Russian Approaches to Strategic Deterrence and Tactical Coercion
Speaker(s): Charap, S. (Senior Political Scientist, RAND)
Date: 18 February 2022
Speaker Session Summary
SMA hosted a speaker session with Dr. Samuel Charap (Senior Political Scientist, RAND) as part of its SMA EUCOM Speaker Series.
In his presentation, Dr. Charap discussed two papers: one that describes Russia’s concept of military deterrence and one that relates Russia’s deterrence approach directly to the Ukrainian crisis. The conceptualization of deterrence in Western countries does not have an exact translation into Russian. The Russian terms derzhivanie—especially strategic sderzhivanie—is the closest term found to deterrence in official Russian military doctrine; however, it has several key differences that exemplifies Russia’s overall strategy. While the term was first used in 1997 to refer to nuclear deterrence, it has been used by Russian leaders as a multi-domain effort that uses a mixture of hard and soft power tools during both peace and war times to force an adversary to act in a limited or restricted way. This broad definition encompasses all of Russia’s strategic actions that are designed to help it achieve its geopolitical objectives. Dr. Charap commented that several downsides to Russia’s conceptualization of sderzhivanie includes blurring the lines between peace and war and that it does not give much time to conceptualize adversaries’ decision making.
The Ukrainian crisis shows how Russia has used sderzhivanie to maintain a simmering conflict since the signing of the second Minsk Treaty in 2015. However, Ukraine is also an example of how Russia is willing to use overwhelming military force when they see their long-term strategy failing. Dr. Charap commented that Russia’s initial limited use of force helped create an uncertain peace outcome, which allowed it to support a pro-Russian proxy force which continued to fight. Russia believed that it could use this proxy force to wear down the Ukraine and outlast the West. However, what occurred was a strengthening of the NATO-Ukraine relationship. For Russia, this undesired outcome is the main reason why it has opted for the potential use of its full military force, which includes advanced weapons systems.
Samuel Charap Biography
Dr. Samuel Charap is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. His research interests includethe foreign policies of Russia and the former Soviet states; European and Eurasian regional security; andU.S.-Russia deterrence, strategic stability, and arms control. From November 2012 until April 2017, Charapwas the senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Prior tojoining the IISS, he served at the U.S. Department of State as senior advisor to the undersecretary for ArmsControl and International Security and on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff, covering Russia andEurasia. From 2009 to 2011, Charap was director for Russia and Eurasia at the Center for AmericanProgress. Charap's book on the Ukraine crisis, Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contestfor Post-Soviet Eurasia (coauthored with Timothy Colton), was published in January 2017. His articles haveappeared in The Washington Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Survival, Current History and several otherjournals. Charap was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center and the International Center forPolicy Studies (Kyiv), and a Fulbright Scholar at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Heis fluent in Russian and proficient in Ukrainian. Charap holds a Ph.D. in political science and an M.Phil. inRussian and East European studies from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. Hereceived his B.A. in Russian and political science from Amherst College. He is a life member of the Councilon Foreign Relations.
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