The sea in Russian strategy

By Andrew Monaghan and Richard Connolly

For the first two decades after the Cold War, Russian naval power hardly featured in the Euro-Atlantic community’s strategic thinking. This began to change in the mid-2010s, as the idea that the Russian navy poses a threat to NATO began to gain ground. That threat took shockingly real form in February 2022, when Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine.

The sea in Russian strategy is the first sustained examination of Russian maritime power in the period since the fall of the Soviet Union. It brings together leading specialists from public policy and academia to reflect on historical and contemporary aspects of Russia's naval strategy and capacities.

At a time of mounting tensions, which some observers have named the ‘Fourth Battle of the Atlantic’, the book offers an informed and nuanced discussion, taking into account the view from Moscow and how this differs from western perspectives. It sketches a trajectory of Russia’s power at sea and reflects on current capabilities and problems, as well as Moscow’s strategic planning for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526168771

Book preview

Introduction: the fall and rise of Russia’s power at sea

Andrew Monaghan

A sense that the Russian Navy poses a challenge for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans and the Baltic, Black, and Mediterranean Seas began to brew through the second half of the 2010s. Senior officials and observers pointed to Russian submarine activity throughout the North Atlantic, asserting the emergence of a Fourth Battle of the Atlantic. They also voiced concerns about how Russian surface ships undertook forceful and dangerous manoeuvres in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as Moscow hindering freedom of navigation in the Arctic and access to the Sea of Azov in 2018.¹

This challenge took very real form in February 2022 when Moscow launched its Special Military Operation and invaded Ukraine. Through its navy, Russia has dominated the Black Sea since the war began. The navy has played an active role in the assault, bombarding Ukraine from ships in the Black and Caspian Seas in support of ground operations. It also seized Snake Island on the first day of the invasion as part of the imposition of a blockade on Ukraine’s Black Sea Coast, cutting its maritime trade. The navy has suffered losses, including the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the missile cruiser Moskva, and there was prolonged fighting over Snake Island before Russia abandoned it on 30 June 2022. But so far, the blockade is having a major impact on Ukraine’s economy, which relies heavily on grain and industrial exports by sea. Indeed, some see the blockade of Ukrainian grain to be contributing to the wider, even global, food crisis emerging and thus have argued for the Euro-Atlantic community to intervene to break the blockade – either through the supply of sophisticated anti-ship weapons to Ukraine or by asserting freedom of navigation and convoying Ukrainian vessels.² Suddenly, the prospect of Euro-Atlantic navies coming into direct contact with the Russian Navy in a dynamic wartime context has become very real.

This represents a complete reversal in our understanding of Russian maritime and naval power over a generation. For the great majority of the post-Cold War era, Russian maritime power hardly featured in the Euro-Atlantic community’s thinking. When it did, it was a question of Russian crisis and tragedy, dysfunction and accident; it was a question of Western assistance to mitigate Russian problems, whether in decommissioning aging nuclear submarines in the 1990s or helping to raise the stricken deep submergence rescue vehicle AS-28 in 2005.

From the Kursk to the Fourth Battle of the Atlantic

Through the 1990s, the Russian Navy faced a complex crisis characterised by the risk of nuclear disaster, underfunding, and understaffing. By the middle of the decade, in terms of ships, the navy had shrunk by nearly 50 per cent: it may have received fifteen new ships annually from 1992 to 1995, but it simultaneously lost an average of 174. Likewise, the strength of naval aviation was reduced by some 60 per cent, and manning of the combat and support forces was at approximately two thirds. Some of this could be attributed to the active and deliberate decommissioning of old and unnecessary ships. But Felix Gromov, the then Commander in Chief of the Fleet, acknowledged that the navy was receiving half of the funding that it needed, and that many of those ships that remained in service were past the time of their mid-term repair. Indeed, while it claimed to remain combat ready, the Northern Fleet, Russia’s primary naval force, was deep in economic and social crisis. If the state’s non-payment of the defence budget led to the knock-on effects of the navy not paying either wages or its bills to the city budget such that production and social services were badly affected, there were further consequences for the training and morale of personnel. Russian reports pointed to the moral degradation of officers, drunkenness, and crime, and hospitalisation with psychological disorders. As Rear Admiral Valery Aleksin, then Russia’s Chief Navigator, put it: without an urgent state programme to reconstruct Russia’s naval forces, by the year 2000 Russia ‘may lose its status as the world’s second strongest naval power’. In the Baltic, Russia would become inferior to Germany and Sweden, in the Black Sea region, it would be inferior to Turkey.³

Instead, in 2000 the Oscar-II class nuclear submarine Kursk sank with the loss of all 118 of its crew in the first major naval exercises of the post-Soviet era, shedding tragic light on the ongoing nature of the situation. The serious mismanagement of the events at the time both by the Russian Navy and Moscow was widely criticised in the Russian and international media. The Admiralty misled Russian officials and media alike about the nature of the tragedy and who was to blame. And with limited and largely decrepit rescue resources available, the Russian Navy initially handled the rescue attempt poorly, rejecting British and Norwegian assistance while itself failing to attach submersibles to the Kursk’s escape hatch.

Launched in 1994, the Kursk had been one of Russia’s newest vessels. But it had had limited time at sea due to lack of funds for fuel, and though the crew was considered the best in the fleet, it was inexperienced, and subsequent reviews pointed to poor training, maintenance, and oversight. An official explanation for the sinking emerged only two years later, stating that a High-Test Peroxide leak (due to a faulty weld) caused a torpedo to explode, setting off a chain reaction causing other torpedoes to explode and destroying the submarine.⁴

The tragedy symbolised the poor condition of the Russian Navy. For many in the Euro-Atlantic community, it confirmed the poor state of the Russian armed forces more broadly at the time, encouraging a view that Russia could safely be ignored as a military or international power.⁵ The tragedy of the Kursk remained the most obvious point of attention in the Euro-Atlantic community to Russia’s navy and maritime power long after the event, even being the subject of a film in 2018.⁶

Even twenty years later, there are high-profile illustrations of Russia’s naval and maritime troubles. The Admiral Kuznetsov, a heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser, has long been plagued by mechanical problems and has suffered repeated misfortunes. When it took part in the Syrian campaign in 2016, it was accompanied by an ocean-going tug because of concerns about the reliability of its propulsion. Subsequently, it was damaged during a refit in 2018 when Russia’s largest floating dry dock, PD-50, suffered a power failure and sank, killing one sailor and injuring four more and nearly taking the Kuznetsov with it. One of the dry dock’s cranes crashed into the flight deck, tearing a hole in it. And again in 2019 as the refit continued, a fire broke out on board Kuznetsov, killing two and injuring fourteen.⁷

A degree of dysfunctionality remains in the Russian Navy, too: in 2016, some fifty officers in the Baltic Sea Fleet command were fired for what the Ministry of Defence called ‘serious lapses in service’. The official explanation is that Rear Admiral Kravchuk and other senior officers were fired for ‘serious omissions in the organisation of combat preparation, of the daily activity of the forces, a lack of measures to improve the life of personnel, the neglect of subordinates, and the distortion of the real state of affairs’ when reporting to the Minister of Defence. Igor Kasatonov, a former commander of the Baltic Fleet and Deputy Commander of the navy, suggested that similar high-profile firings are likely to arise in future because of the low levels of preparation of personnel – ‘we do not have the Soviet school of preparing officers for the fleet’.⁸

The Russian Navy suffered a number of other accidents, including fatal fires on ships and submarines in 2008, 2011, and 2012. Perhaps most notable, though, was the fire on the Russian deep-diving nuclear-powered submarine Losharik in July 2019 in which fourteen of its crew, including many senior officers, died. Observers also point to ongoing problems modernising older platforms, integrating components with old and new platforms, and delivering vessels on time and on budget, as well as wider constraints on the navy, not least its place as the junior service in the Russian armed forces.

But since the mid-2010s, a complete change has taken place both in the international situation and in terms of Russia’s maritime and naval presence. The Euro-Atlantic community has become increasingly focused on a new era of Great Power Competition as Russia and China are understood to be vying for influence and challenge the international order. In this competition, most attention has focused on the way these states use measures short of war to achieve their ends: propaganda and disinformation, cyber-attacks, and the use of special forces and proxies. These questions have driven much discussion of conflict in the grey zone or hybrid warfare.

Nevertheless, both China and Russia also pose significant maritime and naval challenges. Much attention is being devoted, for example, to the growth of the Chinese navy such that it has become the largest naval force in the world, as well as Chinese attempts both to control the South China Sea and to acquire access to ports across the world. China’s emerging naval presence is felt on a global scale through its connection to the maritime silk road and building of a string of ports in the Indian Ocean and beyond, and its interest in the Northern Sea Route (NSR).⁹

There is also official recognition that Moscow’s sustained effort to modernise its capabilities at sea in the 2010s is showing results, and much discussion about how, through the significant increase in the quantity and quality of its naval presence in the Baltic, North Atlantic, and Arctic, Russia is changing the security environment of NATO and its member states.¹⁰ In 2021, the UK’s Secretary of State for Defence stated that since 2013 there had been more than 150 instances of Russian naval assets being detected by the UK (there was just one detection in 2010). This was a level of activity not displayed since the end of the Cold War, according to the (then) UK Chief of Defence Staff.¹¹

This increase in activity led some to assert the emergence of a Fourth Battle of the Atlantic. As Admiral James Foggo, then Commander of the US 6th Fleet and Commander of NATO’s Striking and Support Forces, put it, Russia now appears as a ‘significant and aggressive maritime power’, claiming a maritime battlespace across Europe and closing the technological gap with Western navies. Russia’s reappearance in the North Atlantic changes the strategic reality for NATO, since it is seen to threaten the Euro-Atlantic community’s Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs).¹² This concern about lines of communication is twofold. First, it relates to the alliance’s more traditional ability to deploy forces and supplies across the Atlantic. Second, it relates to the communications and internet cables that run under the sea. According to one senior official, Russia’s modernisation challenges both forms of communication – that in addition to new ships and submarines, Russia ‘continues to perfect both unconventional capabilities and information warfare’.¹³

But the challenge of Russian power at sea goes beyond NATO’s SLOCs in the North Atlantic. It is felt in the Mediterranean, where the Russian Navy has established a substantial presence,¹⁴ and in the High North, where Russia has both built up substantial military capabilities including coastal defence and anti-access weapons systems and sought to establish command over the NSR. Concern about Russia’s so-called anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities has shaped much of the debate about its military modernisation and challenge,¹⁵ but the question of freedom of navigation, including in the NSR, is likely to become only more important.

It is also felt in the Black Sea, not only in terms of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the embellishment of capabilities on the peninsula to create another A2/AD bubble, but also in the way it has asserted control over the Sea of Azov. Through its control of the Kerch Strait, for instance, Russia has been able to control Ukrainian access to two of Ukraine’s own ports, Mariupol and Berdiansk. A crisis emerged in 2018 when vessels of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) stopped and then confiscated three Ukrainian navy vessels, accusing them of illegally entering Russian waters.

This change in debate and understanding of the situation has already driven a change in policy: in May 2018, the United States announced the re-establishment of the 2nd Fleet, and the launch of a new naval command (Joint Forces Command (JFC), Norfolk), which became active in 2019 and fully operational in 2021. As a Pentagon spokesman stated, the ‘return to great power competition and a resurgent Russia demands that NATO refocus on the Atlantic to ensure dedicated reinforcement of the continent and demonstrate a capable and credible deterrence effect’. JFC Norfolk is to be the ‘linchpin of trans-Atlantic security’.¹⁶

This fresh discussion about Russia’s new prominence at sea is important. But it both misses a number of significant themes in Russian maritime thinking and is characterised by old problems of mirror-imaging and imposing Western concepts on Russian thinking that do not correlate to Russian concepts, and refighting the last war. One example is the debate about Russia’s so-called A2/AD bubbles, which refers to a series of long-range anti-air and anti-ship capabilities that create exclusion zones or bubbles that reach well beyond Russia’s coastline. While this fits logically with Western, and especially US military concepts, it does not relate to Russian military thinking and so is misleading in the way it frames Russian capability and activity.

The discussion of the Fourth Battle of the Atlantic is another example, and it echoes a debate that took place during the Cold War about Soviet intentions.¹⁷ As analysts pointed out at the time, the Soviet Navy was neither equipped for nor intended to fight in a similar way to the German Kriegsmarine in the First and Second World Wars (by attacking NATO’s SLOCs). Soviet intentions were misread with regard to SLOCs and also anti-submarine warfare – indeed, the scenario bore no similarity to what the Soviet Navy intended to do in case of war. Thus, the West was preparing to fight a battle that its adversary was not intending to wage; the 2nd Fleet was ‘aimed at a shadow’ and was ‘essentially pointless except for use in dealing with Soviet spoilers sent into the Atlantic on a one-way mission to tie up larger US forces in defence’. Veterans of this Cold War-era discussion see a similar disconnect between US expectations and actual Russian naval behaviour taking shape today, with the newly re-established 2nd Fleet preparing to fight a war that the Russian Navy is unlikely to come out to fight.¹⁸

Russia as one of the world’s leading seafaring nations?

One way to mitigate mirror-imaging is to examine the Russian discussion about maritime and naval power. What are Russian priorities, concepts, and problems? What are the main headlines and themes under debate? There are some important similarities, most notably about the increase in activity: perhaps the most obvious feature of the discussion in Russia is the emphasis on the Russian Navy being equipped and more active globally, not just in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, and Baltic, Black, and Mediterranean Seas, but also in the Red Sea and South Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. The rising importance of maritime matters is accepted by officials and observers alike and has become the focus of some debate.

Thus, Russian observers noted in 2015 that the activities of the Russian Navy had increased sharply, and the number of exercises was growing to levels unheard of ‘even in the Soviet heyday’, with a constant expansion of voyages.¹⁹ Officials too have emphasised this trend. Valeriy Gerasimov, the Russian Chief of General Staff, stated in 2017 that the navy had in recent years increased the intensity of its missions in the key areas of the global ocean and conducted 672 missions, including thirty-one in the Arctic and twenty-two in dangerous pirate areas, and 650 port visits.²⁰ Nikolai Yevmenov, Commander in Chief of the Russian Navy since 2019, pointed to Russia’s major exercises in the Bering Sea in September 2020 and in the Arctic in 2021 as ‘unprecedented’ as the navy seeks to ‘ensure the economic development of the region’.²¹ The Russian Navy joined the search to help the Argentinian navy when one of its submarines sank in 2017 and has conducted numerous long-distance voyages: in 2019, a small flotilla led by the frigate Admiral Gorshkov conducted Russia’s first circumnavigation since the nineteenth century. Russia participated in exercises with Iran and China, including in the North Indian Ocean, and with South Africa in the South Indian Ocean.²² It also contributes to the international counter-piracy effort off Africa’s east coast.

Russian naval exercises grow in size and complexity – indeed, the largest since the Cold War is an often-repeated description of exercises, as are comparisons to those held by the Soviet Navy at its peak. Exercise Ocean Shield in 2018, for instance, was a large-scale inter-fleet exercise bringing together the Northern and Black Sea Fleets off Syria, and two corvettes from the Caspian Flotilla. The major VOSTOK exercises also practised linking different distant regions and fleets, connecting the North Atlantic with the Pacific Oceans. Exercise Ocean Shield 2020 saw activity in all four fleets, with coordination between surface, sub-surface, and coastal complexes and amphibious landings. Groupings of ships and aircraft operated in Eastern, Arctic, and Western strategic directions. In 2021, the Ministry of Defence held a large-scale oceanic exercise in the far sea zone bringing together the Northern and Pacific Fleets in different regions under a single leadership. The exercise was intended to test automated command and control, and to examine both inter-fleet and inter-service cooperation, particularly with aerospace forces. This is all intended to mark Russia’s return to the ocean zone after a long break.²³ This activity is symptomatic of Moscow’s maritime ambitions, but it also shows that there are some important distinctions in the Russian discussion that frame the question differently from how it is discussed in the West.

The most obvious distinction is in the emphasis on Russia’s maritime power. President Putin has repeatedly emphasised Russia’s status as a great maritime and naval power. He points to Russia having the world’s longest maritime boundary with access to three oceans, and the major effort the Russian government has made to modernise and strengthen the navy. He has stated that the navy ‘remains an important, if not key component ensuring national defence and security in the 21st century and we must also preserve and enhance our country’s status as one of the world’s leading seafaring nations’. Putin has emphasised his intent that the navy should be modernised to include high-precision, state-of-the-art weapons, in other words, to create a fleet of ‘unique capabilities’, and the fleet of a ‘strong and sovereign nation’.²⁴

Yet it is significant, though, that Putin points not just to the military role the navy has played, but the much wider range of Russia’s experience and capabilities at sea. Alongside the military elements – both victories and defeats, achievements and accidents – he emphasises Russia’s other accomplishments at sea. He thus points to Russia’s ‘legendary research voyages’ and discovery of Antarctica, and its contributions to science with its geographic, biological, and geological discoveries through the use of the latest equipment and ‘unparalleled design solutions’. Following the March 2021 Umka exercise, he emphasised not only the combat training, but also the research measures – the integrated nature of the expedition, which included study and exploration of the Far North.²⁵ Likewise, Russian experts point to the combination of Russia’s maritime resources, maritime instruments, and maritime activities and place Russia within the top three great sea powers of the current era. For them, though Russia lags well behind the United States and China in the overall index (because of much less activity), its maritime resources and instruments are among the most substantial in the world, and Russia possesses significantly more overall maritime might than the next three states, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.²⁶

This shift to a maritime focus reflects the wider attention that needs to be given to how Moscow understands sea power, even how the Russian leadership thinks about international affairs. For much of the period between the late 2000s and early 2020s, senior officials and experts have emphasised what they see as an emergent and intensifying geo-economic competition over access to resources, transit routes, and markets – and for Russia, much of this is a maritime question given its export-based economy.²⁷

Much of this is laid out in Russia’s official strategic planning documentation, such as the Strategy for the Development of the Shipbuilding Industry, the Maritime Doctrine, and the Fundamentals of Naval Policy. It also features in strategies for regional development (particularly the Arctic) and the strategic planning documents of major Russian companies such as Rosatom and Rosneft. The most recent versions of these documents (published since the mid-2010s) are broadly coordinated with other major documents including the National Security Strategy, Military Doctrine, and Foreign Policy Concept to suggest a deliberate and considered expression of Russian strategic thinking.

The documents also set out the importance of securing Russia’s place as the second most powerful maritime power in the world, protecting and promoting Russia’s global interests, and the deliberate recoupling of the military to Russia’s geostrategic interests at sea. Six regional priorities are set out: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Oceans, the Caspian Sea, and the Arctic. Concerns about the impact of regional conflicts in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa are stated, including piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. It is noteworthy, though, that the documents point to threats in the North and West, particularly in the shape of NATO moving closer to Russia’s adjacent seas, while suggesting a more cooperative approach in the East and South.²⁸

The documents offer sober analysis of ends and means and realistic missions for the navy as well as a broader maritime agenda. The navy is intended both to respond to Russian security concerns – from implementing strategic deterrence and dealing with military threats to anti-piracy operations – and to be a tool for cooperation. To this end, the documents include a range of state tools, including the role of the FSB as border guards, and set out the intention for the long-term modernisation of the navy, particularly the improvement of command and control and the kalibrisation of a range of ships.²⁹

This is the context in which officials and analysts point to the large-scale renovation of the navy. In the spring of 2021, Vladimir Pospelov, a member of the government’s marine collegium, announced the major modernisation of the Udaloy-class (anti-submarine) destroyer Marshal Shaposhnikov, which was handed over to the Pacific