Patrushev Using New Position to Promote Changes in Russian Naval Policies that Threaten the West

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – When Putin transferred Nikolay Patrushev from his position as secretary of the Russian Security Council and appointed him as a presidential assistant in charge of the restored Naval Collegium, many saw that as a clear demotion and even suggested it might cause Putin to challenge Putin.

            Those suggestions (cf. windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/06/putins-recent-personnel-moves-threaten.html and https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/08/newly-elevated-naval-collegium-to.html) have overshadowed and distracted attention from a more important development.

            As Vzglyad commentator Aleksandr Timokhin argues, Patrushev has used his new position to promote the rebuilding of Russian naval and merchant marine capacity and to lead Putin to adopt a far more aggressive stance against the West on the world’s oceans (vz.ru/society/2024/10/17/1292275.html).

            Indeed, he implies, Patrushev may have emerged from his supposed demotion in an even stronger position and one with more immediate and troubling consequences to the West than even his sometimes paranoid denunciations of what he sees the West as doing inside Russia (e.g., jamestown.org/program/kremlin-worried-about-ukrainian-wedges-inside-russia/ and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/08/newly-elevated-naval-collegium-to.html).

            In his new position, Patrushev has been working to overcome three major obstacles to Russia’s becoming a major naval power: the longstanding Russian focus on the army rather than the navy as the basis of its strength, serious problems in Russian shipbuilding, and the paucity of exercises that can serve to intimidate others by highlighting Russia’s strength in this area.

            As Timokhin notes, these three problems have combined to lead to the decline of the Russian fleet since Soviet times, leaving the country’s navy with only approximately a quarter of the ships in the American navy and meaning that there is not a single book in recent times on the uses of the Russian fleet in non-nuclear conflicts with the West.

            Putin has put Patrushev in this position to overcome these problems, the commentator continues; and Patrushev has the knowledge and energy to achieve far more in this regard than the Russian naval leadership has achieved in recent decades, putting it on course to be far better able to respond to and challenge the navies of the West.