Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on threats to Russian security posed by Finland’s NATO membership and Poland’s military build-up

Even independent minded Western experts who should know better are wont to speak about “Russian disinformation’’ as a contributor to the “fog of war” in and about Ukraine. What kind of Russian disinformation campaign there can be when nearly all of Russia’s international channels are blocked by the United States and its European allies is something that obviously does not cross the mind of these seemingly enlightened Russia detractors.

In that context, it is most remarkable that an egregious case of real Russian disinformation yesterday has been totally ignored by Western media. Perhaps that is because the primary audience for this disinformation was domestic, in Russia, and not the world stage.

I have in mind the speech which Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu delivered to the governing board of his ministry. Parts of this speech were broadcast on Russian state news channels. The key sound bites were as follows.

Quote:

Threats to the military security of Russia on the Western and Northwestern strategic areas have grown many times over.

A serious destabilizing factor is the entry into NATO of Finland and, the prospective entry of Sweden. After Helsinki joined the Alliance, the ground border of Russia with countries of the bloc increased almost two times.

On the territory of Finland, NATO may place military contingents which are capable of destroying critically important structures in the Northwest of Russia.

In the immediate proximity of the borders of Russia and Belarus there are stationed around 360,000 NATO men at arms, 8,000 tanks and other armored vehicles, 650 airplanes and helicopters.

Unquote

Shoigu also made reference to Poland’s latest announcement of plans to post an additional 2,000 troops to its border with Belarus. And he said that “Poland has been used by the U.S. as the main instrument of anti-Russian politics.”

The expansion of NATO this year and its prospective further expansion in the near future are indisputable facts. However, whether this increases or reduces NATO’s actual strength in any contest with Russia is open to discussion, as I will demonstrate in this essay. Meanwhile, even if the figures on NATO forces and equipment “in immediate proximity to Russia’s borders” which Shoigu cited are correct, the aggressive intention he attributes to them is what I see as aggravated disinformation.

To be sure, Russia is using exactly the same security calculations as have guided American military doctrine since the 1990s: namely that you pay attention only to an adversary’s capabilities, not to his intentions, which may be unknowable and which may change over time. However, in the given case America’s and NATO’s intentions are entirely readable as we see by their behavior in the proxy war going on in Ukraine: the United States is making every effort to avoid crossing swords with the Russians and precipitating a Russia-NATO war that could easily escalate to a global nuclear war.

I believe that Shoigu’s speech was, firstly, posturing to ensure that his staff does not sleep at its desks when his back is turned. They are being put to work drafting plans for a new armed forces command looking after the western and northwestern territories. 

Secondly, the speech was directed at the State Duma, to bring Russian legislators on board for what will surely be heavy new military appropriations to support the military build-out.  To have a sense of what that means, I make reference to the remarks made on the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show last night by retired Lt General Andrei Gurulyov, Duma member from the United Russia party, member of the Duma commission reviewing budget allocations for defense, member of the Duma Defense Committee. Gurulyov told viewers that the new military command would require headquarters staff numbering 800. That suggests a very big and sophisticated contingent of men at arms.

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So Russia will organize a unit of its armed forces dedicated to defending the border with Finland. However, I believe that Finland’s joining the Alliance has created a net negative security outcome for the Alliance rather than for Russia. This entire exercise repeats the foolishness that the accession of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania back in 2004 signified. Everyone knew at the time that the Baltic States, with their paltry populations and tin soldier armies were no match for Russia, even then when Russia had not yet recovered from its weakness stemming from the 1990s economic and organizational implosion. 

By the period following 2010, it was already understood in the West that Russia could overrun the Baltic States in a day or two if there were no quick response units prepared in NATO to move in swiftly and if there were no European NATO troops on the ground as a tripwire to ensure that Article 5 provisions of the Alliance were instantly brought into play.  Nonetheless, it is questionable whether any of these measures by NATO to date can ensure the viability of the Baltic States if Russia attacks with all its might.

Today, when Russia has demonstrated in its war with Ukraine that it has probably the strongest ground forces on the Continent, the notion that Finland, with its 5.5 million population can hold its own is far-fetched. And how many troops will NATO dispatch there to assist in defense?  One thousand?  Fifty thousand?  Where would these troops be housed?  The questions roll in. I see no obvious answers.

The accession of Finland added more than 1,000 km to the ground border with Russia.  That is close to the length of the line of engagement between Russian and Ukrainian forces today.  As we have seen, the Ukrainians have had a very difficult time crossing that line and making territorial gains against Russia over the course of the past two months of their counteroffensive despite having received massive assistance from NATO in terms of advanced military equipment and training.  The Ukrainian soldiers are brave and committed, and yet the Killed in Action ratio at present is 10:1 against the Ukrainians.

Let us remember that at the start of the war, Ukraine had a population of about 40 million versus Russia’s 145 million.  The outflow of refugees and draft evaders may have reduced the Ukrainian population to 26 million, which is still five times the population of Finland.

Let us also consider the topography and other relevant facts about the Finnish territory abutting Russia on this long frontier. I know something about this from personal travels in Karelia three years ago. We are speaking about dense pine forests and swamps, about very low population density, probably similar to the density in the middle of nowhere in Siberia. There are local asphalt roads there, but no big arterial roads.  By contrast, in the Russian side, the extension of the 4 lane super highway from Vyborg to the Finnish border is nearing completion.  The Russians have their second largest city, Petersburg, with 4.5 million inhabitants and a very advanced logistics infrastructure located less than200 km from the border. Accordingly, I pose the question: who will be threatening whom as both Finnish and Russians prepare their defenses going forward.

As regards Poland, the potential security threat to Russia is on a different level. It has a population of 40 million and the possibility to significantly expand its current armed forces of around 120,000. Its ongoing procurement of advanced armored vehicles, artillery, jet fighters from multiple sources including South Korea and the United States means that in a couple of years it may become a regional power to be reckoned with.  But by that time the Russian armed forces will have grown to 1.5 million and they will be that much better equipped with the types of weapons that have shown their worth on the battlefield and which are all produced domestically, meaning they are easy to resupply and to repair as needed.

I disagree with Shoigu’s suggestion that Poland is being instrumentalized by the United States as the next priority force directed against Russia. The Polish government under its past Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk, like the current government of the Law and Justice party founded by the deeply anti-Russian Kaczynski brothers, needed no encouragement from Washington to position itself as Europe’s shield against the barbarians to the East, that is to say, to take up the standards of 18^th century Poland till the country disappeared from the map of Europe.

Nonetheless, the Polish political system is genuinely democratic, unlike the putsch-installed regime in Ukraine with its fanatical neo-Nazi hangers-on. It has no suicidal tendencies to match Zelensky and his team.  It will hardly venture to go to war against Russia on its own.  And it will have an impossible time mustering a consensus in NATO to join it in a war against Russia that it initiates.

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In the past several months preceding and during the accession proceedings which brought Finland into NATO, its Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has repeatedly emphasized how the Russia- Ukraine war has reunited the NATO member states as never before and given new momentum to the alliance while reaffirming its original objective of standing firm against Soviet/Russian power on the Continent. The newest Scandinavian member had, after all, abandoned seventy years of neutral status and friendly if subordinate relations with Russia to join the pan-European defense system.  The prospect of Sweden’s admission in the near future would be another victory. And ultimately Ukraine would be invited to join, enhancing the Alliance’s military capacity greatly.

Very few in the West have questioned the logic of expansion being a plus and only a plus. One such person was Professor Stephen Cohen, when he pointed out nearly twenty years ago that NATO is not a fraternity house. It is supposedly guided by the national security interests of its member states, and admission of the Baltic States was a net negative for the alliance.  I have updated that critique with today’s remarks on how Finland’s joining the Alliance is another ‘own goal’’ by the NATO team.

Now let us proceed with this debunking of U.S. security considerations by taking a look at the often cited author of Washington’s Ukraine strategy as from the administration of Barack Obama to today, Zbigniew Brzezinski.  Many promoters of U.S. and allied support for Ukraine in its war effort now cite Brzezinski’s “prescient” remarks in his widely sold and read book of 1997, The Grand Chessboard.  This was written at a time when Americans were still looking for a new global strategy given that they had, as they believed, won the Cold War and seemed to lack a replacement national purpose.

Brzezinski insisted that if Ukraine could be detached from its close industrial and political relationship with Russia, then Russia would cease to be an imperial power and could be re-categorized as just another non-threatening European state.

We all know today where pursuit of Brzezinski’s road map has brought us. Russia is arguably stronger than ever now that its society has been consolidated behind a patriotic mission, now that its armed forces have mastered the arts of high-tech ground war and its military industry has expanded production multifold.  In this context, we may say that Brzezinski’s advice to his compatriots and their leadership was harebrained.  For anyone who cares to look into this question further, I urge them to consult my several chapters critiquing Brzezinski’s writings in the ‘90s and early in the new millennium in my collection of essays entitled Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers on International Relations (2010).

Brzezinski’s efforts to contain Russia went beyond his writings to active participation in plans laid by his former protégé Madeleine Albright, who became Secretary of State, to wage ‘pipeline wars’ against Russia. This was a two-pronged effort: to stymie Russia’s planned gas pipelines to Europe like South Stream and to promote alternative pipelines from Central Asian and Caucasus gas producers which would run outside the borders of the Russian Federation and so would be free of Kremlin interference. The various actors and developments in the multi-year ‘pipeline wars’ are discussed in my 2013 collection Stepping Out of Line.

The end result of that policy was the imposition of a ban on importation of Russian hydrocarbons into Europe as punishment for the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline last year. As we know today this is resulting in the deindustrialization of Germany, Europe’s lead economy and exporter, in high inflation across the Continent and in a widespread decline in European living standards.

Moral of the story:  be careful what you wish for.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023