Russia's Imaginary Restraint
Power, Myth & the Cost of Strategic Delusion
“Russia’s tragedy is that to convince outsiders of its strength, it must keep pretending it is holding back a force that would change the world. There is no such force. After the war, Russians will have to decide what they will do with the leadership that brought them to this place, not pursue more unwinnable wars. A settlement based on the reality of Russia’s failures is the lowest-cost option.”
George Friedman
George Friedman’s observation cuts to the core of Russia’s current predicament. It is not merely a comment on the war in Ukraine, but on the enduring mismatch between Russia’s strategic self-image and its actual capabilities.
Western analysts—and policymakers—continue to misjudge Vladimir Putin through a Cold War inheritance of fear: the assumption that Russia retains latent, overwhelming conventional power, deliberately restrained to control escalation. This assumption is false.
The myth of inherited Soviet power
The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union. Its population is smaller, its industrial base weaker, its alliance network thinner, and its military far less resilient. But even the Soviet Union itself was never the unstoppable conventional juggernaut of popular imagination.
After 1945, the USSR never fought a sustained near-peer conventional war. Instead, its record shows extreme caution:
No direct ground combat against NATO
Reliance on proxy forces (Korea, Vietnam, Africa)
Heavy use of advisers, air defence units, and logistics, rather than frontline Soviet divisions
Only one major overseas conventional war: Afghanistan (1979–1989)—a campaign that exposed profound limits in Soviet military effectiveness and political endurance
This was not accidental. Soviet leaders understood that large-scale conventional war against capable opponents risked rapid escalation, economic exhaustion, and political instability at home. They calibrated their behaviour accordingly.
Soviet realism vs Putin’s adventurism
There is a crucial difference between Soviet strategic culture and Putin’s.
The Soviet leadership, particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, demonstrated a grim realism about power limits. They tested boundaries, but generally retreated when those limits were reached. Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) were brutal—but inward-facing—interventions, not external wars of conquest against capable adversaries.
Putin has abandoned this restraint. Ukraine is not an aberration; it is the logical outcome of a leadership that confuses intimidation with capability and rhetoric with strength.
Nuclear weapons and the erosion of deterrence
The nuclear dimension is especially revealing.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union rarely issued explicit nuclear threats. Deterrence depended on uncertainty, not noise. When nuclear signals were sent—Cuba in 1962, Able Archer anxieties in 1983—they were exceptional, grave, and carefully managed.
Putin’s Russia has inverted this logic. Nuclear threats are now routine, performative, and increasingly ignored. By issuing red lines so frequently—and failing to enforce them—Russia is hollowing out its own strategic deterrent.
Deterrence only works when threats are rare, credible, and tied to clear interests. Overuse turns them into background static.
The real tragedy
Russia’s tragedy is not that the West underestimates it—but that its leadership refuses to accept reality. The belief that Russia is merely “holding back” a decisive force is a fiction designed for both foreign audiences and domestic consumption.
There is no hidden reserve that changes the strategic balance. There is only a war of attrition that Russia is poorly positioned to win, and a leadership that has mortgaged the country’s future to sustain an illusion of great-power inevitability.
As Friedman suggests, the least costly path forward is not escalation, nor new wars, but settlement—one grounded in the reality of Russia’s failures, not the mythology of its past.
References / further reading
George Friedman, Geopolitical Futures – analysis on Russian strategic limits
Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan
Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity
Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy
Mark Galeotti, We Need to Talk About Putin
Soviet vs Russian Use of Conventional Force
A Strategic Comparison (1945–Present)
Strategic Purpose
Soviet Union: Conventional force as an instrument of ideological expansion and systemic competition with the West.
Russian Federation: Conventional force as a tool of regime survival and status preservation amid relative decline.
Primary Theatre of Operations
Soviet Union: Central Europe, oriented toward a decisive confrontation with NATO on the continental front.
Russian Federation: The “near abroad,” particularly Ukraine and the Caucasus, with limited expeditionary operations.
War Planning Assumptions
Soviet Union: Expectation of a short, violent, high-tempo war likely to escalate rapidly.
Russian Federation: Acceptance of protracted, attritional conflict under conditions of sanctions and isolation.
Force Model
Soviet Union: Mass mobilisation army built around large armoured formations and deep reserves.
Russian Federation: Smaller standing force with uneven modernisation and reliance on ad-hoc mobilisation.
Command Style
Soviet Union: Highly centralised and doctrinally rigid, but internally coherent and predictable.
Russian Federation: Centralised but politicised, with decision-making driven by personalities rather than doctrine.
Operational Art
Soviet Union: Sophisticated theory of Deep Operations and echeloned manoeuvre.
Russian Federation: Fragmented manoeuvre concepts, increasingly reverting to attrition and firepower.
Combined Arms Integration
Soviet Union: Strong integration at scale across armour, artillery, and air defence.
Russian Federation: Uneven integration, with gradual improvement but persistent coordination failures.
Logistics and Sustainment
Soviet Union: Designed for short, intense war with pre-positioned stocks in Europe.
Russian Federation: Chronic logistical weaknesses that repeatedly constrain operations.
Modernisation Logic
Soviet Union: Emphasis on quantity over precision and technological sophistication.
Russian Federation: Selective modernisation in missiles, EW, and air defence alongside hollowed conventional mass.
Casualty Tolerance
Soviet Union: High tolerance framed as an existential struggle for the state and ideology.
Russian Federation: Very high tolerance, increasingly normalised through repression and narrative control.
Role of Nuclear Weapons
Soviet Union: Nuclear escalation viewed as an integral part of war fighting logic.
Russian Federation: Nuclear weapons used primarily for coercive signalling and deterrence of Western intervention.
Information Warfare
Soviet Union: Secondary to kinetic operations.
Russian Federation: Central pillar of warfare, shaping narratives, legitimacy, and escalation control.
Strategic Culture
Soviet Union: Confidence rooted in superpower status and ideological certainty.
Russian Federation: Insecurity rooted in post-imperial decline and fear of encirclement.
End State Logic
Soviet Union: Clear political-military end states tied to bloc competition.
Russian Federation: Ambiguous end states, with conflicts drifting toward perpetuation rather than resolution.
Core Insight
Soviet conventional power was designed to achieve rapid victory.
Russian conventional power is designed to endure.