Hibernating Bear

Center for a New American Security | Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Peter Schroeder and Kate Johnston

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has forced Moscow to ruthlessly prioritize its strategic interests and reduce its tolerance for risk, leading to non-intervention in recent crises across Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Venezuela, and Iran. Despite significant manpower and equipment losses, the core pillars of Russian expeditionary reach—including strategic airlift, long-range strike assets, and logistics networks—remain structurally intact.

This operational restraint reflects a deliberate concentration of military, fiscal, and escalation bandwidth within a single high-intensity theater to avoid simultaneous contingencies. While the ongoing conflict limits large-scale deployments elsewhere, the Kremlin retains the capacity to project lower-intensity power globally and could still deploy robust force packages to critical regions like Belarus and the Arctic. Once the war concludes, the Kremlin's enduring great power strategic culture and highly active defense industrial base will likely drive a rapid restoration of its global power projection capabilities, especially if post-war European deterrence commitments falter.

Comment

Turkey's invocation of the 1936 Montreux Convention to close the Turkish Straits has severely disrupted the maritime logistics pipeline sustaining the Russian naval facility in Tartus, Syria. Without direct Black Sea access, naval replenishment relies on circuitous, high-cost routes from the Baltic or Northern Fleets, exposing the limits of Russian blue-water sustainment under prolonged regional denial. This Black Sea bottleneck demonstrates how Turkish maritime control can isolate the Tartus outpost while Russian logistics are heavily consumed by the Ukrainian land campaign. Consequently, the long-term viability of Moscow's Mediterranean presence hinges entirely on political arrangements rather than organic power projection capabilities.

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