Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

This time last year, we highlighted an extraordinary report produced by the EU’s agency for analysing foreign, security, and defence policy issues, the European Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) called Enabling the Future – European Military Capabilities 2013-2025.  Two things were remarkable about the report: the depth of its ambition for developing the EU’s foreign and security policy, and the decidedly old-fashioned emphasis on the need to develop an extended EU zone of influence.  It is worth recalling this report when trying to understand Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

The focus of the report was the need for the European Union to develop its own military capabilities “unless Europeans are resigned to becoming ever more dependent, vulnerable, and dispensable”.  The report called for European autonomy on military matters, which it defined, in part, as “the possession and control of capabilities required to fulfil a given mission…”

The report then went on to argue that the EU must reassess its strategic objectives and develop “zones of EU privileged interest” in its “Eastern and Southern neighbourhoods”.  Remarkably, this is exactly the same terminology as was used shortly after the Georgian war of August 2008 by Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev when he declared that Moscow had a “zone of privileged interests”.

It is also exactly the kind of terminology that the US has been criticizing when used by Russia.

One of the scenarios the EUISS report envisages is “military modernization in an increasingly authoritarian country on the EU’s periphery”, which could clearly mean Russia, to which the EU response should be “a higher state of conventional (even nuclear) military preparedness”.  The report added that “sufficient European forces would need to be mobilized to dissuade, but without giving the impression of a potential European preventive or pre-emptive strike against the foreign country’s own infrastructure”.

The key conclusion of the report is that “Europeans should focus on improving their ability to temporarily project and even permanently extend their armed forces into the EU’s geographic zones of privileged interest” [our emphasis added].  These regions are specifically said to include the Caucasus.

For Moscow, the ambitions articulated in this report undermine the claim that the EU is an entirely benign institution whose eastward expansion poses no possible threat to Russia.

No doubt the European Union’s strategic thinkers were getting ahead of themselves in the May 2013 report, mixing up capabilities and ambitions, but with influential EU agencies articulating such ambitions Russia’s concerns about the consequences of EU encroachments in Ukraine look to have more justification than Western leaders are willing to admit.  There are considerable dangers in this Western unwillingness to understand the Russian perspective.

NOTE:  According to the latest Levada Centre poll, 54% of Russians think that Russia has the right to annex territories of the former Soviet Union “on the basis of declarations that Russians living there may suffer or are already suffering from abuse and violation of their rights”.