Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 12

and predictable despite the well-meaning objections
of Kerry and like-minded individuals.

Strategic Consistencies
Continuous expansion is consistent with the history
of the Russian nation. In 862 A.D., Novgorod, the progenitor of the Russian Federation, was about the size of
Texas. After almost 1,200 years, Russia is now twenty-four times the size of Novgorod’s original borders.
Catastrophic invasions drove Russian leadership
to obsess over the need to establish strategic depth.
These invasions include the thirteenth-century
Mongolian conquest, the sixteenth-century Swedish
invasion, the nineteenth-century Napoleonic invasion, and the twentieth-century Nazi invasion.
Russia’s public persecution complex ignores the fact
that before and after those invasions, Russia routinely
invaded weaker neighbors and incorporated their
territory into the Russian state.
Skillful diplomacy did not expand Russia’s borders, but rather an unceasing campaign of conquest
and subjugation on the part of Russia’s rulers. The
Rurik and Romanov dynasties, as well as the Soviet
Union, continually expanded the nation’s borders.
The deeply embedded national psychological mindset that relies on conquest as a means of self-defense
stemming from a turbulent and aggressive history
helps explain Russian foreign policy today.

Strategic Adaptations
Historically, Russia justified expanding its borders
at the expense of its neighbors as a means of seeking security. However, the present-day pretense for
why they are doing this is new. Russia’s reasons for
territorial expansion now have less to do with securing strategic depth and more with securing ethnic
Russians outside of its borders.9 In his book A History
of the Baltic States, Andres Kasecamp explains how the
Soviet Union disrupted ethnically homogeneous areas
by forcing large groups of people to relocate from
their homes.10 Kasecamp writes:
The most dramatic change for Latvia and
Estonia during the Soviet era was demographic. Both republics saw [a] massive influx from the East during the postwar years.
While Estonia was over 90 percent ethnically Estonian at the end of the war, by 1989
10

the percentage of Estonians in the population had dropped to 62 percent. During the
same time period, the percentage of ethnic
Latvians in Latvia dropped from over three
quarters of the population to barely half.11
Either by accident or design, ethnic Russians
colonized key locations within neighboring countries, providing strategic access to Russia, particularly in ports and areas adjacent to Russian borders.
However, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.
Subsequently, national self-interests reemerged and
the Soviet empire dissolved into several nations,
leaving pockets of ethnic Russians living as minorities
in former non-Russian Soviet nations outside of the
newly formed Russian Federation.
The existence of Russian populations outside of
Russia’s current borders has recently provided the
pretext for seizing terrain from the former Soviet
states of Georgia and Ukraine. Figure 1 (page 12)
shows the regions with the greatest concentrations
of Russian citizens, ethnic Russians, and native
Russian speakers outside the border of the Russian
Federation. In 2005, Vladimir Putin stated that
the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” and that
“tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen [ethnic Russians] found themselves beyond the
fringes of Russian territory.”12 After the 2008 conflict
with Georgia, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
told the press, “Our unquestionable priority is to
protect the life and dignity of our citizens, wherever
they are. We will also proceed from this in pursuing
our foreign policy. We will also protect the interest
of our business community abroad. And, it should be
clear to everyone that if someone makes aggressive
forays, he will get a response.”13
Following the seizure of terrain from Georgia in
2008 and seizure of the Crimean district of Ukraine
in 2014, this rhetoric has neighboring countries
with sizable Russian minorities worried. Ominously,
Russia appears intent on meddling in its near abroad
as Medvedev said, “Russia, just like other countries
in the world, has regions where it has its privileged
interests.”14 Berzins observes that Russia learned
from Western-led peacekeeping operations in the
Balkans. Cynically, Russian leaders will use the
international norms of self-determination and an
May-June 2016  MILITARY REVIEW