‘The Russians don’t respect us’ – interview

Russia only attacks a weaker opponent and NATO is not signalling strength, James Sherr, an expert at the Estonian International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS), told LRT.lt in an exclusive interview.

Talking about the Russian military strategy, how has it changed during this invasion of Ukraine?

The strategic goals have not changed at all but the strategy has. The initial strategy that we saw between February and the end of May 2022 was predicated on a fundamentally erroneous understanding of Ukraine and its capacity. And it had very bad results for Russia, but not nearly as dire as they could have been, because the Russians were able to learn lessons and draw conclusions.

The initial strategy was based on the assumption of the strategic surprise, which they almost achieved. [...] The strategy which emerged in 2023, particularly after the sadly predictable failure of the Ukrainian offensive in the summer of 2023, has been based on prevailing in largely attritional warfare by means of superior manpower and material resources and wearing down the enemy to the point of destruction.

And that strategy complements the wider aims of the war [...], in short, to militarily defeat Ukraine, economically destroy it and deceive, divide, and demoralise the West. That strategy is unchanged, and I think it will remain unchanged.

What can be altered is Russia's capacity to actually succeed in implementing that strategy and to a large extent, that depends on us.

By way of historical parallel, at the end of the Second World War, as the West very rapidly disarmed, Russia was in an exceptionally powerful position in Europe, Western European countries were exhausted and economically damaged, and all the institutions we associate with bourgeois Europe had been shattered. Had there been no Western response, then we would be living in a very different Europe now. Certainly, there would be no independent Lithuania and Estonia, the country I had been living in for the past six years, they would have remained [part] of the USSR.

Instead, we had the Marshall Plan, the Brussels Treaty, the European Coal and Steel Community, the establishment of NATO and the first steps towards establishing the European Communities and ultimately the European Union. None of this was inevitable, and in 1946–47it looked very doubtful to many people that this would actually happen at all. And it did.

I think we're at a similar point today, and it will be even more graphic if Russia succeeds in accomplishing its aims in Ukraine.

Do you think the West lacks a coherent strategy?

The West is not one today, the West is many. But if we talk about those allies we all have in the West, who are the most significant in terms of national power and have the most significant influence, beginning with the United States, which is the principal enabler of Ukraine's ability to fight apart from Ukraine itself, I think the approach and the actions that have been taken really serve as a study of strategic and intellectual failure.

Beginning with an intellectual failure after many decades of experience to understand the adversary, we have to understand Russia and its mode of thinking, to understand the implications of Russia emerging victorious.

Add to this, we have always been accustomed to the fact that there are divisions and differences of views and real divisions inside NATO in the West generally, but this is the first time where the principal inhibitor of effective action in the alliance is the US itself.

This has to be understood. It is the US itself that will block any effort by other allies to advance Ukraine's prospects for real security guarantees, underpinned by treaty or NATO membership, one or the other. It is the United States itself, which harbours the greatest and the most disputable, if not completely misconceived fears about Russian power and Russia's will and ability to escalate this war to the nuclear level. It is the United States itself that is most divided and at risk of losing whatever steadfastness exists now with regard to the commitment to NATO allies, and the commitment to Ukraine itself.

So these are new and novel circumstances. To some extent, what happens in November will answer a number of questions, it won't answer all questions, though.

Do you think that those problems are here to stay for a longer period?

I’m not making a prediction, what I am pointing to are the conditions that exist that discourage confidence about the future. It is very difficult now to find clear, substantiated reasons to be optimistic about where things are going in Europe. And this fact is not simply frustrating, it represents a profound misreading of events. Russia is in a far weaker and more vulnerable position than most people in the West seem to believe.

The Russian defence industrial complex is now almost entirely dependent upon China – without China's enormous assistance in terms of machine tools, microprocessors, and other equipment, the Russian defence industrial complex would be unfit for purpose today.

The Russians today rely to a significant extent on weapons systems and capabilities we knew very little or nothing about in 2022. For example, glide bombs launched from aircraft from bases very far removed from the actual military front. But the external factor is very important to Russia, the Russian defence industrial complex is suffering from all kinds of scarcity in labour supply, particularly skilled labour, in resources and competence.

The Russian army has lost the capacity to do what the Soviet army did, which is conduct a war of manoeuvre at vast operational scales, deep into the enemy's rear. Ukraine understands this and has that ability and we've seen this in the Kursk operation, which was achieved with very impressive operational security and complete surprise, not just for Russia, but surprise to the US as well.

These are serious weaknesses and many of these weaknesses can be explained by the system of power itself in Russia, which quite deliberately has been set up to favour loyalty and submissiveness over competence. There are some real vulnerabilities in this system in Russia, which we don't seem to be aware of.

In the West, we are still treating hybrid war as something which is somehow separate from this war and a future war. We fail to understand two things: a lot of Russia's so-called hybrid actions are designed to prepare the future battlefield for overt kinetic conflict.

The second is we're not talking about soft war – a diverse range of actions from penetration, the compromising and undermining of institutions state and private, infiltration, disruption – of railway systems, civil aviation – sabotage like burning factories down, and assassination, including the attempt of the chairman of one of Germany's leading defence company Rheinmetall, as well as outright acts of murder. All of that can expand and yet we are not looking at this as a whole, we are looking at this in a very fragmented way.

We also fail collectively to understand that the Russians don't respect us. By us, I'm talking about the collective West. Yes, they understand what our economic level is, they understand what our technological level is, they understand what our military proficiency is, [but] what they don't see is indispensable in war, which is the willingness and ability to accept risk and serious sacrifice.

These traits are largely absent today in the most powerful countries of NATO. And as a result, for somebody like Putin who understands the moral dimension of strength. [...] an opponent that is not willing or able to accept serious sacrifices, to take real risks to achieve its aims is not worthy of respect.

And that's where we are. Somehow we have to change these calculations, yet very few people are asking these types of questions., far too many people who matter instead are asking questions about how we reconstitute relations with Russia in the long term on a mutually agreeable basis. [...] Most negotiations that have occurred in the context of war have occurred only after one side has clearly been defeated and often after a war has ended.

Do you think there should have been more strategic ambiguity from NATO and the US?

No, I think in some ways there should have been less. I think the United States, because again, it's critical, should have focussed in 2021 on deterring the war in Ukraine. And we could have deterred it.

One big part of it would have been US President Joe Biden stating very clearly on national television – the United States will not stand idly by and watch Ukraine be dismantled and destroyed. And that's where the strategic ambiguity follows, because if someone said, are you saying the United States would directly get involved with such a war and fight Russia, then the president would have simply replied, would you like me to repeat my statement?

It would have involved after the mobilisation of March 2021 a serious programme of arming Ukraine, creating institutions, and joint bodies to assess the threat together and assess the armaments required. It certainly would have ruled out Biden initiating a summit with Putin. Let him do it. It would have ruled out backing off for every challenge Russia posed in 2021 because there were others. Biden was tested multiple times by the Russians in 2021, and he failed every single one of those tests, in my view, he wasn't even aware of some of them.

In Russian history, you could not find an example, in my view, where the Russians have attacked a stronger adversary. If they feared the consequence of attacking Ukraine would have been massive and immediate support by the West, if they saw that support emerging already, I don't think they would have done that. They attacked Ukraine because first, they thought Ukrainians themselves were weak and incapable and that the West was not going to respond effectively.

Of course, we did respond, and the Russians, I think, were in a way impressed by that. But the response was not of a scale and of the nature to make them reassess their calculations. And they were right, because we gradually allowed them to get in a position where they were deterring us instead of the other way around.

The Russians do not attack strength. They attack weakness and they also attack something else – bluff. If you say, as we did in 2008, Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO, but we have no coercive power in the area, we have no defence plans to put coercive power in the area – that's bluff, of course they will attack.

But if we had declared less and yet done more in terms of substance, the Russians would have been constrained, they would have drawn conclusions. Again, another historical parallel was the Berlin blockade of 1948–49. We were on the verge of the Third World War in Europe when that was taking place. And then the allies embarked upon their airlift, which was very risky, because all of those aircraft could have been shot down. [...]

At a certain point, the Soviets understood we could not win in this particular conflict over Berlin, the allies can and will resupply Berlin and therefore we have to draw conclusions. And they just stopped – there was no agreement about them stopping, there was no nice conclusion to it, there were no new negotiating opportunities to emerge after. It was stopped because they were confronted by superior power and they recognised it and they backed down. And they will do that every time.

Do you think what NATO is doing now, or at least proclaiming to do, is sending a strong signal to the Russians?

Not necessarily. If we allow Ukraine to be defeated, the Russians will have realised their greatest victory over the West, over any adversary since 1945. Of course, the adversary in 1945 was not the West, we were barely talking about the West in those days. But it would be Russia's greatest victory in Europe and globally since 1945.

If we want Russia to take us seriously, we have to take Russia seriously, understand it as it is, and understand what is necessary for Russia to respect us and respect our interests. We have yet to do that and there are few encouraging signs today that suggest we are about to do that.

Correction: an earlier version of the interview misquoted Mr Sherr as saying "there are a few encouraging signs" in the last sentence. The lead was also corrected to reflect the change in meaning.