Hibernating Bear

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

Russia retains the core military infrastructure required to project power globally despite sustaining significant equipment and manpower losses during its ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While Moscow has temporarily reduced its risk tolerance to avoid simultaneous high-intensity conflicts, its strategic airlift, blue-water naval assets, and long-range strike capabilities remain structurally intact.

This operational preservation allows the Kremlin to maintain lower-intensity global influence operations while prioritizing its immediate high-stakes campaign on the Ukrainian front. Consequently, Turkey's closure of the Turkish Straits under the Montreux Convention restricts Mediterranean naval deployments, and command-and-control degradation limits parallel large-scale expeditionary interventions. However, once the current conflict subsides, Russia's highly active defense industrial base is poised to rapidly replenish depleted military inventories. If European nations fail to meet their deterrence and defense modernization commitments, a reconstituted Russian military will likely re-prioritise Europe as its primary arena for future geopolitical expansion.

Comment

The closure of the Turkish Straits under the Montreux Convention directly chokes the maritime logistics pipeline sustaining the Russian naval facility in Tartus. Without Black Sea access, Moscow is forced to rely on costly Il-76 strategic airlift or circuitous northern sea routes to maintain its Mediterranean presence. This Turkish Straits bottleneck exposes the vulnerability of Russia's Syrian deployment to hostile NATO-controlled chokepoints.

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