Russia's challenge to the West

Notes on the new Cold War

Russia cannot conceive of itself in any other way than as an empire. After the collapses of 1917 and 1991, it seeks a way to combine this "special destiny" with its weakness in the West and its lack of attractiveness in the face of the countries that were once its satellites, when it was its possession. Without the need to prey on neighboring territories, she acts pragmatically while trying to present herself as an alternative to a West that she considers decadent and hypocritical.

On June 9, 2014 four bombers Tupolev Tu-95MS They were detected by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) on the western edge of the Aleutian Islands. two fighters F-22 Raptor were sent to intercept the Russian planes, after which two of the four Bear They turned around. The remaining two flew over the Pacific until they approached within 50 miles of the California coast, where they were intercepted again, this time by a pair of F-15 Eagle. On October 29 of that year, the same day that the USAF Global Thunder 15 command and control exercise ended, a total of nineteen Russian Air Force aircraft were intercepted by fighters from Norway, Portugal and Turkey. The previous day, seven Russian planes had been intercepted in the Baltic Sea by Portuguese and German planes that were part of NATO's Baltic Air Police Mission.

All this information, received in such a short time frame, brought back to our minds those scenes of Russian bombers intercepted and photographed by NATO planes over the ocean, so typical of the Cold War. And so, too, Russia returned once again to the map of military concerns, after a time of false tranquility, in which competition between powers seemed a thing of the past. What's more, in the last five years his attack on a West that he feels is cornering him and that he nevertheless considers to be decadent, has gone far beyond the military, where he knows that he cannot oppose NATO, to reach aspects political, diplomatic and even moral, as we will see.

After the 2014 Ukraine crisis, the West has undoubtedly entered a new era in its relations with Russia. The invasion of Crimea and its subsequent annexation through a disputed referendum was the first case of territorial expansion experienced in Europe since the end of the Second World War. But if the subsequent armed conflict in the Donbass basin created doubts about Russia's role in an international order in which the US was in retreat, the military intervention in Syria that began on September 30, 2015 represented another new one. milestone: Moscow's first intervention outside the borders of the former Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War and, above all, the confirmation that the Eurasian country was "back" in international competition, after two decades in which its foreign policy has taken several lurches, trying to get closer to the West first and seeking its own path later, after coming out scalded.

The leaders of the West and Russia have sought to send reassuring messages making it clear that we have not entered a New Cold War and, therefore, we still have time to avoid the worst consequences of this hypothetical scenario. During the annual NATO summit that took place on July 8 and 9, 2016 in Warsaw, the secretary general of the organization stated that “we do not want a new Cold War” and that the “Cold War is history and should remain in the history". Of course, public statements usually go one way and the facts go the other and, in this sense, what happened in Poland was no exception: At that same summit it was decided to deploy four multinational units in Poland and the three Baltic Republics. under the name “Enhanced Forward Presence”. Two years later, the US Navy announced its plans to reactivate its Second Fleet for the North Atlantic, in response to an unusual increase in Russian activity in the area. The paradox is that improving relations with Russia was always a stated goal of successive American administrations. So the current situation in relations between both states can only be understood as the story of a disagreement.

Vladislav Zurkov, ideologist of Russian managed democracy.

The second fall of the Russian Empire

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia hoped to maintain its hegemony as first among equals within the community of former Soviet countries and obtain Western guarantees that the political transition in the German Democratic Republic would not lead to the unification of a reinvigorated Germany within NATO. Her fears had some echo in France, but events took away Russian aspirations. All the guarantees that Moscow aspired to were blown up. The Federal Republic of Germany absorbed the German Democratic Republic without giving up its membership in NATO. The Russian soldiers deployed in East Germany packed their bags to return home and the arsenals of the National People's Army were liquidated to end up in countries such as Sweden, Turkey or Uruguay.

A big difference between Russia and the rest of the ex-communist countries is that there was no break with the communist past. In this way, in Russia the KGB was not dissolved in the same way as in other former Soviet republics, but rather a good part of its assets and agents were used to form the new FSB. Nor were its files opened as was the case with the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic or the Securitate of Romania. Deep down, there was an “imperial continuity” between the USSR and the Russian Federation that many escape when they talk about “the ghosts of the Cold War.” It is not that Putin and current Russia have reflections typical of the Soviet era - something that could be understood given his past and his education - but that there is a historical continuity between tsarist imperialism, the later Soviet imperialism (which dealt between 1918 and 1940 to recover the lost tsarist domains) and the new Russian nationalism, which until now has only been able to break off fragments from other countries, but which longs to recover, by considering as its own, many of the territories that have been outside the borders since 1991. Russians, even though Russian leaders are aware that current Russia is light years away from previous ones.

Russia in the 1990s was marked by economic weakness that burned into the memory of the Russian people the market reforms with the fall in living standards and the sudden enrichment of a few in an economic and political system built with the support western. The weakness of the model also meant that Russia lacked an attractive model to offer its surrounding countries. In the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, back then “Russia was not politically strong enough to impose its will and was not economically attractive enough to seduce the new states”.

Of course, from a military point of view, it did not have forces with which to counterbalance the West. After the fall of communism, the countries forcibly incorporated into the Soviet empire fled from Moscow in disarray. Only Belarus, strongly led by Aleksandr Lukashenko, has maintained a privileged relationship with Moscow, although it has not supported the invasion of Crimea. Armenia, for its part, has remained an ally due to its need for a supporter in its conflict with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh. To make matters worse, the financial collapse of August 1998 forced the Russian government to devalue the currency, declare a default on national debts, and approve a moratorium on payments to international creditors. In the spring of 1999, as NATO bombs fell on Serbia, Russia negotiated a loan with the International Monetary Fund. Russia thus had no room for maneuver to avoid NATO intervention in Kosovo.

Later, the US invasion of Afghanistan after the events of 11/26 led to a rapprochement between Washington and Moscow. The new international agenda focused on the fight against terrorism gave rise to Putin's government to present the situation in the Caucasus, where the Second Chechen War was taking place, as another episode in the Global War on Terror. The US intervention in Afghanistan in some ways repeated Moscow's previous strategic needs that led to the Soviet invasion of the country, trying to prevent it from becoming a focus of destabilization for the entire region. This good harmony meant, for example, that on November 2001, XNUMX, the first of the planes that established an air bridge with the Bagram airport landed to deploy a field hospital of the Russian Ministry of Emergencies. But the American “unipolar moment” dissipated that fleeting rapprochement.

In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, a relevant ally of Moscow until the fall of the Soviet Union. In June 2004 the NATO Summit in Istanbul welcomed the three Baltic republics, the first three ex-Soviet countries to enter the alliance. Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia also joined, so what had once been the defensive glacis of the Soviet Union from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea now became a belt of Washington's allied countries.

In the case of the Baltic Republics, this was a deliberate effort to move away from Moscow's orbit. They had historically been part of the Hansa and as soon as the USSR fell they strengthened ties with the Scandinavian countries, returning to their traditional being. From Moscow's perspective it was incomprehensible that those three ungrateful republics would leave to create three “little countries.” Doing more damage to the wound, those countries threw themselves into the arms of the United States to guarantee their sovereignty. By entering NATO, what for the candidate countries was a defensive maneuver, for Moscow became a phase of aggressive expansion of the Alliance.

With the incorporation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria into NATO, in addition to Washington's alliances with Georgia, Azerbaijan and some Ukrainian governments, the former Soviet shield that protected Russia became the opposite; a “cordon sanitaire” that isolated her. Thus, Ukraine would become the playing field in which part of this geopolitical dispute would be resolved. It should not be forgotten that without Ukraine, Russia is further away from Europe and its imperial aspirations can only be directed towards Asia. In 2005, contacts began for the installation on European soil of a protection system against ballistic missiles. Formal negotiations began in 2007, after a period of consultations with the Russian government.

Washington's plan was to install warning radars on Czech soil and missile launchers on Polish soil. The stated purpose was for the anti-missile system to serve as protection against Iran, although Russia feared that it could limit the effectiveness of its strategic forces, the ultimate safeguard of its great power status.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, what Vladimir Putin considered as “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”, Russia first went through a period of strategic pause in the 90s while the State was consolidated, the economy was transformed, and the country's attention was focused on an internal conflict such as that of Chechnya. Once this phase has been overcome, the country has turned its gaze abroad, seeking to consolidate a sphere of influence in the “near abroad.”

The conclusion is that Russia has oriented its relationship with the West on the basis of grievances, real or imagined, it does not matter, which in the West were ignored or undervalued after the great party at the end of the Cold War in which everyone supposedly won. either in freedom, or for the "peace dividends", or for having remained the only superpower. NATO's expansion was done to offer guarantees to countries like Poland and the Baltic Republics, creating a classic security dilemma. The defensive measures of these countries to anchor themselves to the West, however, were perceived by Russia as a threat.

The mixture of religion, nationalism and external threats as a unifying element of the population is, of course, not a Russian invention. However, it is being taken to the extreme by the Kremlin both to legitimize its political system and to promote an external image different from that of the West and in which values ​​play an essential role.

Putin's Russia

In August 1999, Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister of Russia while Boris Yeltsin was still president, already in very poor health. A few months later, on December 31, 1999, Yeltsin resigned, so, in accordance with the Russian Constitution, the prime minister became president of the country until elections were held. Although Putin publicly supported the United Russia political party, he decided to run on its own behalf, as an independent candidate, in the presidential elections of March 2000, albeit with the support of the state apparatus and the oligarchy. In them, Putin managed to be elected president of Russia with 53% of the votes in the first round (while the second candidate, Gennadii Zyuganov, obtained only 29%). Since he entered the political sphere, Putin has achieved a support rate among the Russian population always higher than 60% in his successive mandates, achieving an average of 72% and obtaining 81% in November 2006, as Bill Bowring explains to us. in his study “The Electoral System of the Russian Federation”, published by the European Parliament. This high popularity of Putin is explained thanks to different factors:

  • A greater concentration of power in the figure of the Russian president.

  • The strong control of public opinion through the media.

  • The nonexistence of a political opposition.

  • The achievement of stability and order in the country.

  • The empowerment of national identity.

  • The recovery of Russia's position in the international arena.

  • An improvement in economic conditions at a general level (despite existing social inequalities).

  • The centralization of territorial power (to the detriment of the independence with which federal entities were governed).

  • The decrease in the political influence exercised by the oligarchs in exchange for protection of private initiative and privileges such as access to State resources.

Putin's rise to power was fueled by several Russian figures (apart from powerful figures such as Yeltsin and the tycoon who helped finance his campaign, Boris Berezovsky), such as Russian propagandists Vladislav Surkov and Gleb Pavlovsky, among others. These last two (who fall into the category of political technologists) worked with Yeltsin and helped elevate Putin to the Presidency of the country through an influence campaign called Operation Successor (preemstvennost), which Whitney Milam delves into in “Who is Vladislav Surkov?”.

As Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev emphasize in “The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money”, these political technologists created a new type of authoritarianism using their extensive knowledge of media manipulation. One of their great successes as experts in the field of communication and public relations was, precisely, transforming Putin into the strong man that Russia needed through the influence that television exerted on the Russian population. In this way, they managed to convince their fellow citizens that there was no political alternative to Putin. Better yet, they made new terms such as sovereign democracy accepted as normal.

The term sovereign democracy (supreme democracy) was reinforced by the Russian ideologue and propagandist Vladislav Surkov during a speech given in 2006 to refer to the political system prevailing in Putin's Russia. Although numerous sources of information indicate that Surkov was the person who coined said term, there are references prior to 2005 where it is already indicated that the Kremlin chose both words as “a new commercial name to designate centralized and supervised political development”. In fact, the term “sovereign” is considered to be synonymous with meanings previously used to describe the Russian political system, such as “controlled”, “managed” or “tutored” (in English, managed), as Nikolay Petrov teaches us in “From Managed Democracy to Sovereign Democracy: Putin's Regime Evolution in 2005”. The principles on which this sovereign democracy is based are three:

  • Increase and reinforcement of the power of the figure of the Russian president to the detriment of that of public institutions.

  • Management of the media so that they follow the propaganda line set by the Kremlin.

  • Control over electoral processes and the political opposition.

The CIDOB, in a 2010 article entitled “The political structure of the Russian Federation”, explains to us that it is a concept that allows the Russian Government to define its own version of “democracy”, under which national objectives are considered to be above human rights and individual freedoms. Through the term “sovereign”, the Russian Government establishes that it is the only one with the capacity to determine the peculiarities of the type of democracy that is established in its territory, different from the Western one.

In this way, no other state can call into question the Russian political system, since, if so, it would be considered an unacceptable intervention in the Kremlin's domestic affairs. Consequently, the political regime by which the Russian Federation is guided is usually classified as hybrid, since it is derived from the mixture of democratic elements with other more authoritarian ones.

The concept of sovereign democracy cannot be understood without alluding to two other notions that characterize Putin's regime: the so-called vertical power (vertical vlasti) and the dictatorship of the law (diktatura zakona). In fact, to understand the Russian political system in depth, it is in turn necessary to understand that these three elements complement and reinforce each other and, of course, the way in which they do so.

The vertical power structure was included in the 1993 Constitution, which established three levels of Government: federal, regional and local. When Putin came to power, one of his first objectives was to prevent the federal or regional entities that made up the Russian Federation from continuing to enjoy, as in Yeltsin's time, so much power at the local level and the ability to act independently of the Kremlin. , something that had frustrated many of Moscow's policies, effectively paralyzing the Administration. Consequently, the governors stopped being elected by the people and began to be appointed by Vladimir Putin himself, of course, with the approval of the local legislative assembly, whose majority was made up, logically, of members sympathetic to the Kremlin. In this way, the Russian President guaranteed control of local entities for himself by choosing governors loyal to the regime, achieving greater centralization of power.

Consequently, at the federal level there are three branches of power: executive, legislative and judicial. In the executive branch, there is the Russian president, who is the head of state, and the Prime Minister, who is the head of the Executive. The legislative branch is made up of the Federal Assembly, made up of two chambers: the Duma (which would be equivalent to the Congress of Deputies in Spain), made up of 450 seats, and the Federation Council (the Senate), made up of 178. Finally, In the judicial branch, there is the Constitutional Court. What is not established, unlike what happens in any democratic country, are the counterweights that make some powers balance and audit the others, making concentration impossible, precisely.

The concept of vertical power implies that the executive is not sufficiently subject to control by the legislative and judicial powers. Furthermore, within the vertical structure, the Orthodox Church and the armed and security forces stand as key institutions, something that Armando Chaguaceda tells us about in “The Putin system: Authoritarianism today”. However, Antonio Sánchez Andrés tells us in an article for CESEDEN entitled “The international economic projection of Russia. Influence of the new Russia on the current security system” that “verticalization of power has only worked partially” because, on the one hand, the Executive has failed to exercise sufficient control over the governors and, on the other, the impossibility of stopping corruption at the state level.

Finally, the so-called dictatorship of law rests on traditional Russian legal thought, which dates back to the 2000th century and the philosopher Boris Chicherin. Putin, a lawyer by training, referred to this term already in XNUMX, ensuring that it would replace the rule of law. Used as a political tool, the dictatorship of law must ensure that citizens comply with and respect the laws by perceiving an order and authority that emanates from the State. In reality, although apparently the idea is not so different from what we understand as the rule of law, it is about the use of the judicial system by the political authorities to guarantee the submission of the population to the designs of the Kremlin, using the laws in many times in a misleading way or writing them in a deliberately ambiguous way so that they can be interpreted by judges based on the interests of the moment.

In some Russian circles they already see the country and its political system as a true alternative to the Western liberal-democratic system, an enemy that must be defeated, like any threat.

The Ukraine crisis

You don't have to turn to obscure Russian works on geopolitics to find references to Russian ambitions over Ukraine. The country appears mentioned in The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Hungtinton and The Great World Board by Zbigniew Brzezinski, where we can find the statements of Russian personalities who considered the independence of Ukraine back in the 90s as a historical accident that would happen sooner or later. corrected. They claimed that Crimea and Ukraine would soon return to the bosom of mother Russia. Without going any further, in September 2013 Sergei Glaziev, co-founder of the Russian Rodina party and today part of the Kremlin circle, warned that, if the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU was signed, “Russia could no longer guarantee Ukraine's status as a state and could possibly intervene if the country's pro-Russian regions appealed directly to Moscow.”

Samuel P. Huntington pointed out Ukraine in his controversial work as an example of a country where there was a notable linguistic and religious division that was reflected in the electoral results. In the 1994 presidential election, in fact, the country was fractured in two, with each candidate obtaining more than two-thirds of the votes in the geographical half of the country they represented. A geographical division of the vote that was repeated in each and every election held since then. Huntington proposed several hypotheses about the future evolution of the country's fracture, one of them being the partition of the country. He also pointed out precisely Crimea as a focus of conflict between Russia and Ukraine. According to Hungtingon, the inclusion of Ukraine in the Russian area of ​​influence is vital for Moscow because it allows it to create a nucleus of Slavic countries that anchor it to Europe.

Even in Number 6 of the first period of this magazine, published in July 2010, there is an article by Christian D. Villanueva López titled “The Next Crimean War” in which reference is made to the Russian need to invade Ukraine not only for political and historical reasons, but also for more mundane reasons, such as economy, transportation or technology.

The roots of the fracture, in any case, are historical. Ukraine had been incorporated into the Soviet Union in the context of the Russian Civil War. Whether due to the errors committed in the collectivization of agricultural exploitations, the droughts and famines caused as a weapon of repression, millions of Ukrainians died under the Soviet regime in the early 30s. During the Second World War, the reaction of some occupied towns by the Soviet Union was to receive the Nazi invaders as liberators before suffering the German yoke in their flesh. As in the case of other Eastern European countries, for example Poland and Romania, Ukraine's borders were drawn by arbitrarily absorbing territories from other countries and moving the entire country further west at the end of World War II. Thus, Ukraine ended up incorporating territories that had belonged at some point in the first half of the XNUMXth century to Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romania.

With this background, Soviet oppression and collaboration with Nazi Germany could have been agitated by each side after the government crisis of February 2014. The new Ukrainian provisional government had a serious legitimacy problem. Although President Viktor Yanukovych was removed from office with the votes of his own party, the Russian perspective presented his fall as a “coup.” The presence of far-right groups in kyiv's Independence Square was exploited ad nauseam in the Russian version of the crisis to present the new provisional government as the "neo-Nazi coup government of kyiv."

It should be remembered that in the presidential elections of May 25, the votes of the Svoboda and Right Sector candidates combined did not reach even 2% (1,16 and 0,70, respectively). But at that time the ground was prepared for an uprising of the pro-Russian population in eastern Ukraine in which armed rebel groups withdrew their recognition of the Kiev government and took up arms to defend themselves against the “Nazis.” Old stories for new conflicts.

After more than 20 years of disinterest on the part of the kyiv governments, the country's armed forces were in a sorry state. Much of the country's intelligence apparatus was pro-Russian. Which, added to the economic situation in which Ukraine found itself, meant the government's inability to use force decisively in the eastern part of the country. Furthermore, in the early phases of the war, given the situation of the armed forces, the fighting was carried out by volunteer units emerging from the Euromaidan movement, who announced that after the end of the war they would demand changes in the country. The interest on the part of the Ukrainian government in having them sacrifice themselves in the war in Donbass was evident.

The Ukrainian reaction to the Russian invasion revealed the state of collapse of the country's armed forces and intelligence apparatus. For example, Rear Admiral Denys Berezovsky defected to the Russian side within days of being appointed commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Navy while the Russian assault on Ukrainian air bases in Ukraine revealed the dire state of his aircraft. The first armed actions ordered by the Kiev government in eastern Ukraine ended in fiasco when six BMD armored vehicles belonging to airborne units, part of the elite Ukrainian armed forces, defected to the rebel side. For the new government in kyiv, moreover, it was clear that a large-scale military operation in eastern Ukraine would cause a high number of civilian casualties and would end up undermining any legitimacy of Ukrainian sovereignty aspirations over the region.

Until August 2014, despite everything, the progress of the war was favorable for the kyiv government. The territory in the hands of the pro-Russians was quite reduced and one of their leaders then regretted that Putin had “betrayed” them. Russian contractors, Cossack militias and Chechen militias played a role far from that played by Russian special forces units that participated in Russia's invasion of Crimea. When the war seemed lost, a second phase of the war began with a Russian intervention in which heavy weapons were used, while the flow of armored vehicles began whose insignia were hidden with a paint brush. Russian. Not so other insignia and markings that allow us to identify the unit of belonging and also know that the vehicles had been transported to near the front by rail, since the typical indications with the center of gravity that serve to guide the movement were preserved intact. load in this means of transport. With Russian support, a new situation of balance, or rather entrenchment, was reached, from which we have not really emerged yet. A situation in which the West's commitment to Ukraine was lukewarm, and Russian strength insufficient, such that the balance could not tip on either side.

In this context, the Russian invasion of Crimea can be considered as the acceptance of a fait accompli, constituting a brilliant example of Russian pragmatism and Vladimir Putin himself would recognize in a television documentary that the decision to invade Crimea was taken on the fly. after the fall of Yanukovych and while the military operation to remove him from Ukraine was being debated. The fact is that, for the second time in ten years, a part of the Ukrainian people had ousted a pro-Russian government from power in Kiev, so Putin conceded defeat and took advantage of the weakness of the new government to annex Crimea without firing a single shot and after years of patient undermining work carried out by pro-Russian cultural associations. American military weakness and European economic weakness gave Moscow room for action. After all, who was willing to engage in direct confrontation with Russian troops without knowing how far the war could escalate? In the event of a conflict, was NATO going to apply its doctrine of deep attacks on the enemy rear, even if that meant bombing Russian soil? And above all, was a good part of Europe, with Germany and France in the lead, going to renounce the supply of Russian gas or its commercial contracts with Moscow? All of which leads us to a second issue, which has to do with the interpretation that the Kremlin makes of what happened in Ukraine, but also years before in Georgia (a country that boasted American support prior to the 2008 South Ossetia War. ) and currently in Syria: The perception of the US as a tired hyperpower, an impression that has been reinforced by the "Pivot to Asia" undertaken by Obama in 2011 and that Donald Trump's changing attitude has only confirmed to eyes of the Kremlin.

A new Cold War

The Donbass War, like the annexation of Ukraine, are only two chapters of a confrontation that is global and transversal. Global, because Russia is not content with fighting a West that it considers a threat - at the same time decadent and sick - in Eastern Europe, but is willing to take advantage of any Western weakness, as has happened in Syria or Libya, to gain power. Transversal because for the first time since the times of the USSR it goes far beyond hard power, as everything is permeated with ideology. An ideological confrontation that is also very far from the traditional left-right rivalry and that the revolutionary theocracy of Iran, the Arab socialism of Assad, popular Kirchnerist nationalism or Venezuelan Chavismo have the same place among Moscow's allies.

Putin's government has contributed to this ideological confusion, which has launched the historical shredder to rescue symbols, characters and speeches from the Russian past to incorporate into its nationalist discourse, designed to legitimize a hybrid political system, which we have talked about. Thus, the same is recovered from the Order of Saint George - a tsarist decoration reinvented by the USSR and reinstated by Putin in 2010 to become a patriotic symbol - which is given a new role to Orthodoxy and that is the vindication of the glories Tsarists and Stalinism fit into the same discourse in today's Russia. But Putin's historical revisionism is not so much nostalgia in Russia for the Soviet imperial past in Russia, as the latest manifestation of the historical continuity of Russian imperialism that passed from the tsars to Stalin and that we discussed at the beginning of this article.

It is precisely there, in this historical continuity, where we find the key to the Russian opposition to the West, since the country considers itself as an equal, with its own tradition and values, a special destiny and a responsibility and once a right over your close foreigner. To present itself as a complete alternative to the West, and far from relying solely on its Armed Forces, Russia tries to promote abroad the image of a reliable partner, it has no qualms about dealing with any type of regime, it disseminates through its apparatus of propaganda the values ​​that permeate Putin's conservative discourse and does not hesitate to form a common front together with China in international organizations.

It is very difficult to predict what the future may hold. For the moment, given the relationship of forces, it is unthinkable that in areas like the Baltic it could venture to go against NATO. It does seem more likely that it will deepen its dominance over those areas in which it feels most comfortable, such as Central Asia or the Caucasus. This could be carried out in the best of cases, by strengthening ties with its former satellites through institutions such as the Eurasian Economic Community, established in January 2015 and bringing together Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. At worst, taking advantage of any internal crisis to intervene in said states. It is, in fact, the best thing that could happen to us as the West awakens from the slumber of post-material and post-heroic society.

Be that as it may, what is clear is that Russia has an internal drive that leads it to imperialism and that, despite its relative weakness and its numerous problems, it needs a way out that for the moment has been denied in Ukraine. Also that this vocation, combined with the dilemma that the expansion of NATO poses to the Kremlin, is degenerating into that New Cold War to which Mark MacKinnon referred in 2007 in his work "The New Cold War" and Edward Lucas in a book titled exactly the same and published just a year later.

Final notes

The disagreement between Russia and the West is inevitable because the passage of a whole series of countries that have been part of the Russian/Soviet orbit to the West has been interpreted as a betrayal from Moscow and at the same time is perceived as a threat to its security. This is especially bloody in the case of Ukraine, since with this country outside its area of ​​influence, the Russian Federation is practically isolated from Europe. In the end, a classic security dilemma appears in which the actions of the West and the former Soviet republics to guarantee their security and prosperity are interpreted by the Kremlin as an attack and an attempt to encircle Russia both physically and as on the moral level.

The idiosyncrasy of the Russian political system makes them interpret the prosperity of these countries also as a danger, since it questions a model, the Russian one, which is authoritarian and has not had the same success when it comes to distributing wealth among the population, something that could provoke discontent among its own population.

Having overcome the serious problems that affected Russia in the 90s and in the first decade of this century, the country has turned its gaze abroad, in search of consolidating a sphere of influence that begins in its "near abroad", a term that, given the size of the country and its position straddling two continents, is difficult to specify in terms of extension, which could degenerate into conflicts in areas as disparate as the Far East, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus or Asia. Central.

So far, given Russian weakness, this imperialism has only been felt in the Caucasus and Ukraine, but the intervention in Syria and the growing presence in Africa should put us on alert about its ability to extract significant profits from very limited actions, operating in the Gray Zone or using tools such as Political Warfare or private military and security companies (PMSCs).

This form of struggle has important advantages for a Russia that, in reality, cannot compete either militarily or economically face to face with the West. On the one hand, it allows it to avoid the risk of defeat, in case it one day clashes militarily with NATO. On the other hand, it maximizes its ability to influence the internal politics of those states that are in its sights through its media network or thanks to the financing of populist parties, more in line with its conservatism, since in this way it is not presents itself as an obvious threat and, on many occasions, it is difficult to attribute responsibility for this or that action. This has been seen perfectly in the 2016 US election campaign, but it could also have happened in the French elections with Putin's support for Le Pen and in several other places.

Regarding the West, although the Russian challenge does not represent the same level of threat as the Soviet one during the Cold War - this role has been completely taken over by a People's Republic of China, which does represent a major challenge -, we must be aware that there is dangers that may not seem as obvious as a division of battle tanks or a nuclear submarine, but that if not addressed by taking firm measures, can have a disproportionate effect, in this case, undermining the basis of our regime of freedoms from within, by helping in a process that we have been experiencing for a long time, such as the progressive transformation of our democracies into populism, something that Russia actively promotes.

Writers

  • Jesus M. Perez Triana

    Degree in Sociology from the University of La Laguna. He studied the Master's Degree in Development and International Aid from the Complutense Institute of International Studies. His career as a researcher has been focused on the impact of social change on new strategies and forms of conflict, being the author of the book "Guerras Postmodernas" and collaborating with various media specialized in security and defence. Since 2005 he writes the blog GuerrasPosmodernas.com

  • Clara Rodríguez Chirino

    Intelligence analyst in the private sector. Throughout his professional career, he has tried to combine his interest in international security by publishing informative content mainly in the magazines of the Spanish Ministry of Defense while working in private companies carrying out corporate investigations. She has a degree in International Relations and Translation and Interpreting, and studied a Master's Degree in the Politics of Conflict and Violence from the University of Leicester, United Kingdom.

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