Russia Policy Monitor No. 2617

BUILDING A UNITED FRONT AGAINST RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM
In the fight against Russian aggression, Ukraine is employing a new tool: anti-imperialist training. Last Fall, the Ukrainian government opened a new educational institution known as the "University of Free Nations," notes Russia expert Paul Goble. The facility has a singular objective: "training non-Russians within the current borders of the Russian Federation how to fight Muscovite imperialism and eventually organize their own states." According to Goble, the university was established by the by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the ABN, and the Freedom to Peoples Project, and its first academic cohort "included Chechens, Daghestanis, Ingush, Tatars, Bashkirs, Buryats, Sakha and Oyrat-Kalmyks." These students reportedly "received instruction from Ukrainian specialists on liberation movements, lawyers, economists, and experts on particular kinds of actions" as a way of reading them for subversive actions designed to loosen the Kremlin's hold on their respective homelands and regions. (Window on Eurasia, December 22, 2023)

MOSCOW REJECTS NEW ARMS CONTROL TALKS...
The Kremlin has rejected proposals for new nuclear reduction talks with the White House, just weeks after formally abrogating the New START treaty. Speaking at a press conference in Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov rejected the idea of such talks for now owing to American backing for Ukraine, which constitutes a "hybrid war" against Russia. "We do not see the slightest interest on the part of either the United States or NATO to settle the Ukrainian conflict and listen to Russia's concerns," Lavrov said. "We do not reject this idea for the future, but we precondition this possibility on the abandonment by the West of its policy of undermining and not respecting Russia's interests." (Reuters, January 18, 2024)

...AND THE REAL REASON HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH NUCLEAR DOCTRINE
Russia's current intransigence, according to Lavrov, has to do with ongoing Western support for Ukraine. The real reason, however, relates to the evolving role that nuclear weapons – and nuclear blackmail – are now playing in Moscow's strategy against the West, a new policy paper has suggested. "Russia has been remarkably consistent in issuing nuclear threats against the West and has elevated the role of nuclear weapons in its nuclear strategy," nuclear expert Michaela Dodge notes in a new analysis for the National Institute for Public Policy. "Russian nuclear rhetoric illustrates core Russian beliefs — beliefs that are fundamentally at odds with world order, Western survival and the West’s arms control approach."

Against the backdrop of the Ukraine war, Russia's increasingly adversarial nuclear posture has implications for U.S. security – and for the durability of American alliances. "Russia's escalation of its war in Ukraine appears to have altered, at least temporarily, European NATO member states' perceptions regarding the importance of nuclear deterrence in their security architectures," Dodge notes. "Allies appear to have rediscovered their appreciation of U.S. forward-deployed nuclear systems. Under these contemporary conditions, U.S. nuclear reductions — near-universally applauded by allies in the past — are more likely to be perceived as undermining allied assurance and damaging to alliance politics and security." (National Institute for Public Policy, January 2024)

NUKES AND NEW RUSSIAN THINKING
The findings of the NIPP study above, meanwhile, are reinforced by the assessment of another leading think tank. According to London's prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies, as a result of the poor performance of Russia's conventional military forces over the past two years, nuclear weapons, including non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNW), have risen in importance for the Kremlin as a military and political tool. Meanwhile, "[t]he Russian perception of the lack of credible Western will to use nuclear weapons or to accept casualties in conflict further reinforces Russia's aggressive NSNW thought and doctrine," the IISS study notes, and has led Russian officials to believe that NSNW can be used to escalate a conflict, "either to prevent the US and NATO from engaging, or to coerce them into war termination on Russian terms." (Reuters, January 22, 2024)

A WARNING FROM BERLIN
Russia is learning strategic lessons from its war against Ukraine and the Western response to it, and isn't likely to stop with the conquest of its western neighbor, a top European official has warned. In an interview with the Der Tagesspiegel newspaper, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned that the NATO alliance may face a Russian attack in the near future. "We hear threats from the Kremlin almost every day... so we have to take into account that Vladimir Putin might even attack a NATO country one day," he said. Such an attack is not imminent, Pistorius made clear, but nonetheless noted that German analysts and experts have outlined that it could become possible in "a period of five to eight years." (Der Tagesspiegel, January 19, 2024)