Review: The Sources of Russian Aggression

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Ryan McMaken
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[The Sources of Russian Aggression: Is Russia a Realist Power?, by Sumantra Maitra, Lexington Books, 2024; 205 pages]

One of the unfortunate realities of the foreign policy debate in America is that few Americans are paying much attention. This general level of public ignorance makes it much easier for the American foreign policy elites to then feed the American public whatever lies suit the regime’s agenda.

This has certainly been the case with the US’s current proxy war against the Russians in Ukraine. In the early months of the 2022 Russian invasion there was seemingly no end to the regime’s spinning of wild yarns trying to convince us that Putin is the new Hitler, that Moscow will soon re-create the Soviet Union, and that anything short of the US launching World War III is akin to “appeasement” in the style of Munch, 1938.

So what does motivate Russian state actions in Ukraine? To help us understand the answer to this question we can look to a new book from Sumantra Maitra, The Sources of Russian Aggression.

Maitra’s goal here is to show how Russia’s foreign policy of the past thirty years follows a fairly predictable pattern that can be well explained by the insights of structural realism. Moreover, Maitra goes on to illustrate how Moscow’s behavior in the international realm is that of a conservative and defensive realist great power. Far from being a Hitlerish regime bent on global conquest, Moscow has very specific and limited goals. Moreover, these goals could have been anticipated by Washington, and the current conflict avoided.

Russia and the Realist Model

Among international relations scholars, realists have become some of the most trenchant critics of American policymakers who obsess over countering the Russian “threat.” John Mearsheimer is perhaps the most well known realist scholar at the moment, and he has become notable for his prescient observations about how relentless NATO expansion eastward has precipitated unnecessary conflict between NATO and Moscow. It should surprise no one, then, that realist scholars are not exactly popular in Washington. After all, the only acceptable narrative in Washington is the one in which the US is the great moral crusader nation and every other regime is either insane or hellbent on global domination.

Contrary to the convenient beltway narrative, Maitra illustrates how Moscow’s behavior in the international realm is that of a status quo power. That is, the Russian regime’s foreign-policy interventions are geared toward maintenance rather than expansion.

Through his detailed analysis of the events leading up to today’s war in Ukraine, Maitra shows how Moscow’s actions have been quite predictable and rational within a realist framework. What exactly is realism? As used here by Maitra, it is the “structural realist” or neorealist theory that posits certain assumptions about the behavior of great powers (i.e., The US, Russia, China). Central to all this is the assumption that great powers will virtually always “balance” against threats presented by the dominant great power. In the current world, the dominant power is the United States, and we can expect all other great powers to seek ways to balance against US projections of power. This behavior is not dependent on the professed moral or ideological framework within each great power. Rather, great powers act to preserve themselves and to preserve their position within the international system, regardless of their internal systems of government. Maitra shows that Russia is a “security maximizer” and not a “power maximizer.” As we might expect within a defensive realist framework, Russia seeks to preserve its level of power relative to other states, but this does not require that Russia become a hegemon.

Maitra also notes a key aspect of balancing: “states actually balance against threats and not just power alone.” From this we can draw an important conclusion. Maitra continues: “Russian threat perceptions [are] dependent on aggregate power and offensive capabilities as well as perceived offensive intentions. The greater the perceived threat, the greater the balancing action observable.”

Thus, the mere existence of the United States or NATO has never been enough to prompt an aggressive response from Moscow. Rather, it is the expansion of the threat posed by NATO and the US that have led to escalating tensions, culminating in the current military response from Moscow.

30 Years of Escalations from NATO and the US

Maitra provides a significant amount of historical analysis here, focusing on NATO enlargement throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and finally coming to a head in 2008 with the Russo-Georgian war.

Maitra documents how US secretary of state James Bakers had negotiated for the reunification of Germany by promising the Soviets in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” By 1992, however, NATO enlargement had become a growing goal for both the US and a number of European states. Once again, NATO placated the Russians by claiming that even after Poland and Hungary joined NATO, no military hardware would be placed in these new member states. That pledge was subsequently broken. Thus, a pattern emerged in which NATO, a military alliance that was de facto geared toward containing the Russian state, moved its instruments of power ever closer to the Russian border.

Eventually, this combination of heightened power, coupled with NATO’s ever closer proximity to Russian territory, meant the range of “balancing actions” entertained by Moscow continued to grow.

This process finally provoked a true military response in response to open and explicit efforts by NATO to bring Georgia into the alliance. Maitra shows that unlike other previous NATO inductees, Georgia was perceived by Russia to be key to Russian security interests. A Russian military response therefore appeared justified to Russian foreign policy elites when, on August 7, 2008, Georgian forces shelled Russian allies in the breakaway region of South Ossetia. This led to open combat between Georgian forces and Russian peacekeepers.

Importantly, however, once Moscow achieved its goal of interrupting NATO expansion into Georgia, Moscow ended hostilities and contented itself with “frozen conflicts” in the region. This, Maitra shows, is characteristic of a status quo power concerned with maintenance rather than expansion.

The Georgian war proved to be something of a preview of the Russo-Ukrainian war, although the war in Ukraine is on a much larger scale.

In 2014, after yet another “color revolution” and the rise of US and NGO-backed anti-Russian policymakers in Kyiv, Russia perceived that it could permanently lose access to military resources perceived to be absolutely essential by Russian elites.

Specifically, Maitra details how Russian military assets in Crimea—especially the naval base hosting Russia’s Black Sea Fleet—were not something Moscow could tolerate losing. Thus, the 2014 annexation of Crimea soon followed. Maitra notes that other Russian interventions in Ukraine have been centered on maintaining other resources that Moscow deemed essential. Russia’s military logistics networks had come to rely on close ties with eastern Ukraine. For example, Maitra writes that “critical Ukrainian components and their servicing comprise up to 80 percent of Russia’s strategic missiles forces.” Thus, from the Russian point of view, “without Eastern Ukraine, Russian nuclear deterrence, and its naval forces, would collapse.” All this, combined with the need to keep Crimea’s naval resources, virtually guaranteed that Moscow would greatly escalate its balancing efforts against NATO.

These details also go a long way toward explaining why Russia has not responded with the same level of resistance to NATO expansion into Finland, or even the Baltics, which are both on Russia’s main, non-Kaliningrad border. Simply put, the threat of NATO expansion into Ukraine poses a far greater risk to Moscow than NATO expansion into other states of central and eastern Europe.

So, what is to be learned from all this? Central to Maitra’s conclusions is the evidence that Russia is a status quo power and not a revisionist power. In the examples presented, Russian aggression is an effort to preserve the current system, and preserve Russian state access to key strategic territories and resources. As in the case of Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014, Russian intervention ended once Moscow was satisfied it had prevented any sizable changes to the international order in Russia’s near abroad. 

None of this means that Moscow is “the good guy” in the current international order. When we are dealing with states—especially huge ones, like the US and Russia, which are both possessed of shocking amounts of coercive power—there is no “good guy.” On the other hand, revisionist states like the United States—forever pledging new wars for “democracy” and “fighting terror” while bombing half a dozen countries at any given time—pose a truly global danger. The capricious attitude of toward nuclear war among regime apologists in the US—in response to conflicts that have nothing to do with protecting key American interests—has been especially dangerous. 

Obviously, Maitra’s interpretation poses a challenge to the many narratives claiming that Russia is a revisionist power seeking to remake eastern Europe, or maybe even Eurasia. Which narrative prevails in Washington and among members of the public will be determinant of what type of intervention Washington can demand the American people tolerate and fund. If Russia is a defensive realist power, then this further strengthens the idea that the US has no interest at all in “containing” Russia or further expanding NATO.

Unfortunately, many of the most influential voices in Washington continue to push for more escalation and the narrative that Russia is the new Nazi Germany. It remains to be seen if the incoming Trump administration, which has professed a more dovish position toward Moscow, will counter the beltway’s drive for war.