«…If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. .»
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In times of a fierce war with a powerful and insidious enemy, we have no luxury not to know and understand it comprehensively — from its military capabilities and regime’s functioning algorithms to its industrial and social development trends. Undoubtedly, special attention should be paid to monitoring the very top, that for many years has been composed of people in a variety of uniforms. Its members clearly consider themselves a special clan of initiates, chosen solely on the basis of their loyalty to the state, which to them, is personified by the current Kremlin’s owner.
Security forces originating from the USSR
According to some observers who have long been monitoring the sociological changes in the Russian authorities circles, the share of so-called security officials and people directly connected with the special services in the USSR-Russia leadership has been constantly increasing. While in the last years of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, only about 3% of top government officials came from the special services, in Yeltsin’s time it jumped to 30%, and after his resignation — at first to 43-50%, and later, under Putin-Medvedev — to the whopping 70-80%.
The average age of Russia’s “time-tested” leaders is also telling: Putin is 72, Shoigu — 69, Patrushev — 73, Volodin — 60, Mishustin — 58, Belousov — 65, Naryshkin — 70, Bortnikov — 73 and so on. Almost inevitably they share the mentality formed under the influence of powerful Soviet mythology and years of Kremlin propaganda, with the most prominent among those being Putin’s lament that “the collapse of the USSR was a tragedy and the disintegration of historical Russia.”
Cold War mentality
Since the 1920s, Moscow and its intelligence services have prioritized active information and subversive operations and outright sabotage over merely collecting and analyzing data on the perceived external threats. Initially, the aim was political emigrants, and later — weakening the West overall. For instance, it’s well known that in the late 1970s, in the hope to prevent the deployment of the Tomahawk and Pershing II missiles and turn public sentiment in Western Europe against the US, Moscow was counting on the anti-war movement. The Kremlin warned that in the event of war, the Soviet Union would have to strike at densely populated Europe that had allowed the Americans to deploy missiles on its territory. The tactic obviously remains a favorite one, as today the Kremlin is also threatening some European countries with the nuclear strikes, should they increase their support for Ukraine.
And just as decades ago, subversive and propaganda activities continue to widely use the Kremlin’s overt and covert sympathizers in the West: communist and similar political parties, trade unions, journalists, extreme left-wing intellectuals, unscrupulous businessmen, politicians and bloggers, to name a few. In KGB documents, the policy was referred to as “active measures of exerting long-term beneficial impact on influential foreign circles.” One of the examples that comes to mind is the spread of disinformation that the AIDS virus has been manufactured in American bio-labs.
Over the last century, that sustained subversive course has always had a distinct anti-Ukrainian component — from the 1938 assassination of the OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets in Rotterdam and other steps to destroy the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Ukraine and abroad to the mid-2000s campaigns of discrediting Ukraine as a reliable gas transit country, recent attempts to track the routes of Western aid to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the fresh clumsy shots at denigrating support for the country via provocative graffiti in Paris.
Some Russia experts believe that Putin’s Russia embarked on an anti-Western course after Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. In December 2007, I personally heard the current Russian ambassador to the United States, Antonov, claiming what has since become a Kremlin’s motto — that “Russia has now risen from its knees.” The truth, however is that those were just the years when the old disease started to become apparent on the outside.
But what has been the underlying basis of the Russian leadership’s audacity?
First, of course, it’s the nuclear weapons that make the whole world fear and reckon with Russia.
Secondly, the belief that the West in general, and Europe in particular, has long been mellowed out by the decades of peace and growing prosperity. That their people are unwilling to fight even for their own independence and are most afraid of a global nuclear war, while their politicians are forced to think only about the next election, incapable of developing and implementing a long-term strategy. That western business and free-market economy in general are focused exclusively on profits, and thus, can be easily manipulated, in particular through access to the Russian markets, including the energy one, or denial thereof. Then there is also the belief that due to its vast natural resources, Russia is too important for the global economy to be cut out, which naturally implies that its raw materials, such as oil, gas, uranium, and coal, can and should be used as powerful blackmail tools.
Third, the Kremlin counts on the widespread anti-Western and deeply rooted anti-American sentiment within Russia, both in the establishment and in the general population, and on the belief that a loyal ruling class can be formed from the regime’s main beneficiaries: security forces, senior officials, the defense industry top management and their families. At the same time, the vast majority of the Russian population is seen as ready to give up their few remaining rights in exchange for a small but stable state support and therefore, can be easily controlled by the repressive apparatus.
Interestingly, the dual feeling of both hatred of the West and, at the same time, deeply hidden inferiority by contrast are also inherent in the new generation of Putin’s loyal officers: Vladimir Medinsky, Denis Manturov, Patrushev’s son, Dmitry, Anna Tsivilyova, the Russian dictator’s cousin, and Pavel Fradkov, whose father, Mikhail Fradkov, former head of the SVR, was clearly no stranger to the Soviet secret services, which explains his nine-year work in the 1970s at the all-Union association Tyazhpromexport in India, where he was in charge of military contracts.
Vision of Ukraine and the world
The anti-Ukrainian nature of Russia’s policy toward its neighbor has remained a constant throughout the entire period of Ukraine’s independence. For quite a while, however, Moscow managed to conceal its true intentions in regard to Ukraine, while at the same time, had been actively using its own pro-Russian lobby within the country.
Having launched a large-scale war against Ukraine in 2022 and hoping for a blitzkrieg that would quickly break the will and demoralize Ukrainians, allowing it to take control of the country, Moscow instead found itself in conflict with the entire political West, forced to carry on a protracted and exhausting confrontation. Even today though, the Kremlin still seems to sincerely believe that the Ukrainian resistance “will end within two or three months after the Western countries stop supplying weapons to Ukraine.”
In view of the situation, to keep afloat, within Russia, Putin’s regime, that is essentially a harsh dictatorship of the so-called “experienced special forces officers” — in Russian, “siloviki” or literally “the force cadre” — has resorted to the tactics of increasingly massive repressions against any dissent, encouragement of active whistleblowing, elimination of the last vestiges of civil rights and freedoms, and consistent intensification of the anti-democracy subversive propaganda. It is hoped that the 14th EU sanctions package introduced in June, which, among other things, stipulates that “political parties and foundations, non-governmental organizations, including think tanks, or media service providers in the EU will no longer be allowed to accept funding from the Russian state and its proxies”, will become a sufficiently effective barrier to Russian subversive influence in Europe.
It should probably be mentioned that in preparation for the war against Ukraine, for at least twenty years, Russia has been constantly increasing its cultural, humanitarian, and information expansion, using all modern tools, including the “soft power” ones. One of the central places in Russia’s soft power arsenal has been traditionally occupied by the Russian language, that as such, is managed by the Russian World Foundation (RWF), established by a presidential decree on June 21, 2007. The Foundation’s ideology is completely subordinated to the Kremlin interests: “the Russian world is the world of Russia”, “the Russian world includes not just Russians, our compatriots in the countries of the near and far abroad, emigrants, natives of Russia and their descendants. It also includes foreign citizens who speak Russian, study or teach it, as well las everyone who is sincerely interested in Russia and concerned about its future.” The RWF has always been especially active in the post-Soviet states, considering them the traditional and natural area of the Russian language, the “Russian cultural space.” On the eve of the annexation of Crimea, the RWF in Ukraine tried to take under close control the associations of Russian language teachers, centers of Russian culture, public associations of “compatriots,” charitable foundations, Russia-related cultural and educational societies, youth movements, FM radio stations, and so on. There are reasons to believe that Russian companies operating in Ukraine at the time also contributed funds to finance the relevant “Russian World” projects. During the rein of Yanukovych and his clique, the Kremlin freely carried out its propaganda in Ukraine, including with extensive use of the capabilities of the Federal Agency for CIS Affairs, its nationals living abroad, and Rossotrudnichestvo, established in September 2008. There can be no doubt that the Rossotrudnichestvo’s activities in Ukraine were not only openly pro-Russian, but also directly aimed at splitting the Ukrainian society.
At the same time, the specifics of the mentality of Russia’s “siloviki,” who, as the Russian saying goes, can never be considered “ex-,” together with the psychological legacy of the Cold War, prevent them from realizing that a prolonged confrontation with the West requires a truly powerful economy, while the modern nature of military operations requires an innovative and technologically competitive defense industry, something that Russia lacks and can’t develop without the West.
Meanwhile, neither the former Soviet republics nor the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America want to follow the Kremlin on the path of a serious confrontation with the West, preferring to interact with it only on a pragmatic basis of self-benefit. And it may not be long until the costs of foreign adventures and support for the so-called “friendly countries” will become an unbearable burden for Russia, just as it has for the former USSR.
Oleh Bielokolos, Director of the Center for National Resilience Studies