April 15:
Russia's submarine activity is now once again at Cold War levels, a top U.S. naval officer has said. Admiral Mark Ferguson, the commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe, has told CNN that Russia's deployment of submarines has increased in range, aggression and number - and now has reached levels not seen in two decades. The reasons, Ferguson says, have to do with Moscow's perceptions of NATO. "NATO is viewed as an existential threat to Russia, and in the post-Cold War period, the expansion of NATO eastward closer to Russia and our military capability they view as a very visceral threat to Russia," he says.
April 16:
Russia's continuing economic crisis is having a significant - and adverse - effect on wages within the country,Moskovskii Komsomolets reports. According to statistics released by ROSSTAT, Russia's official statistics agency, wages throughout the country have declined precipitously over the past year, constricting by nearly a third. Whereas in 2014, median salaries were pegged at roughly thirty thousand rubles, today in a number of regions (like Bryansk, Ivanovo and Kostroma) workers can expect to "receive no more than 18-19 thousand," the paper reports.
This trend, moreover, is affecting even Russia's most prosperous population centers. Even in Moscow, wages fell by almost 500 rubles" over the past year, notes Moskovskii Komsomolets.
Russia's 2014 incursion into Ukraine - and its extensive military maneuvers in the "post Soviet space" since then - has become a source of significant concern for U.S. warfighters. "It is clear that while our Army was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia studied U.S. capabilities and vulnerabilities and embarked on an ambitious and largely successful modernization effort," POLITICO reports Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the the deputy commanding general of Training & Doctrine Command (TRADOC), as telling the Senate Armed Services Committee. "In Ukraine, for example, the combination of unmanned aerial systems and offensive cyber and advanced electronic warfare capabilities depict a high degree of technological sophistication."
In response, the U.S. Army, under McMaster's direction, has launched an extensive study (dubbed the Russia New Generation Warfare Study) to examine Moscow's warfighting capabilities and strategy. The study and its outcomes are "expected to have profound impact on what the U.S. Army will look like in the coming years, the types of equipment it buys and how its units train," according to POLITICO.
April 18:
A top Russian official has called for a further revival of nationalism - and a dramatic tightening of state control over Russian society - in response to the "hybrid war" being waged by the West. Writing in Kommersant, Alexander Bastrykin, the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of Russia - which since 2011 has served as the country's main federal investigative authority, with more than 20,000 employees - charges that "[T]he last decade of Russia, and a number of other countries, live in so-called hybrid war unleashed by the US and its allies. This war is being waged on different fronts - political, economic, informational, and legal. And in recent years, it has moved into a qualitatively new phase of open confrontation."
In response, Bastyrkin believes, "[i]t is important to create the concept of the ideological policy of the state. The basic element of it could become a national idea, which is really united to a single multinational Russian people." That, however, isn't enough. Russian authorities also need "to organize a wide-ranging and detailed verification of compliance with federal law, the activities of all religious, national, cultural and youth organizations, in respect of which there is reason to believe that they are engaged in banned extremist activity."