Page 43 - North Atlantic and Nordic Defense

North European and North Atlantic Defense: The Challenges Return

In this interpretation, this campaign encompasses the Arab Spring but aims to subvert Moscow’s allies and
eventually “the constitutional system of the Russian Federation” itself.

With NATO "puppets" in charge of these countries, Western businesses can more easily exploit their natural
resources and undermine Russia’s “sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity.”

Of course, Russia has been developing and employing its own panoply of non-military hybrid capabilities to
subvert or influence foreign governments, including cyber weapons, mass media tools, foreign intelligence
assets, energy dependencies, agents of influence within ethnic Russians or other groups living in foreign
countries, and other tools.

Russia is also building alliances with other states (and statelets).

The doctrine actually priorities the latter—Abkhazia and South Ossetia are designated as Moscow’s closest
military allies, along with Belarus, due to the integration of their militaries with those of Russia. Below them
rank the other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)—Armenia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

The doctrine also says Russia is eager to develop security partnership with international groups that Moscow
believes share its perspectives—the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (which includes China), the BRICS
(which besides Russia includes Brazil, India, China and South Africa), and the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Other than these short references, China is not explicitly mentioned in this version of the doctrine or the
previous one, either as a threat or an ally.

The Doctrine’s description of Russia’s more capable nuclear forces, which have been receiving priority funding
and attention by the current leadership, does not differ much from previous documents.

Despite some earlier speculation that the Russian government would announce some kind of preemptive strike
doctrine, the text states that the Russian President would authorize the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation
for an attack against Russia and its allies that involved the use of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear,
chemical, biological) or in the case of an attack with conventional weaponry that “threatens the very existence
of the state” (Article 27).

Of course, Russia joins the other nuclear weapons states, with China’s being the sole and unverifiable
exception, in refusing to exclude first using these weapons.

In addition, Russian officials, including President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have been issuing
more explicit nuclear threats during the past year, including to affirm that defending Crimea falls under
Russia’s nuclear umbrella and even that Moscow can now legally place nuclear weapons on the peninsula.
The caveat about Russia’s willingness to use nuclear weapons to prevent a major conventional defeat would
apply most obviously to NATO but also to any Chinese attempt to exploit its local conventional superiority to
recover Russian Far Eastern territories lost in previous centuries.

One reason for this abstention may be that the Doctrine more forthrightly acknowledges Russia’s non-nuclear
“strategic deterrence measures," such as better-prepared conventional military forces, improved precision-
guided munitions, and other means of combat without using nuclear weapons.

Scholars may debate the importance of the distinction in the distinction between opasnosti (dangers) and
ugrozy (threats) facing Russia, but the latter are probably more easily dealt with by non-military means.[ref]

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