When senior British officers visited Moscow in the days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the chief of the Russian general staff, Valery Gerasimov, boasted that he commanded the second most powerful army in the world. A week into the conflict, however, the Russian military has been performing abysmally. The gap between Russian military expectations and its actual performance shows what it has and has not learned over the last 14 years of military modernisation, and how it is likely to continue its war in Ukraine.
After its unsatisfactory combat performance during the invasion of Georgia in 2008 the Russian military embarked upon a sustained programme of rearmament. Russia poured around $159bn a year into its armed forces when measured on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP). That has created a force with a vast fleet of modernised main battle tanks, artillery, air defences, and long-range cruise and ballistic missiles. Whereas in the cold war the Soviet army expected to depend upon nuclear weapons to win any high-intensity conflict, the modern Russian army aspired to fight with speed and precision.
