WHAT is said to be the largest concentration of Russian troops since the epic final battles of the World War II, which crushed Hitler’s armies, takes place next month. The maneuvers involving 300,000 Russian soldiers, 36,000 tanks and other armored vehicles, a thousand warplanes and two naval fleets will also include smaller contingents of troops from China and Mongolia.
This massive demonstration of Moscow’s military might is called “Vostok” or “East” and is being held far from Russia’s European borders with rival NATO powers. But it is clearly designed to send a message to Washington and its military allies that the Kremlin now disposes revitalized armed forces that underpin President Vladimir Putin’s drive to re-establish his country as a superpower on a par with the United States.
The Russians have invited NATO observers to the vast Vostok exercise to witness for themselves the extent of Moscow’s new military prowess. Inevitably, uninvited guests, in the form of US satellites, will also be busy watching and listening to every move commanders make, monitoring their tactics and how well they work. From the Pentagon’s point of view, the data that gathered is likely to be an intelligence bonanza.
To stay effective, all armies have to exercise and test themselves in battlefield conditions. But a mass gathering of military assets is a relative rarity. One reason is that they are extremely costly, at the very least in terms of fuel and wear and tear on sophisticated equipment. The Russian economy is in trouble. Putin has just had to row back slightly on radical reforms to the pension system which brought out popular protests at an extension of the working age. But with US-led sanctions following the seizure of Crimea, the Moscow-backed uprising in eastern Ukraine and the apparent overseas murder of political opponents, the government is finding it increasingly hard to make ends meet. In such circumstances it might seem a bad idea to spend the equivalent of many hundreds of millions of dollars on huge military exercises.
This however, is to ignore the key benefit that Putin expects to gain which is the propaganda effect on his own people. Russia has always desired and generally admired a strong ruler. The bare-chested, martial-arts-fighter president has set out to cast himself in that mold. After the chaotic and ramshackle leadership of his predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the latter notable for his blatant corruption, Putin set about restoring Russia’s place in the world. He renewed its rusting navy. He shook up its largely conscript and demoralized army, which had never recovered from the bloody humiliation of Afghanistan and the heavy casualties in the Chechen independence conflict.
Russia’s revanchist military power chimes with Putin’s insistence that the country faces an existential threat from outside powers, most particularly the United States. This is his justification for the expenditure on the armed forces of billions which could otherwise have been employed more productively on economic growth and reform. But has Putin forgotten one crucial lesson of recent Russian history? The old Soviet Union collapsed in no small measure because the Kremlin found itself unable to outspend Washington in the arms race. The inefficiencies and corruption that dogged the Soviet Union then still exist in a largely economically unreformed Russia today. Can Putin really afford his new military power?
