Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 11

RUSSIAN WARFARE

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Live Bridge: A Scene from the Russo-Persian War (1892), oil on canvas, by Franz Roubaud. This painting illustrates an episode near the
Askerna River where the Russians managed to repel attacks by a larger Persian army for two weeks. They made a “living bridge” so that
two cannons could be transported over their bodies.

defense is a good offense.” George Kennan, deputy
chief of mission to the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics in 1947 and author of “Sources of Soviet
Conduct,” notes that Russian feelings of insecurity
and inferiority are to blame for their expansionist
tendencies.5 Elsewhere, Timothy Thomas, a former
U.S. Army foreign area officer to the Soviet Union
and senior analyst at the Foreign Military Studies
Office at Fort Leavenworth writes how, after years
of depression, Russia is eager to reassert itself in the
world of geopolitics.6
Russian strategic ends appear to include achieving security by dominating the international order.
Russian expansionist policy in the “Russian Military
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

Concept: 2010” states that deterring and preventing
conflict lies in Russia’s ability “to expand the circle of partner states and develop cooperation with
them,” and that physically incorporating neighboring territory into the Russian Federation itself (e.g.,
Chechnya) or as vassal states (e.g., South Ossetia,
Abkhazia, and the Donbas) is the best route for
security.7 U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, incredulous of Russia’s 2014 intervention in the Ukraine,
remarked, “You just don’t in the twenty-first century
behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading
another country on completely trumped up pretext.”8
Unfortunately, Russia’s behavior from the ninth century to the present continues to be fairly consistent
9