By hyping up the Russia threat, the west helped ignite this war

It turns out that Russia had a far more realistic idea of its own strength, or lack of it, than the west allowed, writes Mary Dejevsky

With Russia at war in Ukraine, this year’s Victory Day parade has been keenly anticipated abroad (AFP/Getty)

On Monday 9 May, Russia will stage its customary Red Square parade for Victory Day. President Putin, his ministers and his top brass will line up on the podium, as their Soviet predecessors once did, and watch the display of Russian hard power. Western diplomats and military experts, for their part, will have their eyes peeled for anything new, just as their Cold War counterparts did before them.

With Russia at war in Ukraine, this year’s parade has been keenly anticipated abroad, but probably in Russia too, for any signals it may send about Moscow’s intentions. For the Kremlin, the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany might offer an ideal opportunity to repeat the “de-Nazification” component of its rationale for invading Ukraine. On the other hand, that message could be downgraded or omitted, indicating perhaps Russia’s acceptance that Ukraine’s government will stay.

Some have suggested that Russia could hasten its capture of the port of Mariupol, at whatever cost, so it has at least one victory to report. Others have speculated that the patriotic fervour whipped up by the parade could prepare the way for Putin to announce a general mobilisation – in a tacit admission that the campaign could be relaunched.

In all, this year’s proceedings are set to be more closely watched than any since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and perhaps before. And it would be useful if, even as it underlined the price Russia had to pay, Monday’s commemoration of victory also reminded the western world of something else. However impressive the hardware, however disciplined the troops and however stirring the tunes, this Red Square extravaganza will be a show. It will say little about the real strength of the Russian military or its capability in the field.

Especially where Moscow’s armed forces are concerned, too many western Russia-watchers still allow themselves to confuse shiny appearance with tarnished reality. One of the west’s cardinal errors in the 1980s was to magnify the military threat from Russia. It is both surprising and dangerous that the same error persists and has now helped escalate longstanding tensions into a thoroughly old-fashioned war.

During the Cold War the tendency to over-estimate the Soviet Union’s military strength was understandable in its way. The USSR spanned a vast territory with a population, at 287 million in 1985 that exceeded the then US population of 238 million. The Red Army’s defeat of Germany was for many within living memory, while the Cuban Missile Crisis and the space race had left their imprint on many western leaders’ formative years.

Nuclear weapons were also recognised not just as a deterrent but a leveller: even if the Soviet Union appeared weaker than the west in most military respects, its nuclear capability posed the terrifying risk of mutually assured destruction – hence the emphasis on nuclear arms control agreements at the time. Even the term “Upper Volta with rockets”, used to denigrate what was seen as the Soviet Union’s skewed economic priorities also implied the threat of military unpredictability.

It was only with the Soviet Union’s largely unforeseen collapse that western analysts took another look at the supposed military threat and concluded that the west had had far less to fear than had generally been believed. That a realistic sense of Soviet weakness might have underlain Mikhail Gorbachev’s concern to conclude arms treaties with the United States was rarely advanced as a consideration at the time.

The western emphasis was rather on the imperative of containing the Soviet Union and cutting what was seen as the chief threat to global peace down to size. But the estimation of that threat was distorted by the failure to see that the dysfunctional state of the civilian economy, with its growing shortages even of basics, applied in large measure to the military economy, too.  Even when Gorbachev withdrew the bedraggled Soviet army from Afghanistan, this was seen more as a political concession to popular opposition than evidence of that the supposedly well-resourced military machine was in trouble. The west had been in a much stronger position than it had believed.

The west’s failure to discern the real weakness of the Soviet military as the USSR rushed headlong towards its total collapse makes it all the more surprising that it has committed the same mistake again. The warning signs were there.

Russian forces subdued the rebel region of Chechnya only by resorting to the most heavy-handed and primitive of tactics. The lacklustre performance of Russian forces during the Georgia war, when they encountered Georgian troops newly trained and equipped for a future in Nato, spurred Putin to embark on a major programme of higher spending and structural reforms. But it was never clear how far the advertised results of those changes corresponded to reality – how far the hypersonic weapons, for instance, that starred in a showy video during Putin’s 2018 State of the Nation speech, were actually functional.

And now the setbacks experienced by Russian forces in Ukraine over the past eight weeks suggest that a combination of corruption, inadequate training and poor morale has compromised operations. Even if, in the end, Russia attains what was likely to have been its minimum objective – a land corridor from Russia to the Crimean peninsula, which it had annexed with little local opposition in 2014 – Ukraine has been successful beyond most expectations in tying Russia down.

That Russia appears to have fallen short does not mean that it can be or that it will be defeated in Ukraine. Nor, without knowing the detail of its plans, can it be definitively stated exactly how far and in what ways it has underperformed. But what might reasonably be concluded from Russia’s operations so far is the possibility that Russia has all along had a far more realistic assessment of its own capabilities vis-a-vis the United States and Nato, even as the overwhelming western consensus remained that Putin’s Russia constituted an enormous threat.

As to why the west persisted in what now looks like a profound misjudgement, the more excusable reason might be that it wanted to err on the safe side. A more cynical explanation would be that the US, the UK and others wanted to keep their defence sectors in business. Either way, though, the persistence of this misjudgement matters.

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The fact is that, as we now see in Ukraine, the military threat from Russia to the west – to the Nato countries of the west, that is – has been exaggerated out of all proportion. Ukrainian forces may have been trained and supplied by the west, but it is no mean feat to have delayed Russia’s advance to the extent that it has, without Nato forces on the ground. In what is clearly by now a “proxy war” – the west is getting the best of Russia.

This is surely one reason why Russia has so far been reluctant to risk any action that might bring Nato directly into the war. But it also casts Russia’s long-standing objections to the expansion of Nato, and particularly to the membership of Ukraine, in a rather different light. Maintaining its hyped spectre of the Russia threat, the west has always dismissed Russia’s professed concerns about Nato, insisting that it is a purely defensive alliance from which Russia has nothing to fear.

It turns out that Russia had a far more realistic idea of its own strength, or lack of it, than the west allowed. The west fatally misread a weak state as a strong state, meaning that its attempts to second-guess Russia’s behaviour largely misfired. If there is to be any new relationship between the west and Russia – which is unlikely to be very soon – the west must start with this basic reassessment. It must accept that Russia is a weak state, and that the west and Nato are strong.