A group of high-level defense officials from Central and Eastern Europe and the United States on Wednesday warned of the threat of Russian aggression, discussing ideas to respond to the Kremlin’s moves in its neighborhood and beyond.
At the 8th annual Center for European Policy Analysis Forum in Washington, D.C., a panel of defense officials representing the U.S., Latvia, Poland, and Estonia, tackled Russia’s aggressive foreign policy and how to potentially contain the country’s ambitions.
“What is the threat from Russia? Well, it is primarily still a soft power threat, but with an increasingly hard edge. There is a very substantial conventional military threat aspect to it,” said Jānis Kažociņš, Latvian National Security Adviser to the President and Secretary to the National Security Council.
Russia poses a threat not just to regional security and European security, “it’s a fundamental assault on the bedrock principles of the international order,” added Michael Carpenter, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.
The panel came on a day of heightened tensions with Russia. A Dutch-led international investigation team on Wednesday said that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a BUK surface-to-air missile fired from Russian-backed, separatist controlled territory. Investigators said the BUK launcher was transported from Russia to separatist territory before the missile launch, and then returned to Russia the day after the plane was shot down in 2014, killing everyone on board. Russia denies its involvement in the incident. The U.S. State Department released a statement saying “this announcement is another step toward bringing to justice those responsible for this outrageous attack.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday, meanwhile, spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the situation in Syria, telling him that “that the United States is making preparations to suspend U.S.-Russia bilateral engagement on Syria – including on the establishment of the Joint Implementation Center – unless Russia takes immediate steps to end the assault on Aleppo and restore the cessation of hostilities,” according to a State Department readout.
At the conference, panelists agreed that countries looking to counter Russia must focus efforts on deterrence, collective defense, resilience and governance.
Kažociņš said Russia is attempting to assert influence in three specific areas: One, through insurgency and undermining states — particularly through the use of ethnic communities of Russian speakers; two, by employing information warfare to suggest that the Baltic states are failed, corrupt governments that must inevitably return to the fold of Mother Russia; and three, through corruption and bribes, as well as threats and intimidations.
“We should be doing more to influence Russia rather than simply waiting for Russia to influence us,” Kažociņš said.
Effectively deterring Russia is key, said Estonian Defence Forces Commander-in-Chief Gen. Riho Terras, and that requires NATO to be unified and the United States to be involved and on the ground.
“Russia, Putin, understands only hard power. He’s using soft power, but he understands heavy metal. He understands Leopard tanks in Vilnius, he understands the Polish tanks in Riga, and he does understand French tanks in Estonia,” he said.
And that conventional military deterrence must be backed by nuclear deterrence, he added.
“In Russia, there are people who really think, military people and not military people, who think they can use nuclear weapon as a means of the escalation. They do not believe that NATO’s three allies [France, the United Kingdom and the U.S.] who have the nuclear weapons are willing and able to respond with a nuclear strike against them, tactical nuclear strike, and that is a very dangerous tendency,” Terras said. “…I think we should put a lot of emphasis, still, on nuclear deterrence.”
The United States is focused on tailoring its response to “the gravity of the problem,” Carpenter said.
“Our actions have spoken very clearly on how seriously we take the threat,” he said, pointing to the U.S.’s increased force posture in Europe, its involvement in more military exercises, the prepositioning of its warfighting equipment on the eastern flank, and the boosted investment in allies’ capabilities and infrastructure to resist Russian aggression.
Beyond military investment, more attention needs to be centered on the “soft underbelly where the European space is most vulnerable,” Carpenter said — namely, on Russian propaganda, the disinformation campaign, the funding for political parties and the Kremlin’s use of corruption to get inside some of its neighboring countries.
And it is key that Russia learn a lesson from its involvement in Ukraine, Carpenter said, that “this was a strategic blunder, a quagmire, another mistake.” Moscow must be made to see that its actions there “are something it will not repeat” — because if the lesson learned is that the benefits were greater than the costs accrued, “we’re just going to see this happen again,” he said.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief.
