The Russian Military Is Neglecting Its Eastern Flank

By Robert Beckhusen,War Is Boring

Ten years ago, the Russian military embarked on a series of major reforms intended to restructure, modernize and equip its forces for the 21st century. In more recent years, Russia has put those reforms to the test in two conflicts, in both cases successfully.

The Russian military of today is not the antiquated, rusted-out Soviet hand-me-down that it used to be — at least, the parts of it that Russia likes to show the world in parades, in the western regions near NATO, in Syria and in the news media. Russia’s military reforms have been uneven and there are still major holes in the country’s defenses that still leave it ill-prepared to fight a major war.

That’s the verdict from a recent article in Military-Industrial Courier or by its Russian acronym VPK, an influential military newspaper. These vulnerabilities are acute in Russia’s Central and Eastern Military Districts, which encompass most of the country’s territory and stretch from the forests east of Moscow, past the Urals to the Pacific — as well as most of Russia’s southern borders.

“Huge spatial ‘holes’ exist in ground-based air defenses, which are also renewed much more slowly than in the west of the country.”

Above — a Russian Tu-95 bomber in the east. At top — Russian scouts during training. Russian Ministry of Defense photos

“It will be extremely difficult to resist the [U.S.] Air Force and the U.S. Navy and Japan, but this is not the worst [part],” adds the VPK article’s author, Alexander Khramchikhin of the Moscow-based Institute of Political and Military Analysis. “It is much harder for parts on the mainland (from Lake Baikal to Vladivostok) to fight against the PLA, which has been radically updated over the last two decades.”

Khramchikhin is also concerned about the state of Russia’s reserves. While Russia has thousands of tanks — 2,700 in the active forces alone and thousands more in reserves — a future conflict will likely chew through these vehicles at an alarming rate. In Eastern Ukraine, hundreds of tanks on both sides have been lost. In Syria, tank losses number in the thousands.