the Kremlin. This is, however, a problem for the West more than for Russia. Unpredictability and a pervasive sense of constant potential threat is central to Moscow’s diplomatic strategy, and the more a risk-averse Europe is uncertain about potential Russian “red lines” and intent, the happier the Kremlin. This approach is not always especially impactful, especially the more it is used, but it is cheap, easy, deniable, and also plays well with other, more muscular forms of coercive diplomacy.

Wargaming Aggression

“Not a single action within the military training of the Russian army, including an expected operability test, violates international agreements and treaties… The real aim of allegations about the Russian military threat is to intentionally create panic and maintain the image of a treacherous enemy, fighting which can provide colossal military budgets.”

Russian defence ministry

spokesperson Igor Konashenkov17

As part of Putin’s ambitious plan to rebuild military capacity, the Russian armed forces now train much more often, more extensively and more seriously than at any time since the collapse of the USSR.18 To be most useful, exercises need to replicate the kind of operations the forces are likely to find themselves facing, something every military understands. What this also means is that exercises can be used to warn and threaten, by simulating attacks or other kinds of operation against neighbours, in the full knowledge that those neighbours will carefully be watching them in the hope of gleaning some insights into Kremlin intent.

Hence, while, in the main, Russia’s field and command post exercises ought to be considered, first and foremost, attempts to build and maintain operational capacity, they are also used in a secondary role as ‘heavy metal diplomacy.’ This is especially the case when they wargame operations bound to attract Western attention – especially given that Moscow’s media will often then showcase them, just in case Europe was not paying close enough attention – and yet which lack an underlying military rationale or otherwise are out of step with wider preparations.

Sometimes such exercises are highlighted in foreign-language media, but it is also done in domestic media known to be watched by Western Russian-watchers. The Zvezda military television channel’s regular Sunday morning ‘Sluzhu Rossii’ (‘I Serve Russia’) magazine programme, for example, regularly highlights major military exercises and operations, such as the July 2014 surprise inspection of nuclear strike forces in Irkutsk that conducted mock deployments and that were a thinly veiled launch on targets to the West.

Again, the Nordic states have been particular targets. Even before the downturn in relations caused by the Ukrainian revolution and annexation of Crimea, Moscow had continued to wargame potential conflicts on its western flank. However, whereas the massive 2013 Zapad (‘West’) military exercises had at least stopped short of simulating nuclear strikes, since the annexation of Crimea and subsequent worsening of relations, Moscow has increasingly wargamed even such situations. Of course, it has held nuclear training exercises before – as do the US and all nuclear powers – but since 2014 it has shifted to a more explicit focus on Europe.19 One Russian officer speculated that “Zapad-2017 might end like Zapad-2009,” referring to an infamous exercise that ended with a simulated nuclear strike on Poland.20

Furthermore, the snap exercises which Russia has increasingly been mounting, while undoubtedly of great value in assessing training shortcomings and improving operational capabilities, are also used to test and troll Moscow’s neighbours in a manner reminiscent of cold war practice. Given that they can and have been used as covers for offensive operations, as happened before the annexation of Crimea, they inevitably raise concerns in Europe. Indeed, that seems part of the Kremlin’s calculation.

In March 2016, for example, 33,000 Russian troops wargamed offensive operations against Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, including seizing the Aland, Gotland and Bornholm islands. Even less subtle was the exercise in June 2015, when Russian bombers simulated a nuclear attack on Bornholm, timed to coincide with an annual festival when 90,000 guests and Denmark’s political leadership were on the island.

The Baltic region is also frequently the scene for such operations. Kaliningrad, bordering Poland and Lithuania, sees regular snap exercises, often in conjunction with forces in the Russian mainland. Likewise, in October 2016, 5,000 paratroopers carried out exercises in Pskov, close to the Estonian border, with 2,500 undertaking simulated combat jumps. By way of comparison, the total Estonian Land Forces number some 6,400 personnel.

Such instruments of ‘heavy metal diplomacy’ have several virtues. They are dual-use, in that as well as bringing pressure to bear on Europe, they are also valuable in their own right, as training opportunities. They can be given a coercive dimension often at little extra cost, especially if there are virtual command post exercises rather than physical ones. They are also easily deniable: Moscow always claims to be running purely defensive exercises. They are also controllable: the risk of a wargame becoming a war is minimal.

Symbolic Deployments

“This is not about reaching for some foreign policy goals, satisfying ambitions, which our Western partners regularly accuse us of. It’s only about the national interest of the Russian Federation.”

Sergei Ivanov, then head of the Presidential Administration,

on the deployment of Russian troops to Syria, 201521

After years of threat and warning, and of moving the missiles there temporarily for ‘drills,’ in November 2016, not only did Moscow confirm that it was going to deploy Iskander-M (SS-26) missiles into its Kaliningrad exclave, it also said they would be accompanied by advanced S-400 air defence systems. Inevitably, the fact that the Iskander can bear a nuclear warhead drew particular attention to the deployment, even though it is primarily configured for precision strikes with conventional payload, and has been used in this capacity in Georgia and Syria.

However, this is a deployment eight years in the making. In November 2008, then-president Dmitri Medvedev threatened it if NATO went ahead with its planned ballistic missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic. When NATO instead turned to relying on US Aegis cruisers mounting SM-3 missiles, Moscow again began to get concerned. As usual, a worried Kremlin is a threatening one, and in 2011 Medvedev reopened the idea.

To an extent, the deployment was and is inevitable: there is only so long a country can cry wolf. Nonetheless, it has garnered the anticipated reactions of horror and concern. The US State Department has warned that it is “destabilising to European security,” a view echoed by Lithuania (which said it “increases tensions in the region”), while Polish defence minister Antoni Macierewicz called it of the “highest concern.”22

In many ways, that is again the point. The practical implications of the Iskanders are not all that great. It does give Moscow certain additional capacities in a time of all-out war, but it is not in any way a game-changer. If anything the anti-air/area denial (A2/AD) implications of the proposed deployment of S-400s, which would be able to contest the skies over northern Poland and the southern Baltic Sea, are more serious. Nonetheless, there is a special symbolic value to anything which has, or could have, nuclear warheads. The deployment of two Buyan-M missile corvettes to the Baltic Fleet in October 2016, for example, was militarily significant because their Kalibr cruise missiles greatly extend the range and capacity of existing Russian systems present, but it aroused particular political attention because they can mount nuclear warheads.

Combat deployments also often have an additional, symbolic role. The deployment in October 2016 of a small flotilla based around the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier to provide additional fire support in Syria, like the earlier use of cruise missiles from ships in the Caspian Sea in November 2015 and the Rostov-on-Don submarine and surface ships in the Mediterranean since then, were classic examples of military theatre. The missiles and Kuznetsov’s air strikes had little real impact on operations in Syria, certainly nothing that could not have been accomplished by the existing air contingent there. On the other hand, their ‘heavy metal diplomacy’ significance was considerable.

The cruise missile launches delivered striking visuals that made it onto television screens and websites around the world, and underscored the long-range reach of Russia’s military and also the capacities of its newer systems. As for the Kuznetsov, while its smoky and stolid plod from Severomorsk through the North Sea, English Channel and Strait of Gibraltar raised some derision, this was nonetheless the very first combat mission for this 25-year-old carrier. More to the point, it was accompanied by the Petr Velikii, a missile cruiser mounting a formidable anti-shipping arsenal, whose presence owed less to any value in Syria than as a reminder to NATO not necessarily to consider the Mediterranean mare nostrum, its sea.

As with politically framed wargames and exercises, these deployments perform both practical military and ‘heavy metal diplomacy’ roles, and as such the cost of the latter aspect is often rolled into the upfront expense of the deployment. They are similarly deniable. On the other hand, they do carry with them some greater risks. First of all, whereas training exercises at home are easily controlled, such deployments take place in operational spaces where the potential for unexpected incidents is that much greater.

More broadly, the use of actual conflicts in Syria and Ukraine as tools of political leverage in Europe also risks affecting how Moscow manages those conflicts and its own role within them. For example, Russia involved itself directly in the Syrian conflict at least in part to counter attempts to isolate it diplomatically and to force the West to engage with it. In this it was successful, not least forcing Barack Obama to meet with Putin during the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. Since then, Russia has let opportunities to withdraw from the conflict pass, and, according to officials in Moscow, this is also to an extent out of fear that it would lose leverage in the region and with the West if it did. As a result, Moscow has a perverse incentive to see the conflict continue, as it justifies its presence there.