Joe Cheravitch
Executive Summary
Between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea over two decades later, international attention toward Russia’s military waned significantly from its apogee during the Cold War. Russia’s military, however, hardly remained static and underwent significant changes as it strove to adapt to perceived shifts in contemporary warfare. While rapid evolutions in digital communications technology during the late 20th and early 21st centuries were certainly seen as a critical threat in Russian defense circles, they also offered a new means of undermining adversaries from virtually unlimited distances. Conflicts of the future, according to many Russian analysts and observers, hinged on control of “information resources,” which involved everything from jamming enemy battlefield communications to using mass media to turn a population against its leadership. The West was therefore caught by surprise in 2014, when Russia’s military and security services began to use a wide array of computer network operations, electronic warfare, and digital influence platforms to help facilitate kinetic activities in Crimea and eastern Ukraine while disrupting Ukraine’s new government and its international partners. Since then, a litany of cyberattacks—many of which have been attributed to Russian military intelligence—and seemingly novel approaches to military operations in Russia’s periphery and abroad have reinvigorated studies in Russian military affairs, attracting a growing number of analysts tasked with deciphering Russia’s motivations and methods.
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