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This book offers a nuanced and detailed examination of Russia’s international activity. In broad terms, the book contributes to two of the most important current debates about contemporary Russian actions: whether Moscow is acting strategically or opportunistically, and whether this should be understood in regional or global terms. The book goes against the majority opinions on both questions, and introduces contributions in a number of under-researched themes. It argues that Moscow is not acting in a simply ad hoc, reactive way, but in a consistently strategic manner, and that this is best understood not by analysing Russia’s return to specific regions, but in a more holistic way with a global horizon, linking activity across different regions. This means that the Russian challenge is likely to continue rather than fade away.
The book addresses core themes of Russian activity – military, energy, and economic. But it offers an unusual multi-disciplinary analysis to these themes, incorporating both regional and thematic specialist expertise. Underpinned by detailed analyses of the revolution in Russian geospatial capabilities and the establishment of a strategic planning foundation, the book includes chapters on military and maritime strategies, energy security, and economic diversification and influence. This serves to highlight the connections between military and economic interests that shape and drive Russian strategy.
framework as global competition for resources and markets intensifies. There is a distinctly military component to Russian strategic thinking on the Arctic. But Russia's principal aims are to develop the region's hydrocarbon resources, despite the Western sanctions imposed in 2014, and to consolidate Russia's jurisdiction over the Northern Sea Route (NSR) to secure unrestricted access to international markets, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. The two aims are linked: achieving them simultaneously is expected to develop the Arctic as a new
Northern Sea Route (NSR). In 2011, for instance, Putin announced major Russian investment in the Arctic to challenge traditional trade routes, 32 and in July 2017 Russia and China agreed to develop an “Ice Silk Road”. Since then, there have been further announcements about infrastructural development through the 2020s. These include the building of new deep water, year-round ports, such as Indiga on the Barents Sea, to connect with the new Arctic-bound Belkomur railway to create an Asia–NSR transport corridor
Other projects include new transhipment hubs in Kamchatka and Murmansk and a planned deep water port at Indiga, among many others, designed to export iron, coal, lumber, and other products extracted from northern Russia. Russia also plans to increase transhipment across the Northern Sea Route (NSR). In 2018, President Putin set a benchmark of eighty million tons of traffic through the NSR by 2024, purportedly a tenfold increase. 24 In 2020, Moscow published an updated Arctic strategy pushing new
in an integrated way are what has characterised the Russian leadership's approach since the early to mid 2000s, in an active effort to shape events. This is shown best by the way that Moscow is investing heavily in a number of major strategic projects – the Northern Sea Route (NSR) being the most obvious example, but also more broadly in terms of infrastructure. Certainly, there are problems in this process, and undoubtedly Moscow has to respond to changing and unexpected developments, as any strategist must. But the emergence of an interactive, competitive