Russia Threat Fades; Europe Cuts Military

Half a decade after the end of the Cold War, Western European nations have embarked on a new round of defense cuts.

In France last month, President Jacques Chirac announced the most sweeping overhaul of the country’s military since Gen. Charles de Gaulle was president in the ‘60s, including a 30% cut in the size of the armed forces.

Four days later, German Defense Minister Volker Ruehe signed off on a report reaffirming a 10% cut in the size of the Bundeswehr that had been agreed to last year. The reduction is in addition to substantial cuts already implemented after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And in Stockholm last week, the commander of Swedish military forces, Gen. Owe Wiktorin, found himself explaining to parliament how he plans to defend the country with 10% less money in 1998 than he gets today.

In part, these reductions reflect both the fundamental change in the types of security threats facing post-Cold War Europe and the intense budget pressures as the region’s welfare states scramble for new cash to fund costly unemployment, social security and medical programs.

But there is another development that also drives this downsizing: the Chechnya factor. Attempts by Russia’s armed forces to put down the 15-month-old rebellion in the breakaway republic have been so abysmal that governments in Western Europe have effectively downgraded the residual risks posed by the 1.5 million-strong Russian military--this despite the country’s political instability.

By contrast, Clinton administration policymakers and private defense analysts in the United States say the Russians’ poor showing in Chechnya is having little impact on how America structures its forces, in part because it only confirms earlier U.S. assessments.

Apart from worrying about Russia’s nuclear weapons--should Moscow suddenly become hostile again--the U.S. military “de-tuned from any Russian threat” years ago, said Dan Goure, analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan research group. “The Red Army scare is gone,” Goure said.

But in Western Europe, where the shadow of Russian military power still lingers despite the Cold War’s end, the “Chechnya factor” has had an easing effect.

Part of Swedish defense doctrine, for example, has long been aimed at countering the potential danger of an invasion carried out so quickly and efficiently that the country’s reserves have no time to mobilize. The Russian performance in Chechnya would seem to further reduce what little chance still existed for such a scenario.

“Chechnya didn’t play a central role in our original decision [to reduce defense spending], but it certainly reinforced our views once we had formulated them,” said Roger Hallhag, the international secretary of Sweden’s Social Democrats, whose government pushed through the cuts. “The lack of logistics . . . it’s shown how much reduced the threat is.”

In France, it was a desperate need to rein in government spending and a belated acknowledgment that Russian forces are now 1,800 rather than 180 miles away that mainly led to Chirac’s plan to revamp the French military. But here too Chechnya is believed to have played a role.

“In our case, it was subliminal rather than spoken,” said French defense specialist Francois Heisbourg. “That [Russian forces] have been so absolutely ghastly has been reassuring. It’s diminished those trying to resist the cuts.”

Just how poorly Russian forces have performed in Chechnya is sometimes hard for outsiders to grasp. “Worse than the army’s biggest critics ever predicted,” said Dmitri Tretin, a defense specialist at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Moscow was forced to pour hundreds of fresh troops into the Chechen capital, Grozny, late last week to quash a surprise rebel attack there, but events two months ago in the small Dagestani village of Pervomayskoye provide one of the most vivid examples of Russia’s military troubles.

About 300 Chechen rebels holding 120 hostages fought off thousands of elite Russian special forces who had encircled the village and spent days attacking it from all sides. Eventually, the Russians abandoned their ground assault, stepped back and showered the village with missiles, reducing it to rubble.

But amazingly, more than 100 rebels, including their leader, escaped the Russian cordon, even though it had been reinforced by tanks, artillery and warplanes. Aided by a diversionary attack, the rebels simply fought their way out of Pervomayskoye on the last night of battle, taking most of their prisoners back to Chechnya with them.

Disorientation, neglect and the larger political turmoil in Russia have all contributed to Russia’s stunning military decline. But the absence of funding has hurt most.

Lobbying for more money in advance of December’s parliamentary elections, the Defense Ministry claimed that soldiers’ wages for September and November had been delayed a month and that some remote garrisons were going without pay for up to three months. Soldiers also were getting one-tenth their normal meat rations, there was no money for servicemen’s funerals and Russian pilots were flying one-tenth of their required training missions.

Defense officials and lawmakers say the increased budget this year will help the armed forces improve the miserable lot of soldiers but will do little to improve weapons systems and other hardware.

The Defense Ministry has had legendary confrontations with local electric companies that cut off the power to bases that fall behind in paying bills.

“ ‘Decay’ was the right word to describe the state of the Russian military over the previous five years. Chechnya has shown we’ve now entered the period of disintegration,” Heisbourg said.

But there are those who caution against drawing such conclusions. They recall how Adolf Hitler watched the Red Army get pushed around by Finnish forces in 1939-40 and concluded that Josef Stalin’s purges had emasculated it. Five years later, the Russians were on the Elbe.

Michael Stuermer, director of the Ebenhausen Institute, a German government-backed think tank near Munich, also argues that, far from being a cause for easing defense spending, the Russian performance in Chechnya should be ringing alarm bells.

“If the Russians wanted to create trouble, they wouldn’t come in tanks--they’ve got no fuel,” he said. “What they do have is large stocks of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that are now in less certain hands than ever. The message from Chechnya is that we’re picnicking on the edge of a smoldering volcano.”

Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Moscow and Art Pine in Washington contributed to this report.