Editor’s note: On February 10, Fiona Hill testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on Russia’s foreign policy and security challenges to the United States and its Western allies.
The Russian Security Challenge
Russia today poses a greater foreign policy and security challenge to the United States and its Western allies than at any time since the mid-1980s, when it was incarnated as the Soviet Union and the U.S. and the USSR were engaged in a nuclear arms race that seemed set to bring the world to the point of a nuclear conflagration. Russia’s military seizure and annexation of Crimea, and its war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, have sparked Europe’s worst security crisis since the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Russia’s military intervention in Syria has upended Western calculations in the Middle East. Russian actions now endanger Euro-Atlantic aspirations for stability across a region stretching from Belarus to the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia’s challenge has occurred during a period when the U.S.-led post-Cold War security order has weakened and fragmented, along with the norms that have sustained Western institutions like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). The legitimacy and credibility of these institutions has been undermined in spite of the fact that the enlargement of NATO and the EU, along with the creation of the framework for an institutionalized partnership with Russia through the Charter of Paris, the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the NATO-Russia Founding Act, were all seen to have led to a new era of more cooperative U.S.-Russian relations and the stabilization of Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s.
In an August 2014 speech in Yalta, in Crimea, only a few months after annexing the peninsula, Russian President Vladimir Putin openly rejected the U.S. and Western vision of the post-Cold War order in Europe. He essentially proposed jettisoning it to return to an earlier frame for managing relations that emerged 70 years ago, in the closing phases of the Second World War, during the Potsdam and Yalta conferences—where the big allied powers of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union decided the fate of Europe and agreed to rearrange borders over the heads of the defeated powers and smaller countries. Putin made a pitch for the United States and Russia to come together again, in a “new Yalta,” to thrash out adjustments to the current order that would recognize Russia’s special status in regions of Europe and Eurasia that once constituted part of the Russian and Soviet empires. Here, Moscow would have a veto over any development that impinged on Russia’s sovereignty and interests. In many respects, this would be the same arrangement that Russia has at the United Nations (UN) through its permanent membership of the UN Security Council. Russia would have the acknowledged right to block steps by other lesser powers that it did not like, such as Georgia’s and Ukraine’s efforts to associate with NATO and the EU. Russia’s decision to go to war with Georgia in August 2008, to seize Crimea in March 2014, and to embark on a covert war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region have all been forceful assertions of this demand for a veto.
The Role of Vladimir Putin
Related
In looking at Russia and Russia’s actions since the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in the Donbas region, external observers have spent a great deal of time looking at President Putin and trying to understand his motivations and worldview. There is good reason to do so. Although there is a collective leadership around Putin, and there are people in that collective with different conceptions of what Russian policy at home and abroad should be, Russia’s leadership system has been hyper-personalized since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. Between 2008-2012, during Putin’s political tandem with Dmitry Medvedev, when Putin was prime minister and Medvedev was president, the system was much more pluralized. Since the two switched places, the decision-making circle in Moscow has been pared down. With wars on two fronts in Ukraine and Syria, Putin has transformed his current presidency into a wartime presidency.
A centralized military and political command center—the Stavka, the high command in Russian—has been created in Moscow. All information on critical security and political issues is fed in to a small group of people around Putin, and key decisions seem to be taken within that group. Although we have some idea of who is in the central group, we should assume that the membership of this central group is fluid and may change composition, shrinking and expanding, depending on the issue at hand. The Stavka comprises the “hard men” of Russian politics—people like Sergey Ivanov, the Presidential Chief of Staff, and Nikolai Patrushev, the head (Secretary) of the Security Council; and also to varying degrees Sergey Shoigu, the Minister of Defense, Gennady Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff, Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), and Mikhail Fradkov the head of the foreign intelligence agency, the SVR. From the evidence available in the Russian press, group members seem to be there because of their individual relationships with Vladimir Putin, not just because they represent a specific institution. This makes penetrating the membrane of deliberations inside the Stavka exceedingly difficult, even for supposed Russian insiders. We also do not really know what happens within the group. How is information passed to Putin? Who deliberates on what with him? How does Putin decide on a course of action?
From the outside, Putin appears as a “unipolar leader.” There are no significant checks and balances on Putin’s presidential power. As Russian president, he has no larger institutional arrangements or political party beneath or behind him like Soviet-era leaders did with the politburo and the Communist Party. Putin has availed himself of the centrality of the Russian presidency in the Russian constitution to concentrate power around himself. The presidency and the constitution are essentially fused together, with each guaranteeing the other. Other state institutions, from the cabinet of ministers to the Russian Duma (parliament), have been systematically downgraded. The Duma has become little more than a rubber stamp for presidential proposals.
Power—meaning the ability to exert traction inside the system, or to transmit ideas and lobby for benefits or changes in course—is essentially informal in Russia. Broader social connections to Putin and his inner circle create degrees of power. Everyone in the inner circle is part of a tight group from the same general age cohort, whose relationships with President Putin (and among themselves) extend back decades in St. Petersburg, where Putin grew up, studied, first joined the KGB, and became deputy mayor; in Moscow, where Putin moved in 1996 and began his ascent toward the presidency; and in Dresden, in East Germany, where he was posted by the KGB in the 1980s. The informal networks that intersect with the inner circle make power in Russia very complex and difficult to manage as well as to navigate.
The Russian people appear to have very little direct power or traction in the system given the fact that the Russian Duma and political parties have limited roles. And yet the people do have considerable traction collectively. As in other countries, economic interests—like workers from huge manufacturing companies (especially in the defense sector), railway workers, miners—and those with important skills and functions that the state relies upon—like the intelligence operatives in the security services, or the members of the uniformed military—can bring some weight to the bargaining table. The aggregate opinion of these groups, and the population at large, as expressed in polls and through elections, is the essential element in affirming the legitimacy of the current Russia political system. Putin’s popularity—his record as a leader and the public’s ratings of his political performance over time—are critical to keep power in balance.
Author
Fiona Hill
Leave of Absence
Everything in contemporary Russian politics depends on the maintenance of Putin’s charismatic authority. This means that Putin’s ability to continue to juggle competing interests, and his own fitness to rule, his health and mental capacities, are key. If things go badly wrong, if too many domestic crises crowd the agenda that Putin cannot solve, if outside events (like plummeting oil prices, or international sanctions, or the outbreak of war) throw up unexpected obstacles and constraints or change the system’s operating contexts, if Putin is seen by the population at large to be ineffective or weak, or if he is literally incapacitated in some way, then his ratings will fall. If the Russian people lose their faith in Putin as president then the whole political system risks becoming destabilized.
As a result, the group around Putin in the Kremlin is fixated on messaging the population and branding and rebranding President Putin. So far, they have succeeded in keeping Putin’s ratings up (a couple of percentage points short of 90% in the most recent polls) because of the siege mentality that has progressively taken hold of both the elite and the population in Russia. Russian public opinion surveys show a broad-based conviction among Russians that the United States and the West are “out to get them.” The prominence of the demand for national security in the context of the Ukraine crisis and the war in Syria has given Putin a clear, but temporary, advantage. It has deflected public attention away from concrete demands for higher living standards that were creeping up in public opinion polls in 2010-2012, as well as for more abstract demands of political rights and freedoms that were a feature of the large political protests in the same period. Although the Russian economy and the state budget have taken a beating since 2013 as a result of low global energy prices and a strong degree of fiscal mismanagement, Putin and his team have been able to blame all of Russia’s financial woes on the United States and Western sanctions. Russians, for now, are rallying around their man and their country, and tightening their belts. The key question, of course, is for how long?
Putin and the Kremlin have to turn the temporary advantage into something more permanent if they are to keep the population unified and mobilized behind Putin’s presidency. Every major defense and security decision, and every one of Putin’s public appearances and pronouncements (at home and abroad), is filtered through this requirement. Homeland defense and the current political system’s defense—are one and the same. Putin’s presidential term extends until 2018. Under the present constitution he could serve until 2024. In Moscow as well as outside Russia, everyone is wondering how likely it is that Putin can last that long, what changes he might undertake to stay in power, and what kind of Russia we can expect in these next eight or nine years, and beyond, if the economy continues to decline.
The Power of Personalized Politics
In contemplating these questions, we first need to recognize that with or without Putin, Russia will continue to pose a significant security challenge to the United States and its Western allies. “Waiting Putin out” is not a long-term strategy for dealing with Russia. Even if Putin were to “disappear” tomorrow, he is most likely to be replaced by someone from his inner circle. We should assume that a succession plan is in place in Moscow to maintain the coherence of the current system; and, if this is the case, then Putin’s successor is more likely to resemble him in leadership style than any of his immediate predecessors since the mid-1980s—Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and also Dmitry Medvedev. Nonetheless, it is extremely important to understand how Putin operates, personally, as a leader. Irrespective of the larger trends in Russia, while he is still in office we need to figure out how to engage with Putin as Russia’s president.
At all turns, Putin has shown he is willing to pay a high economic and diplomatic price as he seeks to tip regional balances of power in Europe and the Middle East in Moscow’s favor. This has included upsetting the “reset” of relations with the United States, the loss of “modernization partnerships” with Germany and the European Union, the rupture of relations with NATO, and now a major rift with Turkey over Syria. As my colleague Clifford Gaddy and I outline in the second edition of our book, Mr. Putin Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings Press, 2015), we in the United States have consistently underestimated Vladimir Putin and his capacity for action. The Coda for this book, summarizing the key findings, is attached in the appendices to this written statement.
Putin has several important features that distinguish him from other world leaders. First, he is a professional secret service operative. One of his main skills is to dissemble—to lie. He is a master at this—at, as he puts it, “working with people” and “working with information.” This is not some character flaw. It is part of a skill set that Putin has consciously developed over the course of his career in the intelligence services and which he now uses in his political career. The operative must conceal his true identity and intentions at all times. As the Russian head of state, this gives Putin a great tactical advantage—if no-one knows what he wants or how he is going to react, he can stay one step ahead of his political opponents (domestic and foreign).
Since he came into office, Putin’s Kremlin team has worked very hard to increase this tactical advantage by making the Russian President—and thus the Russian decision-making system—as inscrutable and unpredictable as possible. Access to Putin is strictly limited. The Kremlin maintains an almost complete unity of silence and message. When messages seem to be transmitted without approval they are accompanied by equal measure of dis/mis-information. No-one outside the inner circle is supposed to know what is going on. Everyone spends a huge amount of time trying to figure out what Putin thinks. They are thus deflected away from trying to figure out what they should actually do in response to his various moves or to get ahead of the situation.
Another aspect of “working with people,” is that Putin personalizes all presidential interactions with other Russian officials on domestic issues and with other world leaders on foreign policy—as he would have done as a KGB case officer recruiting, handling, and dealing with an intelligence target or asset. As president, Putin is closely involved in outreach to world leaders—delivering messages directly, cajoling, and coercing where necessary, to push Russia’s positions on the full range of issues. Putin’s approach is individually tailored to each leader, and combined with other official Russian contacts targeted at top-level elites alongside more routine lower-level exchanges.
Further adapting the approach of the operative, Putin tends to make agreements on the state-to-state level painfully personal. He prefers to make significant foreign policy deals on the basis of leader-to-leader commitments in one-on-one meetings. When there is a diplomatic rupture—as Russia’s prior disagreements with Georgia under President Mikheil Saakashvili, and currently with Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan underscore—Putin publicly refers to individual leaders having broken their behind-the-scenes undertakings. He frequently stresses in commentaries that the problem in the bilateral relationship is tied to the individual leader, and not to the ongoing relations between the states, and peoples—even when punitive sanctions are imposed or military action is taken (as in the case of Georgia in 2008). The punishment is meted out against the leader or leaders, reminding them of their broken commitments, and airing their dirty laundry in public—just as the operative would remind his targets of the consequences of crossing their handler.
An additional distinguishing feature is that Putin is a master at adapting and changing his tactics. We often mistake his tactical shifts as inconsistency or “lack of strategy.” But Putin is strategic in the sense that he follows a few firm principles—and is very clear about them in his speeches and public pronouncements. He subordinates everything else to his main goals. He tries to remain flexible and to keep his options open so that he can adapt to changing circumstances. He approaches everything on a case-by-case, almost game-by-game basis. In each instance, he prepares stratagems in advance, and then plays his cards carefully to try to win on a particular issue and move forward onto the next stage of achieving his goals.
With or Without Putin
Vladimir Putin is somewhat unique in his style of leadership and in the methods he uses, but he is by no means an anomaly in his views within Russia—nor is the current personalized nature of Russian governance something out of the ordinary. A small inner circle around a strong leader is a central element in Russian political culture dating back to the tsarist era and extending through the Soviet period. Contrary to what might be the popular belief, given all the focus on Putin, the Russian president is not personally charismatic. His popularity and appeal stem from his style of leadership—his perceived inscrutableness, his calm under stress and duress, his ability to adapt, and his promotion of Russia and its people first.
Putin is not selling anything to Russians, nor is he especially interested in proselytizing abroad. Putin is not a Marxist-Leninist or Bolshevik or Communist like some of his predecessors. His primary focus is on the home front, even if his actions frequently take him far beyond Russia’s borders. Like many other contemporary leaders internationally, he is a populist. Ideology, or what passes as ideology in Russia today, is closely tied to Putin’s image. Putin and his team have worked hard to manipulate and maintain a set of ideas that bolster and legitimize his policy positions. Ideology is branding—branding both Putin and Russia. “Putinism” is not especially coherent and is not intended to be. Putin and his political team have retro-fitted a wide range of broadly accepted “Russian ideas” to establish and maintain legitimacy for his presidency. Indeed, Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin tried to do the same thing in the mid-1990s—even setting up a task force to come up with some new ideas during the period of acute ideological collapse after the passing of Communism.
Putin presents himself as defending and securing what Russians care about. Since the war in Ukraine, as Russians, fed a steady stream of Kremlin messaging through the state media, have seen their national security threatened by the crisis, Putin has taken charge of forging a common (albeit artificial) sense of Russianness. In some respects this is a conscious reprise of Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s role during the “Great Fatherland War” or World War II, and Putin often refers to Stalin and this period in his speeches. Over time, Putin’s presidential image has shifted from an “action figure” fixing things an