School of Hard Knocks


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The world is an increasingly tough place.
Statecraft. Strategy. Security |
International Analysis & Insights from Russia
Author: Dr. Maxim A Suchkov.
Moscow-based policy wonk (easily Googleable)

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New Book: The Russian Way of Deterrence

One of the shrewdest observers of Russia's "things military" Dima Adamsky published his new book on how deterrence à la Russe works.

The book investigates Russia's approach to coercion (both deterrence and compellence), comparing and contrasting it with the Western conceptualization of this strategy. He argues that deterrence is one of the main tools of Russian statecraft and deftly describes the genealogy of the Russian approach to coercion. He also highlights the cultural, ideational, and historical factors that have shaped it in the nuclear, conventional, and informational domains.

Drawing on extensive research on Russian strategic culture, Adamsky highlights several empirical and theoretical peculiarities of the Russian coercion strategy, including how this strategy relates to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Plenty to digest, a lot to argue about and some to disagree with, but definitely a worthy read. I will do a book review for this one later this month.


Semiconductors: a Role for Russia?

Mainstream thinking on chips evolves around potential conflict of mainland China with Taiwan. It suggests that since each produces 22% of global microchips, a military crisis would put the whole industry (and the world) in serious crisis. True. But there's one element missing.

Russia accounts for 80% of the market for sapphire substrates - thin plates made of artificial stone, which are used in opto- and microelectronics to build up layers of various materials such as silicon. They are used in every processor in the world. Russia holds an even stronger position in special chip-etching chemistry using ultra-clean components, accounting for less than 100% of the world's supply of certain rare earth elements used for these purposes. A ban on finished products for Russia will result in a retaliatory ban on the supply of these components, possibly causing a shortage of processors globally.

As the sanctions war is getting uglier, the cost-benefit analysis would help.


Russia - West Confrontation: Could It Have Gone Any Different?

In early 2022 Russia & the West faced a fatal choice between a limited war & a full-scale war. Moscow opted for the former in a hope to avoid the latter. Russia was - and remains - of a firm belief that the Special Military Operation was, to put it in American political parlance, "a war of necessity". The West has made every effort to convince its own population and the rest of the world that this was "a war of choice". Whichever narrative one supports, two and a half years into the confrontation, the prospects for a full-scale war are very real.

Things could have been different. Back in the day I penned a piece that unpacked the Russian thinking on the issue and laid out Moscow's aspirations.

Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 symbolically ended the 1990s era of Russian-Western relations. It was Putin’s first notable call to set the framework for “security guarantees” for Russia. Agitated by what Russia called “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia as well as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Putin’s complaints about “unilateral dominance of the United States in international relations” were a howl of frustration after failed attempts to establish a more favorable relationship with the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush. In the West, his remarks were seen as a signal of Russia’s own revisionist ambitions. The five-day war with Georgia in August of 2008, although triggered by then-President Mikheil Saakashvili’s adventurous offensive in South Ossetia, was, in Moscow’s view, part and parcel of the greater American and European failure to take the red lines seriously.

Putin’s second call for “joint undivided security” came during another period of turbulence: the Arab uprisings, NATO’s intervention in Libya, and what Moscow perceived as the Obama administration’s support for the Bolotnaya protests in Russia. These spurred Putin to raise the issue of Russia’s “security guarantees” in one of the articles he penned as an aspiring presidential candidate in the spring of 2012. Titled “Got to Be Strong: Security Guarantees for Russia,” the article in Rossiyskaya Gazeta argued that Russia’s own security can be guaranteed only by means of “developing military potential in the framework of containment strategy and at the level of defense sufficiency.”

Putin’s current “ultimatum” is thus a third attempt to coerce the U.S. and its European allies to review the entire European security architecture as well as alter the Western approach towards the post-Soviet space. Putin’s threat to sever diplomatic ties with the West if Washington opts to impose new sanctions on Russia over Ukraine suggests the Kremlin feels it may reach a certain point after which talking to the West makes no sense. After that, Russia would have to activate an option of “providing its own security” that would probably imply greater costs for its own economy but also an uncomfortable security reality for others.

Moscow. January 7, 2022.


Putin goes to China: nuts & bolts

President Putin begins his state visit to China (May 16-17).

By now, Putin visited China 18 times, this will be his 19th trip.
⭐️ 4 official visits during the 1st & 2nd presidential terms (2000-2008);
⭐️ 2 visits to Shanghai for other international gatherings around the same time period;
⭐️ 12 times during his 2rd and 4th presidential terms (2012-2023).

To compare, all American presidents combined have visited China 14 times, including Obama 3 times during 8 years of his presidency, Trump - 1, Biden - 0.

Putin brings with him top policy-makers of economic, financial. energy and trade domains.

This includes:
⭐️ Deputy heads of the presidential administration Maksim Oreshkin and spokesman Dmitry Peskov;
⭐️ Six deputy prime ministers: First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov, Deputy Prime Ministers Tatyana Golikova, Alexander Novak, Yury Trutnev, Dmitry Chernyshenko - they all head intergovernmental commissions from Russia end - as well as Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Savelyev. All of them will deliver reports;
⭐️ Central Bank Governor (Elvira Nabiullina), Finance Minister (Anton Siluanov), Economic Development Minister (Maksim Reshetnikov), head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Yury Chikhanchin);
⭐️ Heads of economic agencies, heads of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation (Dmitry Shugayev), Russian Railways (Oleg Belozerov), Rosatom (Alexey Likhachev) and Roscosmos (Yury Borisov).

On top of that a big cohort of bussiness folks:
⭐️ Rosneft board chairman Igor Sechin
⭐️ Co-chair of the Russian-Chinese Committee of Friendship, Peace and Development, Russian Presidential Commissioner for Entrepreneurs' Rights Boris Titov
⭐️ Head of the Russian-Chinese Business Council and owner of Volga Group Gennady Timchenko
⭐️ Chief Executive Officer, Chairman of the Executive Board of Sber Herman Gref
⭐️ Oleg Deripaska, business tycoon
⭐️ Chief Executive Officer of Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev
⭐️ Chief Executive Officer of VTB Andrey Kostin
⭐️ Board chairmen of Rusnano (Sergey Kulikov) & Novatek (Leonid Mikhelson)
⭐️ Head of the Delovaya Rossiya (Business Russia) Association Alexey Repik
⭐️ President of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Alexander Shokhin
⭐️ Chairman of VEB.RF Igor Shuvalov.


Are Hybrid Wars an all-Russian Invention?

Hybrid warfare (HW) has become a buzz word in virtually any debate on modern-day conflict. Introduced to policy discourse in the early 2000s, its meaning went through a number of evolutionary stages until its operational use has become so frivolous and frequent it has almost grown to be an element of political pop culture. While military officials have started to use the term HW in their countries’ official doctrines, the term especially penetrated – and plagued – policy and academic debates 🤷‍♂️

In Russia, the HW concept experienced its own deflection. Until a few years ago, the term was not part of the official Russian lexicon. Before the war in Ukraine, Russian sources would occasionally use the term to either discuss one of the trends in the American way of war or to refer to the US threat perception🕵️

However, after 2014, as much as the current Western vision for HW is centered on Russia, Russia’s own vision for HW is exclusively West centered in that it sees – and frames – any conflict from Syria to Ukraine and from Venezuela to Belarus, and even the clash of very agendas – from sports to COVID19 vaccination to Eurovision song contest – as a ‘hybrid warfare’ the West wages on Russia 🥷

The asymmetry of capabilities, experiences, and practices stresses different priorities for Russian and Western political leaderships and militaries when it comes to HW. As a result, Russia mostly focuses on how to prevent ‘colour revolutions’ and how to counter associated ‘information warfare’, whereas the West stresses the need to fend off subversion and interference, including in the cyber domain 💻

Here's my article for the "Small Wars and Insurgencies" Journal which critically examines how the hybrid warfare concept informs Russian academic and policy debate and how it impacts Russian political and military practice.


Bosom Enemies, Bitter Friends: What Relationship Framework are Russia and the US Doomed to?

@pir_center_eng in partnership with @mgimo_university released Security Index Yearbook 2024-2025 - a collection of essays on most critical issues of global security. It features my chapter on why Russia and the United States are clinging to the Cold War paradigm, and whether there is any agenda left in bilateral relationship.

"In a number of occasions, the Cold War is counterintuitively portrayed as a gold standard that the contemporary great power rivalry should seek to reproduce should it find ways to avoid a disastrous nuclear war. The problem with such a vision today is that both the intentions of the actors and the structural factors of the rivalry are different."

"The issue of how Russia and the United States perceive one another is important in the sense that it helps understand a number of critical issues at the center of the expert debate, among others, those concerning the root causes of the confrontation and how far the two parties can go ... There are arguably 4 mutual perception images of Russia and the US that dominate the expert debate and policy considerations at the moment.
⭐️Both parties strongly believe that the other party started it first.
⭐️Both see one another as declining powers.
⭐️Both see each other as revisionist.
⭐️Both see each other as a source of global insecurity."


"Unlike the Cold War era, there is today a great asymmetry between the US and Russia in terms of what they each want from the world and from one another. The United States seeks to preserve its declining – yet still dominant – position against rising China.

Russia, in turn, does not seek to establish dominance in the world, nor does Moscow seek to prove that its socio-political formation is a more efficient development model than that of the US, as it did during the Cold War. Rather, deceived by the West in the 1990s and mistreated in the 2000s, Moscow has embarked on de-Westernization of the international system, even if Russia still occasionally attempts to engage with that system on its own terms."


Few years ago, I co-authored a report on "The Future of War" which forecasted some of the politico-military trends & laid out the Cyclical Evolution of War Theory that is on full display today.

"...with all their importance,
technologies are only able to foster change in tandem with other components.
Their emergence & introduction facilitates the development of relevant skills and capabilities which in turn stimulates the emergence of new procedures to harness their potential.

Finally, implementing a specific procedure gradually creates a new situation that forms a certain perception of the new threat – the final element in the cyclical evolution of war.

As soon as this threat is perceived, a technology is conceived to respond to it.

From a political & military standpoint, threat perception is an important force determining
what technologies, ideas, & procedures are needed to counter threats.

These, in turn, create a new perception of threats thereby perpetuating the evolution of military practices."


On this day, 79 years ago the Soviet Union & the Allies defeated the Nazis.

The heavy price of 30 mln people lost in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War is tragic evidence of the national sacrifice & a gloomy reminder that wars should be avoided at any cost. Today, however, we are closer to another major military clash than ever since the end of WWII.

Russia has been a key actor & will remain one. Some consider it to be part of the problem. Others believe it's part of the solution. Either way Russia matters.

Russia has a complex geography & complicated history. These & other factors remain its most strict teachers in the school of hard knocks which contemporary world is.

This channel seeks to analyze principles of this School & Russia's place in it. It also seeks to explain not excuse Russia's own policy moves & views on the increasingly turbulent world: politics, security, tech development & other critical issues.

Subscribe and share with potentially interested friends.

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