Russia’s 2016: a year lived on the edge

A decisive role in the outcome of the war in Syria, interference in the US presidential elections, and the race for intercontinental ballistic missiles supremacy. Twelve months ago we wrote that 2015 had been the year of Russia. Today we could say the same thing of 2016, and with more than one reason.

Putin’s words sum up Russia’s 2016 better than anything: “Today we are stronger than any opponent who wants to threaten us”. The mind of the Russian president pointed at America and NATO, as always. The other side of the global equilibrium. A balance based for decades on the US and USSR nuclear arsenals, and the mutual threat of retaliation in case of nuclear attack by either party. A balance that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with threats to the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons – but especially due to the American missile shields – seemed to have moved in favor of the US. A balance, though, that had never finally come down  on one side. Putin’s words are now important not for what they say – it is not news that the Russian nuclear arsenal is larger than America’s and anyone else’s – but because they are pronounced at the end of a year that saw Russia playing an increasingly important role in the world.

The Cold War balance

Let’s start with nuclear weapons. Putin’s statement came just hours after Trump announced his will to strengthen the American nuclear arsenal. It is not clear what the US President-elect means: modernising the nuclear triad, or calling into question the US-Russia agreements on denuclearisation. Either way, that’s a nice gift to Putin’s nuclear programme, which just recently had a leap forward.

2016 was the year of the presentation of the new Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) RS-28 Sarmat, NATO codename Satan 2, a weapon with a destructive powerof 40 megatons, something like 2,600 Hiroshima bombs all in one. But the value of Satan 2 is not so much in its destructive power, as in its ability to break the global strategic balance. The new ICBM will pierce “any missile defense system, present and future”, because it will fly between 7 and 12 times the speed of sound, like a hypersonic missile; it will change its trajectory after launch, it can even reach the United States by flying over the South Pole and, before the impact, it will deliver from 10 to 15 independently targetable warheads on the target. It’s impossible to stop it.

The US missile defence systems, such as the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GDM) and the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (ABMD), already in operation in Romania and soon in Poland – which have done so much to irritate Russia – can today prevent a nuclear strike with the current Satan, hitting it at different stages of its flight, but will have little effect against the new Satan 2.

It’s deterrence tool, then. A weapon of retaliation, meant to restore a nuclear balance.

And then there are the treaties: Under the START-3 treaty, both USA and Russia will have only 700 missiles for up to 1,550 warheads each by 2018. Moscow, which now has 526 rockets and 1648 warheads, has to get rid of 154 Satan missiles, that will not be replaced by the same number of Sarmats, given the higher number of warheads they can carry. However, this is always assuming that START-3 is not called into question by the Trump presidency.

The digital Bear

If Satan 2 is a weapon that works only if it is not used, in 2016 Russia deployed another deadly arsenal. And it used it. The cyber war launched by the Kremlin hit the US as never before. Russian hackers have done such a good job that, even if the US allegations were not true, Moscow gained a result anyway: to make Russia the world’s first cyberwar superpower.

The acme came with July’s hacking of the DNC. On that occasion two hacking teams, dubbed by the DNC’s security team “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear” (which according to the IT Company CrowdStrike leads to the two main branches of Putin’s intelligence apparatus, the federal FSB and military GRU), stuck their noses into Hillary Clinton’s party computer for at least a year, passing information to WikiLeaks that could have affected the outcome of the campaign. Recently, the US intelligence services, requested by President Obama, draw up a report after over a month of cyber investigations that point the finger at Russian hackers linked to the Kremlin.

A DDoS attack, of a magnitude never seen before, paralysed a big slice of the US internet for a couple of hours (a completely new kind of attack, which exploited tens of millions of devices connected to the Internet around the world, such as video recorders and IP cameras, to create a bot army that hit the same target):and everybody looked East.

Nevertheless, it’s not entirely a novelty. In 2007, a DDoS attack took down the Estonian government’s Internet network, in response to the decision to dismantle a monument to the soldiers of the Red Army in Tallin, causing the interruption of essential services and significant damage to the Estonian economy. In 2008, a few weeks before Russian military invasion of South Ossetia, Russian hackers blocked communications in Georgia, as well as several government websites, including the President’s. In 2014 the cellphone network and the Internet of Crimea were hit, shortly before the arrival of the “little green men”, the Russian soldiers without insignia. And earlier this year an attack on Ukraine’s electricity grid has left 700,000 houses in the dark.

However, never before has the offensive capability of the army of Russian hackers reached such a target and hit it so hard.

2017 comes with new opportunities for Russia to capitalise on the results achieved in the year that is ending: the success in Syria, the rise of Donald Trump at the White House, crude oil price on the rise, the peace path for Donbass being negotiated in Minsk, and the rise of pro-Russian leaders in Moldova and Bulgaria. And meanwhile, the upcoming elections in France and Germany are seen as an opportunity to operate the propaganda machine at full capacity and throw some more spanners in the works of European integration. In short, everything leads us to assume that in 2017 Russia will be a global player like never in the past twenty years.

@daniloeliatweet