Primakov doctrine

The Primakov doctrine has set Russia’s recent course. The Kremlin must decide if it should continue to follow the doctrine, or if it should pursue a more robust set of global ambitions. Since 2014, Russian “hybrid warfare” has been at the center of attention of Western security analysts. The Kremlin’s reliance on proxies, disinformation, and measures short of war has created the impression that its hybrid capabilities are distinct and separate from its military and can serve as a substitute for hard power. That impression is incorrect. Russian military and hybrid activities and tools are inextricably linked. Hybrid warfare has been associated with Russian Chief of the General Staff General Valery Gerasimov, the author of the so-called Gerasimov doctrine—a whole-of-government concept that fuses hard and soft power across many domains and transcends boundaries between peace- and wartime. Rather than a driver of Russian foreign policy, the Gerasimov doctrine is an effort to develop an operational concept for Russia’s confrontation with the West in support of the actual doctrine that has guided Russian policy for over two decades: the Primakov doctrine. Russia should strive toward a multipolar world managed by a concert of major powers that can counterbalance U.S. unilateral power. Russia should insist on its primacy in the post-Soviet space and lead integration in that region. Russia should oppose NATO expansion. Military power is the necessary enabler of hybrid warfare. Hybrid tools can be an instrument of risk management when hard power is too risky, costly, or impractical, but military power is always in the background. Nuclear weapons are the foundation of the country’s national security and the ultimate guarantee of its strategic independence. But they are not an instrument for risky endeavors—they ensure that other powers do not engage in such endeavors against Russia. The implementation of the Primakov doctrine has been anything but reckless. Russian uses of hybrid warfare and military power—against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014, as well as in Syria since 2015—have been calibrated to avoid undue risks. Yet the intervention in Syria has also highlighted the limits of Russian hard power and hybrid warfare. Russian hard power is insufficient to impose the Kremlin’s preferred version of peace on Syria, and Moscow lacks the vast economic and military resources to become a hegemon in the Middle East. The key question for the Kremlin is whether to push for greater capabilities and take additional risks in pursuit of a more ambitious set of global aspirations, or to continue to follow the Primakov doctrine and the careful practice of calculating the risks and benefits of a given course. New generations of Russian leaders—less mindful of the Soviet experience of overextension than the current generation of leaders—may be more influenced by the successes of Crimea and Syria, more inclined to take risks, and more ambitious in their vision for Russia. How they address these ambitions and exercise Russian hard power will have major consequences for the future of Russia, Eurasia, and the world. When the Russian Federation occupied and then annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the specter of major interstate conflict returned to the heart of Europe for the first time since the end of the Cold War. In the United States and Europe, discussions about this new standoff between the United States and Russia (or the West and Russia) have focused a great deal of attention on the idea of “hybrid warfare,” or gray zone operations. The concept of hybrid warfare has been associated with Russia’s current chief of the general staff, General Valery Gerasimov. In a 2013 article , published in a relatively obscure Russian defense industry journal, he outlined the key elements of what has become known as the Gerasimov doctrine. In it, Gerasimov described a version of whole-of-government warfare that transcends boundaries between peace- a