Russia's once-creaky military is now modern and lethal

MOSCOW • In the early years of Mr Vladimir Putin's tenure as Russia's leader, the military was a hollowed-out but nuclear-armed shell. It struggled to keep submarines afloat and senior officers lived in mouldy, rat-infested tenements.

Two decades later, it is a far different fighting force that has massed near the border with Ukraine. Under Mr Putin's leadership, the military has been overhauled into a modern sophisticated force, able to deploy quickly and with lethal effect.

It features precision-guided weaponry, a streamlined command structure and professional soldiers. And they still have the nuclear weapons.

The modernised military has emerged as a key tool of Mr Putin's foreign policy: Capturing Crimea, intervening in Syria, keeping the peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan and, just this month, propping up a Russia-friendly leader in Kazakhstan.

Now it is in the middle of its most ambitious operation yet: using threats and potentially force to bring Ukraine back into Moscow's sphere of influence.

"The mobility of the military, its preparedness and its equipment are what allow Russia to pressure Ukraine and to pressure the West," said Russian security analyst Pavel Luzin.

Without firing a shot, Mr Putin has forced the Biden administration to shelve other foreign policy priorities and contend with Kremlin grievances that the White House has long dismissed.

It is Mr Putin's highest-stakes use of the military to muscle Russia back into global relevance.

The T-72B3 tanks amassed on Ukraine's border have a new thermal optics system for night-time fighting, as well as guided missiles with twice the range of other tanks, according to Mr Robert Lee, a United States Marine Corps veteran and Russian military expert.

Kalibr cruise missiles on ships and submarines in the Black Sea and Iskander-M rockets along the border can hit targets just about anywhere inside Ukraine, he said.

In the past decade, the Russian air force has acquired over 1,000 new aircraft, including its most advanced fighters, the SU-35S.

Kremlin thinking has also evolved over the size of the armed forces. The military relies less on the number of conscripts and more on a well-trained core of roughly 400,000 contract soldiers.

These soldiers receive better treatment. Mr Putin boasted in December that the average lieutenant now makes just over US$1,000 (S$1,360) a month, better than the average salary in other sectors. The government spends about US$1.5 billion on subsidising private housing for service members.

What is new is not just Russia's upgraded equipment, but also how the Kremlin uses it.

The military has honed an approach that Dr Dmitry Adamsky, a scholar of international security at Reichman University in Israel, calls "cross-domain coercion" - blending the real or threatened use of force with diplomacy, cyber attacks and propaganda to achieve political aims.

That strategy is playing out in the crisis around Ukraine.

Russia is pushing for immediate wide-ranging concessions from the West. Russian troop movements into allied Belarus put a potential invasion force within 160km of Kiev.

Russian state media is warning that Ukrainian forces are the ones preparing acts of aggression. And on Jan 14, hackers brought down dozens of Ukrainian government websites and posted a message on one stating "be afraid and expect the worst".

Dr Adamsky said: "They are all related by design."

Russia's military modernisation is also, increasingly, meant to send a message to the United States, projecting power beyond Eastern Europe.

In Syria, where Russia intervened in 2015 using devastating airstrikes and limited ground troops to protect President Bashar Assad, Russia's advancements showed it could effectively deploy precision-guided weaponry, long an edge that Western armed forces had held over Russia.

In that war, Russia "showed to themselves and the whole world that they are able to wage large-scale operations with precision weapons, long-range weapons, and intelligence capability to support it", said Dr Adamsky.

Mr Putin's investment in the military has also been accompanied by a militarisation of Russian society, entrenching the concept of a motherland surrounded by enemies and the possibility of a coming war.

All those make it hard for the West to stop Mr Putin from attacking Ukraine, if he is determined.

"There's very little we can do to deny Russia's ability to wage further warfare against Ukraine," said Mr Mathieu Boulegue, a research fellow in the Russia and Eurasia programme at Chatham House in London. "We can't deter a worldview."

NYTIMES