Tag Archive for: Vladimir Putin

Is Putin’s nuclear boasting for real?

How seriously should we take President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Russian Federal Assembly on 1 March 2018, where he boasted about radical breakthroughs with Russia’s new nuclear weapons? Were these merely the rantings of a deluded leader? Putin, however, asserted that ‘everything I’ve said today is not a bluff … it is not a bluff, believe me.’

So, what are these threatening nuclear weapons that Putin claims Russia now has? He began by describing the capabilities of the new super‑heavy (200 tonnes) intercontinental ballistic missile called the RS-28 Sarmat. According to Russian sources, the missile carries 10 to 24 independently targetable nuclear warheads for a total of 20 megatons or more.

Putin said that this ICBM is the first to be able to attack targets from over the South Pole. In that case, its sub‑orbital trajectory would threaten America from its southern approaches and so bypass US ballistic missile warning radars, which face northwards to detect attacks from over the North Pole. It has a very short boost phase, which shortens the interval during which it can be tracked by satellites with infrared sensors.

Putin went on to claim that Russia is also developing new types of nuclear weapons that render missile defence systems ‘absolutely pointless’. One of them allegedly is powered by a small nuclear propulsion unit in an air‑launched missile called X-101. Apparently, it’s a low‑flying stealth missile carrying a nuclear warhead ‘with an almost unlimited range and unpredictable trajectory’. Putin claimed that ‘no other country has developed anything like this’.

Another weapon that Putin mentioned is an unmanned, nuclear‑powered submersible vehicle that can operate in the ocean at extreme depths, has an intercontinental range, and can travel at underwater speeds in excess of 100km/h. This weapon is known as Oceanic Multipurpose System Status‑6 (or Kanyon) and has been dubbed a ‘doomsday drone’ because it may carry a cobalt nuclear warhead of up to 100 megatons capable of devastating ports like New York and Los Angeles with massive radioactive contamination. Putin claimed, ‘There is simply nothing in the world capable of withstanding them.’

Putin also asserted that Russia has a high‑precision, hypersonic air‑launched missile system called Kinzhal (Dagger). Again, he asserted that ‘it is the only one of its kind in the world’. This missile is allegedly capable of flying at Mach 10 and delivering nuclear and conventional warheads over 2,000 kilometres.

He claimed another technological breakthrough with the development of a missile that’s a gliding wing unit. This new hypersonic‑speed, high‑precision weapon system called Avangard can apparently be fitted to an ICBM warhead and hit targets at intercontinental distances and engage in intensive manoeuvring as it travels. This makes it ‘absolutely invulnerable to any missile defence system’. Once more, Putin asserted that ‘no country in the world as of now has such arms in their military arsenal’.

The Russian leader boasted that only a country with the highest level of fundamental research and education, technology and human resources can successfully develop unique and complex weapons of this kind. He claimed that ‘Russia has all these resources.’

Putin said he hoped that everything he had just said would make any potential aggressor think twice, since unfriendly steps against Russia (such as deploying missile defences and bringing NATO infrastructure closer to Russia’s border) ‘become ineffective in military terms … making them useless’.

He suggested that those in the past 15 years who have tried to accelerate an arms race and seek unilateral advantage against Russia have wasted their time: ‘Nobody wanted to listen to us then. So, listen to us now.’

Putin’s parting shot was a reminder that Russia not only reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack, but also in response to an act of aggression using conventional weapons against Russia ‘that threaten the very existence of the state’. Any use of nuclear weapons against ‘Russia or its allies with weapons of short, medium or any range at all’ will be considered as a nuclear attack, and ‘retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences’.

So, what are we to make of this resounding blast from the Cold War? Without access to highly classified intelligence, it’s impossible to accept or reject Putin’s claims about the technological performance of these new nuclear weapons.

However, Pavel Podvig, the editor of the very informative book Russian strategic nuclear forces (The MIT Press 2001), has stated that Putin isn’t exaggerating about Russia’s new weapons. Nor is the existence of most of them a huge surprise. ‘So, it is all feasible,’ he said after Putin’s speech.

But why is Russia putting all this effort into defeating America’s very limited ballistic missile defences? The answer probably is that Moscow continues to worry about a US technological breakthrough.

The Pentagon’s reaction was to observe that it has deployed no new nuclear capabilities for over two decades, but that it will replace its strategic nuclear triad over the next 10 years. The US can do this at a cost of only about 6.4% of the current Department of Defense budget.

How then can Russia afford to embark on what’s undoubtedly a hugely expensive nuclear arms build up when its economy is barely the size of Spain’s, and when America’s current defence spending is almost 10 times that of Russia’s?

So, we may be right to be pessimistic about Putin’s claims and suspect that he was merely playing to his pre‑election domestic audience. Even so, there’s also a risk that we may now be about to embark on a serious and destabilising nuclear arms race between Russia and America.

Cyber wrap

Despite the continuing concerns over Russia’s adversarial role in cybersecurity, President Trump announced at the G20 that he and President Putin had discussed the formation of a joint US–Russian ‘impenetrable cyber security unit’ to ‘guard’ against ‘election hacking’. The announcement has unleashed a wave of disbelief. Many have likened the move to trusting the fox to guard the henhouse, or accepting rings of power from Sauron. Adding fuel to the fire, WikiLeaks has taken the opportunity to suggest Julian Assange for the job of leading the proposed unit. President Trump has since clarified his position, characterising the unit as an avenue for ‘discussion’ and ‘ceasefires’. President Putin has since provided a much clearer and more sensible description of the initiative, calling it a ‘working group’ that would define rules of engagement and propagate international legal norms.

While the idea of information-sharing and de-escalatory hotlines between adversaries has shown value in previous agreements in other bilateral relationships, the specifics of what President Trump meant are unclear, and concern remains over Trump’s continuing refusal to publicly and clearly identify and penalise Russia as an interfering actor in the 2016 US election. And a similar agreement between the FBI and the Russian FSB fell apart earlier this year after the FSB partners were linked to the massive Yahoo hack of 2014, which exposed 30 million Yahoo accounts.

Janus Cybercrime Solutions, the author of the original Petya ransomware, has argued that it was not behind the recent outbreak of NotPetya, and has provided a link to download the master decryption key for all past versions of Petya. The key has been tested and validated by a researcher from Kaspersky, suggesting that Janus is sincere in its desire to avoid blame. Meanwhile, the attackers behind NotPetya (exact identity unknown) have made their first public statement on DeepPaste, offering NotPetya’s decryption key in exchange for 100 Bitcoin, or US$250,000. On the other side of the NotPetya attack, ‘Intellect Service’, the Ukraine-based accounting software company that was hacked so that its legitimate software update mechanism could be used to distribute NotPetya, had its offices raided by heavily armed police last week. The company’s servers were also seized, which seems to reinforce previous statements by Ukraine’s Cyberpolice unit that the company will be facing charges of negligence.

Critical infrastructure protection continued to be an area of concern this week, after US officials discovered that a foreign government had gained unauthorised access to some administrative and business networks of at least 12 US power plants, including nuclear facilities. Analysts have pointed to Russia as the most likely source, and they are concerned that the attacks are part of the testing process for the development of advanced tooling that can knock out electrical grids. Germany’s domestic security agency, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, has released its annual report, noting that there’s been an increase in spying and cyberattacks from foreign governments, particularly from Turkey after Turkey’s July 2016 coup attempt, and from Russia in the lead up to the German parliamentary election in September 2016.

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) is looking for a new chief information officer as the current one, Randall Brugeaud, moves over to become deputy statistician at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The move comes at a less than ideal time for DIBP, which is two years into a massive IT integration program (PDF), but demonstrates the high regard in which DIBP’s IT staff are held by the public service and by ABS executives, who are looking to avoid a repeat of last year’s census troubles.

A dark-web seller was found to be offering Medicare numbers for the equivalent of A$30.50 apiece since October 2016, raising concerns about the numbers’ use in re-identification attacks on privacy. Initial speculation is suggesting that Health Professionals Online Services, a Medicare name-to-number search system, is the source of the numbers. In a subsequent interview, Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge said that his department has no seen indications of an ongoing security breach, and that the ‘vulnerability’ in question is more likely a traditional, small-scale data breach from a clinic or surgery. The matter’s also been referred to the AFP. While the extent of the breach isn’t yet clear, the government has initiated a wider review of Medicare security which will prove revealing when it’s completed in September.

It seems to be the time of the year for ambitious IT reviews. The Australian Electoral Commission has announced that it will be conducting a formal review of its IT systems, to be completed in August 2017. The review comes as a timely response to recommendations from a joint parliamentary committee. Elsewhere in Australia, the Victorian government has concluded its own review of 54,000 fines, which were quarantined after WannaCry hit their issuing cameras. The review found that most fines were correctly allocated, despite minor disruptions, and that the majority of the 54,000 will stand.

Russian defence spending: it’s the ekonomika, stupid

In 2014, the Russian economy faced two major setbacks: international economic sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and a collapse in global oil prices. At the time, crude oil alone represented more than a third of Russian exports by value. The Russian economy has no doubt seen better days, but defence spending has until now largely been protected from the recent economic downturn. But that might be about to change: economic pressures are mounting and the Kremlin will likely be forced to choose between sustaining foreign operations and moving ahead with military modernisation plans.

In October, Russia’s Ministry of Finance revealed forward spending estimates that showed a 12% nominal reduction in defence spending by 2018. Figure 1 shows Russia’s spending on defence (in constant 2015 currency) and as a proportion of GDP. The figures for 2009 and 2015 are particularly interesting. A full percentage point jump in 2009 is likely to have been due to operational costs of prosecuting the Russo-Georgian War in August of 2008. Similarly, the significant increase from 2014–15 would likely be due to Russian operations in Syria (and possibly Eastern Ukraine).

1Sources: DIO Economic Trends 2016; IMF World Economic Outlook Database Oct. 2016 Edition; IHS Jane’s  (Note: Future spending adjusted to 2015 RUB using IMF CPI deflators)

Based on the IMF’s current projections for Russia’s GDP, reductions will bring defence spending as a percentage of GDP down from the 2015 high of 4.2% to possibly as low as 2.9% in 2018. If those projections turn out to be accurate, Russia’s defence spending would drop to its lowest rate since 2011–12. But forecasting is always problematic, and a lot could change by 2018.

The good news for Moscow is that Russian operations in Syria have provided effective advertising for Russian military hardware. Back in March, Vladimir Putin boasted that Russian arms sales in 2015 had exceeded US$14 billion, and prospective foreign orders had reached US$56 billion. (As a caution, SIPRI’s arms transfer database, which measures the value of delivered goods, lists a 2015 exports figure of less than US$10 billion).

Figure 2 shows the last ten years of Russian arms export deliveries in constant 2015 rubles and constant 2015 US dollars. The value of the ruble relative to the US dollar collapsed in 2014–15 as sanctions and the oil crisis started to bite. Russian arms sales in 2014 and 2015 look similar in US dollars, but the value in rubles doubled over the same period.

 

2Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database

It’s worth noting that arms imports into Russia since 2006 have consistently represented less than 1% of total defence spending. What little they did import came mostly from Ukraine, which has been a vital source of naval gas turbines for decades. Even though the value of the ruble has plummeted relative to the dollar, it’s difficult to determine how much Russia’s purchasing power in the defence market has changed, since the country makes almost all of its own hardware. If anything, the change is likely to make Russian arms cheaper on the international market and thus even more saleable.

Arms sales alone aren’t likely to improve Russia’s economic prospects in the long term, but it’s an indispensable source of revenue for the Russian government. And each sale has geopolitical implications: Russia’s main military hardware customers over the last ten years are India (US$40b in 2015 dollars, according to SIPRI), China (US$20b), Algeria (US$12b) and Vietnam (US$7.5b). Sales in the same period to Syria (US$2.5b) and Iran (US$1.5b) are noteworthy, and the easing of sanctions on Iran has already stirred talk of major new acquisitions. Sales of military aircraft made up almost half of all arms sales (45.5%), with missiles (16.6%) and air defence systems (10.1%) the next two most popular purchases by value.

It’s hard to know what—if anything—will reverse Russia’s economic misfortunes. It’s likely that Putin will seek rapprochement with the US under President Trump in an attempt to end the sanctions, though it’s anyone’s guess how successful this strategy will be. An upswing in oil prices would be a boon to Russia’s export economy. And, while there are some indications that prices are stabilising, it may be years before prices return to pre-2014 levels.

On the other hand, if Moscow continues to conduct expensive operations in Syria, operational costs may result in further delays to new platforms. The Russian Navy’s surface fleet plans have already been set back by the lack of Ukrainian gas turbines, the air force can currently only afford twelve units of the developmental PAK-FA fighter jet, and the Russian Army’s new tanks may be delayed even further. Moscow has some hard choices to make.

The puzzle of Putin’s insecurity: Praetorian guards, Stalinist blueprints

Image courtesy of Flickr user Harald

Churchill’s famous line, ‘Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,’ refers to Stalin’s totalitarian empire. Taken out of context it reinforces a national myth, etched in every Russian mind by the poet Tyutchev: ‘Russia defeats the human mind’. That’s claptrap, yet aspects of contemporary Russia seem deeply puzzling.

Why should a man who has ruled Russia for almost 17 years and who, polls suggest, is trusted by 80% of his compatriots and apparently adored by some; who faces no challenge to his authority, and whose political admirers apparently include Xi Jinping, Trump, Le Pen, Farage, Orban, and Tsipras—why should Vladimir Putin repeatedly take steps that suggest he feels acutely threatened?

On 5 April, Putin decreed the formation of a National Guard, ostensibly to combat terrorism, extremism and organised crime, responsible to him directly, and only to him. The move prompted puzzlement in Russia itself, because Russia already has a Centre for Combatting Terrorism (headed by the FSB, the KGB’s domestic successor); a Special Rapid Response Group (SOBR) against organized crime; 182,000 ‘internal troops’; and 15-18,000 trained riot-police (OMON).

What’s more, Putin already has a personal guard, the FSO. Its size is a state secret but Sweden’s Defence Research Agency estimates its strength at 20–30,000. Estimates of the size of the new National Guard, expected to be drawn from the various forces listed above, vary from 180,000 to nearly 430,000. The higher figure, almost half the size of Russia’s army, seems unlikely. Putin appointed his former personal bodyguard and judo-sparring partner, Viktor Zolotov, to head it

Some of Putin’s cohort of securocrats—the heads of Russia’s phalanx of security agencies—have a clear explanation for the move: Russia, they say, is under constant and intense attack from ‘the US and its allies’ who are prosecuting a ‘hybrid war’ against it. Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary of Russia’s National Security Council, asserts that US hostility to Russia is not a result of tensions that wax and wane but is ‘systemic’.

Last month another lieutenant, Alexander Bastrykin, gave an even more fervid explanation in a newspaper article. Once Putin’s fellow student in Leningrad, Bastrykin heads the Investigative Committee, an agency set up by Putin in 2011 that, like the National Guard, reports to him and has no equivalent in the liberal democracies. Given that the State Prosecutor achieves a 99% conviction rate, the need for the Investigative Committee was unclear. But Bastrykin acts as a kind of super prosecutor-general prosecuting fictitious cases against Kremlin betes noires.

Bastrykin has a record of thuggish behaviour. In June 2012 he was compelled—on orders from above—to apologise to a journalist after a newspaper editor revealed that Bastrykin had kidnapped the journalist, threatened his life and joked that he would take charge of the investigation into his death.

Bastrykin’s message to his readers is stark: Russia faces a present and acute danger from crimes of terrorism and extremism that are being fomented and funded by ‘the US and its allies’, together with the likes of ISIS and al-Qaeda.

‘Over the past decade Russia…has been subjected to a so-called hybrid war, unleashed by the US and its allies…prosecuted by various means: political, economic, informational and legal,’ he asserts. So resolute counter-measures are imperative and urgently required.

‘Enough of pseudo-democracy, dictated by pseudo-liberal values.’ China’s methods in censoring the Internet and controlling the media should be applied in Russia. ‘Falsifying historical facts and distorting contemporary events’ should become criminal offences. The families of terrorists should have their property confiscated—recalling the collective punishment of the families of ‘enemies of the people’ under Stalin.

So, another puzzle: why would a senior judicial officer, who isn’t a member of the National Security Council, proffer a policy blueprint, and one that seems to imply the President has toyed too long with pseudo-democracy and failed to ensure the country’s security?

It seems inconceivable that Bastrykin could have published his chilling diatribe without a nod from the President’s Secretariat, especially as the last time a Putin lieutenant used the media to air a grievance he was dismissed. Is the neo-Stalinist manifesto by the country’s most senior ‘legal officer’, in a newspaper aimed at the elite and the new middle class, a warning from the top that any disloyalty would be extremely unwise?

As well as decreeing a new praetorian guard, Putin appears to be reshuffling his top echelon, rusticating one of his longest serving lieutenants, Viktor Ivanov, who first recruited Putin to the KGB, and abolishing the Federal Drug Control Service that Ivanov headed.

Given that politics everywhere is about power and money; that in Russia both depend ultimately on Putin’s favour; and that even the Russian security agencies must compete for fast shrinking funds, the article smacks of a bid by Bastrykin to preserve his job and standing.

Presumably the explanation is some or all of the above.

What’s plain is that Russia’s present supremo perceives his interests being served by mobilising the populace with the spectre of ‘the US and its allies’ waging an undeclared war against the Russian people and collaborating with Daesh and al-Qaeda in planning acts of extremism and terrorism in Russia.

Whether Putin and his inner circle’s sleep really is disturbed by fears of foreign attack or subversion from within remains hidden. Setting up another and large internal security force, and authorising a call for overtly Stalinist methods against a putative new generation of enemies of the people, looks like paranoia. But for Putin such measures presumably amount to sound governance.

Securing Putinism: Russia’s National Security Strategy

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‘Be vigilant, for the enemy never sleeps’ – Soviet propaganda slogan

On the last day of 2015, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree approving a revised National Security Strategy. As the document contains the latest definitions of Russia’s national interests as perceived by Putin and his lieutenants, and sets out measures by which they say they’ll be protected and advanced, it behoves countries affected to try to understand what the Strategy says, and doesn’t say, and what its goals are.

Comparing the new text with its predecessor from 2009 illuminates a marked shift. Depicting ‘the US and its allies’ as ‘striving for world hegemony’ and NATO as an ‘inherently aggressive alliance’ isn’t new. But accusing the US of constructing ‘a network of biological-warfare laboratories in territories contiguous with Russia’ is. It exemplifies bellicose language that makes the text the most starkly anti-American and anti-NATO Russian document since the late Soviet period.

The paper identifies eight primary threats to Russia’s security. Of those, the most pressing are: the US and NATO; foreign espionage activity (ranked first in a separate list of ‘threats to state and public security’); terrorists and other extremists; and the activities in Russia of foreign and international NGOs. Corruption is ranked seventh, just ahead of emergencies, natural disasters, and climate change.

Students of Russian history will note a recrudescence of Soviet-era terminology: ‘sharpening contradictions’ and ‘economic growth rates surpassing those of the West’. Other formulations, such as ‘Russia’s spiritual potential’ and ‘the rebirth of traditional Russian spiritual-moral values’, are from the ideological armoury of Tsar Nicholas I (‘the Gendarme of Europe’), with whom Putin is said to enjoy being compared. This pseudo-religiosity also owes much to Putin’s cooptation of the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Strategy exemplifies what James Sherr has called an ‘obsession with the connection between events abroad and events at home’. Asked to formulate its fundamental idea Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary of Russia’s National Security Council, said ‘the essence is strengthening the unity of Russian society and ensuring social stability…’ In other words, with ‘the US and its allies’ seeking to ‘contain’ and subvert Russia by ‘eroding its traditional values’, Russians must unite behind their president.

Patrushev is the KGB/FSB general responsible, under Putin, for the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko. In June 2015 he claimed that ‘the US would like Russia not to exist…because we have a lot of resources which the Americans think we don’t deserve or have rights to…Madeleine Albright claimed that neither the Far East nor Siberia belonged to Russia.’ Albright, former US Secretary of State, said no such thing, but in 2007 a Russian intelligence officer claimed that FSB psychologists had read her mind. Patrushev now presents this feat of psychic espionage as a fact.

The accusation about US biological warfare is made without supporting evidence. But the claim serves an instrumental function of telling the military establishment, the officer corps, rank-and-file servicemen and the general Russian public, that the US represents a kind of radical evil that’s preparing a genocidal plague to exterminate the Russian people. In this sense, the Strategy is an exercise in mobilisation and information warfare.

The Strategy’s measures to counter this putative assault on Russia include: enhancing ‘informational security at home and abroad’ i.e. control of the Russian internet and cyber warfare; the ‘consolidation of traditional Russian spiritual-moral values through patriotic education’; and ‘the preservation and development of an all-Russian identity’.

We don’t know why the document has been released now. The Kremlin’s explanation is that a law adopted in 2014 requires the President to review the country’s national security strategy every six years. In other words, revising the strategy was just a bureaucratic exercise. But the document’s content makes clear that it is, in fact, an exercise in crisis management and mobilisation.

Context matters. Russia is in a recession. GDP is down by 4% and household consumption by 9%. Fixed investment, falling since 2011, fell 8% in 2015. In 2015 the CPI climbed 12% year-on-year, and the average wage fell by about 8%. Those two figures in particular should worry the Kremlin.

Sanctions have played a role but the key cause is the falling price of oil. If indirect contributions are included energy exports contribute 20 or even 25% of GDP. Russia is pumping oil at a record post-Soviet level of about 10.7 million barrels per day, to keep production high in order to maintain market share.

Respected Russian commentators, such as Dmitry Trenin and Konstantin Remchukov, have written of an erosion of the Putinist consensus and Putinist stability. They warn that unless the Russian economy is ‘modernised’—code for ‘reformed’—a new outbreak of unrest is inevitable. From the Kremlin’s viewpoint, a National Security Strategy depicting threats to the Fatherland in apocalyptic terms, diverting attention from the economy and ‘strengthening the unity of Russian society and ensuring social stability’ is sound policy.

The final part of the revised Strategy expresses Russia’s willingness to ‘cooperate with other countries on the basis of respect for Russia’s interests and international law’, that is, as they’re defined and interpreted by Russia. Therein lies a big difficulty: ‘the US and its allies’ and Russia have fundamental differences about what such a basis for cooperation would mean in practice.

Leaving to one side Russia’s role in the Middle East, ‘respect for Russia’s interests’ presumably means, at the very least, recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea; forgetting about MH17; acquiescing in the status of east Ukraine as a de facto Russian protectorate; recognising Russia’s right to limit the sovereignty of other former Soviet republics; and lifting economic sanctions.

It’s hard to see how the norms of Putin’s Russia and those of the liberal democracies can be made compatible. As Angela Merkel put it: Putin is ‘living in another world’.

Tag Archive for: Vladimir Putin

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