Newly Elevated Naval Collegium to Ensure Russia Remains a Great Naval Power Capable of Rebuffing the West, Patrushev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 15 – Russia has had a Naval Collegium since the start of Putin’s time in office, but that body has now been taken away from the Russian government and put directly under the Kremlin. Headed by Nikolay Patrushev, former Security Council secretary and now an assistant to Putin, this body will work to expand Russian naval power around the world.

            In an interview to Izvestiya, Patrushev says the body he now leads will work to ensure that the Russian navy regains the strength the Soviet navy had because “the role of force in international relations has not declined” but grown (iz.ru/1742941/valentin-loginov-maksim-solopov/geopoliticheskaia-situatciia-trebuet-priniatiia-dopolnitelnykh-mer).

            According to the head of the newly-elevated Naval Collegium, this body will help Russia overcome the losses it suffered in the 1990s when Moscow assumed it could buy much of what it needed abroad and allow it to develop the kind of naval power that will help it counter and then push back Western efforts to interfere abroad.

            The West is not only interfering in Russia’s internal affairs by its use of Ukraine, Patrushev says; but it is working elsewhere on land and on sea to reduce Russia’s influence. It is seeking to deprive Russia of access to the world ocean in the Baltic and to limit Russia’s rights in the Black Sea.

            To those ends, he continues, the new Naval Collegium consists of three councils: the first for the strategic development of the navy, the second for the defense of Russia’s national interests in the Arctic, and the third for the development and support of the naval activity of Russia both within the country on its rivers and on the world ocean.

            The first of these, the Council for the Strategic Development of the Navy, will become “the ‘brain’ center’” of the collegium and will promote the Russian navy’s expansion and modernization, with particular attention now to the development and use of unmanned vehicles and weaponry, Patrushev says.

            The second, the Council for the Defense of the National Interests of the Russian Federation in the Arctic, will ensure that Russia’s status there, one that reflects that it already as more power there than all other Arctic states taken together, and the importance of keeping the Northern Sea Route a Russian one and expanding Russian extraction of oil, gas and minerals not only in the current economic exclusion zone but on the continental shelf more generally.

            And the third, the Council for the Development and Security of the Naval Activity of Russia will focus on import substitution and “technological sovereignty” to ensure that Russia can produce what it needs without having to rely on anyone else not only for the navy but for its use of internal waterways as well.

            When Patrushev was removed as secretary of the Russian Security Council, many assumed that Moscow’s most prominent hawk had been sidelined. But his vision of the Naval Collegium and its role and the support he still has from Putin suggests that he will use his new post as he did his earlier one: to push more forward and aggressive Russian policies.