IN THIS ISSUE

* Russian military faces the challenge of developing network-centric warfare
* …while public decries Dagestani soldiers hazing their ethnic Russian peers
* …as Moscow stokes inter-ethnic conflict in Karachaevo-Cherkessia
** New in the Jamestown blog on Russia and Eurasia (http://www.jamestown.org/blog):
- Moscow Backtracks From Strategy to Bypass Ukraine’s Gas Transit System
*** Note to readers: There will be no EDM from November 26 to 27 due to the Thanksgiving holiday. EDM resumes publication on Monday November 30.

“New Look” Russian Military: 2009 Training Year and Beyond

Jacob W. Kipp

On November 17 the Collegium of the Ministry of Defense met to review progress on the new look for the Russian Armed Forces. To no one’s surprise, Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov gave the new look a passing grade for the 2009 training year. However, his comments about the upcoming training year suggested greater attention to the individual training of soldiers and officers. What that means in practice will decide whether the “new look” is about image or substance. Serdyukov drew attention to President Dmitry Medvedev’s positive evaluation of the “Osen 2009” exercises, the collective name for the recently completed “Zapad 2009, and “Ladoga 2009,” and said that training objectives had been achieved and represented a positive step towards the “new look.”

One of the most important steps towards forming the new look military was the creation of a new organizational basis for strategic-operational command and control. In other words, the shift away from a four-echelon command structure of military district-army-division-regiment and the establishment of the brigade as the basic tactical unit, almost 100 percent complete with the exception of a few technical details. The Chief of the General Staff, Army-General Nikolai Makarov, emphasized the substantial improvement in deployment times achieved by the brigade reorganization, which had reduced the period of preparation to combat status form a matter of hours to one hour. This change was achieved by bringing the brigades up to full strength and eliminating the need for the unit to wait for the arrival of additional personnel. Moreover, the weapons, equipment and ammunition for each unit are not kept in remote storage areas, but have been placed with the units themselves. The emphasis is upon immediate combat power and not mobilization potential. Looking to the coming training year, Serdyukov mentioned “Vostok-2010” as the main strategic-operational exercise and emphasized that the focus of the training year will be upon raising the combat capability of the individual soldier and officer within their tactical units (Krasnaya Zvezda, November 18).

Dmitry Litovkin, the defense correspondent for Izvestiya, pointed out that since the announcement of the new look it has been clear that the transformation would involve a series of reforms over a period of time with target dates identified for their completion. The reform envisions a reduction in manpower from 1.2 million in 2009 to 1 million in 2012. The cut in manpower involves more fundamental changes in Russian military culture. Doctors, lawyers, and journalists working for the MoD will lose their shoulder tabs and become civil servants. The overall size of the officer corps is to be cut by 200,000 with the objective of increasing the ratio of enlisted personnel to officers. The sub-text for the push to form an armed force that equals world standards is that much of the current officer corps is professionally incompetent. Litovkin quotes one unidentified source from the General Staff as saying that officers who had no subordinates to command for 15 years simply do not know how to go about accomplishing a mission: they will have to be replaced. The newly created brigades are expected to be combat ready within an hour, and must be capable of conducting 45 days combat before the arrival of significant mobilization reserves (Izvestiya, November 18).

This a very profound change for an army that was based upon mass mobilization of reserves, where the military districts not only raised initial armies, but became the basis for follow-on echelons. It reflects the abandonment of not just the Soviet system, but also the tsarist system of universal conscription. To succeed, this reform must replace quantity with quality, and first of all, the quality of personnel, who are at home in an “informatized” battlefield. Litovkin understands this and sees Makarov as committed to that process. While there is much talk of new weapons, Makarov stresses that “new” misses the point. What the armed forces require are modern weapons, the equal of those in the hands of potential enemies (Izvestiya, November 18).

Within the military and beyond there are those who recognize what is required. They speak of a new and revolutionary potential associated with the “new look.” Lieutenant-Colonel Aleksandr E. Kondratev, an outspoken supporter of network-centric warfare, appreciates what is required to be modern and effective with regard to technology and manpower. In a recent article he reviewed a new book by the prominent defense intellectual, Andrei Kokoshin. Kokoshin serves in the State Duma as a delegate from United Russia and is Director of the Institute for International Security Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In his latest book, Innovatsionnye vooruzhennye sily i revoliutsiia v voennom dele (Innovation Armed Forces and the Revolution in Military Affairs [RMA]), Kokoshin takes to task the Russian thinkers who have persisted in seeing the RMA in strictly technological terms and not understanding the centrality of what he calls setetsentrizm (net-centrism), a term taken from commercial computing, but applicable to military affairs as the most advanced form of information management.

In commenting on Kokoshin, Kondratev noted the use of Lanchester models for optimizing combat potential, but points to a different path in the twenty first century when information systems will make possible not only vertical and horizontal integration, but also change the tactics of the prospective formations in open combat formation, optimize methods of intelligence activities, facilitate the harmonization and coordination of fire destruction, and bring about a leveling of distinction among command and control instances. Such changes amount to a rejection of Soviet doctrinal principles based on weapons platforms to network-centric informatization. Synergy is the watchword because it allows information management to optimize effects beyond individual platforms: “Here, indeed, the synergistic effect (2+2 =5) appears, when the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The annex to military synergy is a synergy of action in a network of armed struggle, which by the combined effect exceeds the sum of effects from the use of those same means separately” (Voenno Promyshlennyi Kuryer, No. 45, November 18).

As Kokoshin and Kondratev both assert, that this is the real challenge before the transformation to the “new look” for it requires not just modern weapons, but an entirely different mindset among military personnel.

Hazing Scandal Highlights Russian Military’s Complex Relationship with the North Caucasus

Valery Dzutsev

On November 17, the news of mass hazing incidents in the Russian Baltic fleet broke in the media. According to the reports, a group of Dagestani conscript soldiers had harassed their ethnic Russian –or Slavic, as some media outlets preferred to call them– peers for a protracted period. Numerous hazing incidents took place in the town of Pionersky in Russia’s westernmost Kaliningrad oblast and included episodes of Dagestani soldiers robbing their Russians colleagues of their money and personal belongings and forcing them to dance Caucasian dances. The last straw for the Russian conscripts allegedly was when the Dagestanis formed the word Kavkaz (Caucasus) using their bodies to form the letters while one of them filmed it (Komsomolskaya Pravda-Kaliningrad, November 17).

Ethnic-based violence has long been widespread in the Russian army, dating back at least to the early stages of the Soviet army’s development. At the same time, the commanders have habitually been dismissive of the idea of ethnicity being the primary cause of the conflicts. Media received the information about this latest hazing event from unofficial sources, including the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, while the officials from the Baltic fleet at first declined to comment. Russia’s deputy general-prosecutor responsible for affairs inside the military, and Prosecutor-General Sergei Fridinsky, who is Russia’s Chief Military Prosecutor, sent a special group of prosecutors to investigate the situation among the conscript soldiers (Regnum, November 18).

The investigators were quick to dismiss the ethnic character of the crime, stating that not only the Dagestani soldiers, but also soldiers from other regions of Russia took part in violent attacks on their peers (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, November 20). Sergei Neilenko, the investigator for especially important cases, tried to play down the role of ethnicity in the incident, “People of various ethnicities are among the suspects,” he said, continuing: “Also the lawbreakers have no ethnicity –a hooligan is hooligan everywhere. Regarding the word ‘Kavkaz’ [referring to the fifteen soldiers whose bodies were used to form this word], if we remember geography –the Caucasus is big. Sochi [an ethnically Russian city in the Northern Caucasus] is in the Caucasus, too” (www.newkaliningrad.ru, November 19).

Incidents like this regularly happen in the Russian army. While ethnic Chechens are still largely excluded from the military services, Dagestanis, as the largest North Caucasian group, recurrently appear in the news either as the perpetrators or the victims of hazing in the army. Some observers say that the incidents signify not only the army’s shortcomings, but also manifest the tensions that exist within society.

In 2008, a group of Dagestani soldiers attacked a military reconnaissance unit in Samara region, beating up the soldiers and stealing their personal belongings. That incident resulted in three Dagestanis receiving short-term prison sentences (www.svpressa.ru, November 20).

In July of this year, a group of over 40 new conscripts from Dagestan were severely beaten up in Altai Krai (www.infox.ru, July 8). The perpetrators of that crime were sentenced to various prison sentences, but the prosecution did not find that ethnicity was a factor in the incident (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, November 19).

Prosecutors’ persistent attempts to conceal ethnic hatred as one of the main causes of hazing in the Russian army may indicate that the Russian authorities are afraid of sparking mass anti-Caucasian protests among the Russian population of the country. According to the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, over 100 xenophobia-related attacks took place in the country in the period from January to July 2009 alone. Thirty-seven people were killed in the attacks, twenty of them in Moscow and Moscow Oblast (www.antirasizm.ru).

“There have always been incidents in the army involving conscripts from the North Caucasus, but only in those military units in which the commanders did not take proper prevention measures,” said the former commander of the Baltic fleet, Admiral Vladimir Valuev (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, November 20).

However, there are significant new features of the present situation in the army compared to previous periods. During Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s December 2008 annual televised radio phone-in, he was baffled by a question from Dagestan in which the questioner claimed that the Dagestanis had difficulties in signing up for the conscript service in the Russian military and even had to pay bribes to be drafted. Putin wondered: “Is the army paid-for now? Some people can hardly be lured into the army, when others ask [to be drafted to the military service], but are not accepted.” He promised to look into the matter.

Over the past two decades the Russian military has invariably faced a shortage of conscripts that can be drafted, despite cuts in the overall number of military personnel. This has been due to the sharply declining birthrates in the country and widespread shirking of military service by Russians. In Dagestan, however, with its high birthrate and high unemployment, the situation has dramatically changed recently, and working in the military in the capacity of a contract soldier has become an attractive prospect for many young people in the republic. According to Russian law, contract soldiers have an obligation to serve their military conscript tours of duty in order to qualify for contract military service. So Dagestanis have a clear incentive to get drafted as conscript soldiers in order to be able to find a military job afterwards (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, December 4, 2008).

Declining ethnic Russian rates of conscript service and increasing Dagestani rates of conscript service has led to a relative increase of the Dagestani soldiers in the ranks of the Russian army, which contributes to the flaring up of existing tensions. This tension is acquiring a particularly disturbing hue for Moscow, given the persistent instability of the security situation in the North Caucasus.

Circassians in Karachaevo-Cherkessia Plan Mass Protest

Fatima Tlisova

Circassians in the Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia have called for a national demonstration to protest against the denial of their civil, political and ethnic rights. Two demonstrations are set to take place on November 26 –the first in the town of Habez, located 18 miles to the south of Cherkessk, the capital city of KCHR, then in Lenin square in Cherkessk, in front of the republican administrational building (the local newspaper “Cherkessk,” November 17).

The initiative group for the protest sent an application for a license to hold the demonstration to the Cherkessk mayor’s office on November 4. The application was denied on the basis of a governmental decree issued on November 12 announcing a national emergency in the republic because of the H1N1 virus pandemic and banning any public gatherings for an indefinite period (www.09biz.ru, November 19).

The head of the Circassian youth movement, Timur Jujuev, told Kavkazsky Uzel that the government’s decree on the swine flu emergency was issued not because of the virus pandemic but to prevent Circassians from mass public protests. In his interview, the youth leader said: “All the public markets continue working on a regular basis, so where is the emergency? We are going to organize the demonstration even if we will need to wear surgical masks and even if we do not have a license from the government. This is not the will of one or two men; it is the will of a nation, and we have right to say what we think” (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, November 19).

The Circassians, who are an ethnic minority in KCHR and constitute approximately 11 percent of the population, have given three major reasons for being unhappy with their status in relation with the Turkic speaking Karachai ethnic majority.

The first involves political rank: Circassians claim that their right to have a presence on the decision-making level is being constantly violated by the dominant Karachais. Evidence for the claim is based on the fact that during the last 30 years, no ethnic Circassian has been allowed to hold the highest post in the republic: since the Soviet period Moscow has appointed men of ethnic Karachai background for the top level position. In 2008, the Circassians lost another position –that of prime minister. Over the last seven months, the Karachai majority in the KCHR parliament have repeatedly banned the Circassian candidate Vyacheslav Derev from taking a position in the Russian Federation Council (NTR local television channel, November 12).

The second reason is historical heritage: Circassians accuse the Karachai political elite of falsifying history. The most scandalous case involves conflicting claims about the ethnic background of the first conqueror of Mt. Elbrus, Khashir Chilar. According to a number of historical sources, such as the testimony of scholars and military members of the expedition to Elbrus, Chilar was a Circassian from Nalchik. The Turkic-speaking Karachais claim that the scholars misunderstood the ethnicity of Chilar, who was an ethnic Karachai. This competition has had tremendous influence on the current political situation in the republic. For example, on November 20, an outdoor poster celebrating the Great Karachai Hilar Hakirov (the Karachai-language version of the name of the first conqueror of Elbrus) was burned in the city of Cherkessk by unknown perpetrators (“Cherkessk,” November 21).

Finally, Circassians declared that they were gravely offended when the local newspaper Express-Post published an article denying the fact from the history of World War II that the Circassian village of Belseney saved dozens of Jewish children from the Nazis. This led to a spontaneous protest demonstration in Besleney in which local Jews who had been saved took to the streets to show “the deep oppression” they felt after “such an unjust and false” newspaper article. Although the editor of the Express-Post apologized publicly for the article, it was during the Besleney demonstration that Circassians called for a national protest demonstration (www.09biz.ru, November 19).

The situation in Karachaevo-Cherkessia cannot be understood without reference to the other two Circassian republics –Kabardino-Balkaria (KBR) and Adygeya. On November 17, a demonstration to defend the rights of Circassians in KBR occurred in the republic’s capital Nalchik that was attended by approximately 3,000 people. In a video posted on Facebook, Ibragim Yagan, the leader of the Circassian NGO, speaks in Circassian to the youth who are a majority of demonstrators. Standing under the flags of the Russian Federation and Circassia, Yagan called upon the youth to wake up and claim their rights and their land. “We have been constantly watched, followed, blackmailed for our political activities,” he said. “But we cannot lose anymore, because we have already lost everything.” Yagans’ voice from the stage is accompanied by a chorus of supporting voices from the auditorium.

Unlike in KCHR, Circassians constitute the majority in KBR. They say, however, that their civil and ethnic rights are constantly being violated there. “After the parliament of KBR ratified the bill ‘On land and territory’ earlier this month, each Balkar living in KBR in turn has received 10.6 hectares of the land while only 1.6 hectares belong to each Circassian,” said Jelyabi Kalmykov, the head of a local Circassian coordination committee. “We have lost more than 200,000 hectares of our land since the occupation,” Kalmykov noted. The meeting sent a protest statement to the KBR government demanding the abolition of the bill on land and territory (Gazeta Yuga, November 19).

The leader of the Circassian Congress of KBR, Ruslan Keshev, declared at the end of his speech: “If the government does not listen to us we are ready for radical actions. This is the only homeland we have” (Gazeta Yuga, November 19). Despite the aggressive public rhetoric between the Turkic speaking Karachai-Balkars and Circassians, both ethnic groups share a clear understanding that the conflict is not natural, but created with a particular political goal. The leaders of the initiative for the Circassian world sport games, Sufian Jemukhov and Alexei Bekshokov, released a statement in which they attributed the current “unnatural interethnic escalation” to the upcoming 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi and the related protests by Circassians both at home and in the Diaspora.

According to Jemukhov and Bekshokov, the conflict has the potential to blow up the whole Caucasus into a bloody mess with the mass civilian casualties and therefore keep the Circassians from opposing the Sochi Winter Olympics. “Moscow plays the conflict scenario when the participants do not have the ability to solve the conflict, but the conflict is absolutely manageable and can be easily solved by its rulers from the Kremlin,” they said in their statement (Adygeya Natpress, November 14).

The role of the Kremlin in fanning the flames of local ethnic conflicts due to political interests was underscored in Adygeya, where the local newspaper published a letter from the most famous Russian leader in Adygeya, Nina Konovalova of the Soyuz Slavyan Adygeyi (the Union of Slavs of Adygeya), to the leaders of the Narodnaya Partia Rossii (the People’s Party of Russia). In the letter, dated October 18, 2005, Konovalova asks for support in the upcoming republican parliament election. While describing the potential of her organization, she writes: “Escalation through our propaganda and agitation of the social and interethnic situation in the republic can lead to a notable increase in the number of people who are unhappy with the current government. If we build our election campaign on the base of uniting Adygeya with Krasnodarski Krai… we can leave all our opponents far behind.”

The letter has a handwritten note on it, stating: “1. We do not have money. 2. Try to create a bloc with the Promyshlennaya Partia [the Industrial Party] – they have money.”

Konovala and her unified bloc of the Soyuz Slavyan Adygeyi and Promyshlennaya Partia won the election under the slogans of unifying Adygeya with Krasnodar Krai, and she is now in the parliament of Adygeya representing the rights of the republic’s Russian population. During the election, Adygeya and other Circassian republics and Circassians in the Diaspora held a number of mass demonstrations, hunger strikes and political actions protesting against the possibility of Adygeya losing its autonomy.

To view other artciles published by Eurasia Daily Monitor, The Jamestown Foundation click here