How Putin spent 20 years rebuilding Russia's military 'and then just simply destroyed it' in Ukraine, according to an expert who watched it happen

• Vladimir Putin has spent his two decades in power rebuilding and reforming Russia's military.
• The force has been "shattered" in Ukraine, Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security, said.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin assumed power in 1999, the Russian military had gone through a decade of post-Soviet decay.

Over the next 20 years, Putin and his military leaders rebuilt that force into one capable of a variety of operations around the world, with advanced warships and aircraft and well-armed troops — all backed up by the world's largest nuclear arsenal.

In his book, "Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine," Mark Galeotti, a scholar of Russian security affairs who has studied the country since the final years of the Cold War, documents how Russia under Putin reformed and revamped the military and put it to the test in combat in Europe and the Middle East.

Below, Galeotti describes those reforms, what they achieved, and how, in a devastating war in Ukraine, Putin has squandered the military he built.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

When Putin came to power at the end of the 1990s, what was the state of the Russian military? What kind of condition was it in?

Truly catastrophic is the honest answer. Essentially, there had been no meaningful attempt at reform. It was a shrunken Red Army at a time when, frankly. The Russian state just simply lacked any resources to look after it, control it, protect it.

So we had cases of soldiers who had been withdrawn from Germany, and they had no homes, no barracks to go to, so they were living in unheated tank sheds. We had soldiers who weren't being paid, so no wonder they went out moonlighting as everything from construction workers to contract killers.

In this context, actually, what was happening is that the military was not in any way a guarantee of Russian security. It was actually a threat to the security of Russia and indeed its neighbors.

Putin himself, he was trained in and rose through the Soviet intelligence apparatus, so what was his relationship with the Russian military when he came to power, and what kind of role did he envision for it?

He had no real relationship with it. We have to note, after all, that this is a man who — he likes to pose as the tough-guy action figure. He can scarcely walk past a tank or jet fighter without a photo opportunity in the cockpit, but he has no meaningful military experience.

He did the bare-minimum reserve-officer training when he was at university, and then as soon as he left and joined the KGB, he used that to get himself out of any future reserve-officer responsibilities. His career outside, when he left the KGB, it was really as a kind of political fixer in St. Petersburg, so he had some dealings with the military garrison then, but really they were business dealings more than anything else.

So he came to power with no military experience and yet with a very clear belief that Russia needed to be a serious military power. His idea of great-power status is a very 19th-century one, which includes the fact that a great power has the capacity to intimidate or coerce other countries to do what it wants, and for that end, he felt that Russia needed a strong military.

Over the next eight years, Russia waged two wars, a protracted one in Chechnya and then a shorter one in Georgia, and you write that the Russian military's underwhelming performance in Georgia in 2008 enabled Putin's defense minister to push through some serious reforms. How did the Russian military underperform in that conflict in Georgia?

The question of fighting Georgia was never really in doubt. The disproportion between Russia and Georgia in terms of their forces and size was just so huge, so, of course, Russia was going to win. But there was an expectation that it was going to win a lot more neatly and effectively than it really did.

In fact, this is actually a war of blunders in terms of air bases, which had long since been mothballed being attacked, of friendly fire incidents, of one case, for example, in which a general actually could not get in touch with his own forces through his communications network and had to borrow a journalist's satellite phone in order just to talk to his own troops. Things like that, which actually, put together, led to a litany of complaints.

Russia lost more planes due to its own friendly fire incidents than to Georgian air defenses. More Russian vehicles broke down, again, than suffered combat damage. So basically, it provided the necessary ammunition to force a recalcitrant and conservative high command to accept that there was a need for reform.

In the reforms that came out of that, the "New Look" army, what were Russia's leaders seeking to change about the how the military looked and functioned?

Essentially, it was to try and drag the military out of its Soviet era. The thing is, the Soviet military had really been based around the trauma of the Second World War and this idea that the motherland might need to be defended by some sort of massive, million-man army. So it was really a structure to ensure that if need be, they could mobilize reservists, so you had large numbers of conscripts who then would be ready, and [the reform] was all about really quality rather than quantity.

The point is what, at that time, the Russian leadership realized was actually Russia was not going to face that kind of massive, existential big war. Despite the propaganda that still spread, NATO was not about to drive eastward, and if, God forbid, the Chinese ever invaded, well, frankly, the only response to that that would make any sense would be nuclear. So instead, what they thought was Russia faces a future in which it's more likely to be involved in smaller, scrappier border conflicts and power-projection missions, so it needed a smaller military but one that was more flexible, more efficient, and generally more modern.

By 2015, Russia had engaged in two more wars: the war in Ukraine in 2014, which was largely a proxy fight, and then the limited intervention in Syria. What did those conflicts show about the capabilities of the Russian military and about the impact of those reforms?

They were showing that the reforms were actually working. I mean, it was still a work in progress, but nonetheless it demonstrated that just as Russian special forces proved to be a lot more professional and efficient than we might have expected in the seizure of Crimea in 2014, well, likewise, the air force performed much more efficiently in Syria than we thought.

I remember when it first happened, when the first forces were deployed [to Syria], there was a lot of assumption within Western-defense-analyst circles that the Russians would not be able to sustain it, that sooner or later their planes would start falling out of the sky because of bad maintenance, that they wouldn't be able to get the necessary logistical support in place, all that kind of thing, and yet the Russians managed it.

So it showed that, in fact, reform was having a real impact, but I think it also, in hindsight, demonstrated two other things. First of all was that actually reform was still focused on a relative handful of elite elements within the military. It's not as though every single Russian soldier was now at that capability. But secondly, it worked precisely because of this new expectation that Russia would not be fighting a big war, and that clearly would come back to bite it in February 2022.

After you write about Donbas and Syria, you have a chapter about the investments and modernization efforts for Russia's military. Could you go through what the big-ticket investments were and what Russia was trying to do with its military by buying all that new equipment?

In many ways, it was actually trying to emulate the United States, but, of course, it's a little bit difficult to emulate the United States when you have a national GDP about the same as Spain's. But nonetheless, the idea was precisely to create a modern, flexible force that could operate across the full spectrum of military operations.

So then you had, for example, modernized nuclear forces as the final backstop of national security all the way through, though, to having the kind of highly flexible special forces whom you can then deploy into a whole variety of smaller-scale, often kind of political missions, and so everything in between. So again, it was tremendously ambitious because they were trying to hit every single base. Still, of course, the focus was on the nuclear forces and power-projection forces.

The navy continued to be, in some ways, the sort of problem child because Russia is not really a blue-water naval power, but still, even the navy was getting more than its fair share of new kit and such like. So I think it was an attempt to create a force which could basically do anything, which is great if you have the equivalent to the American defense budget. When you don't, what that means is you get to do a bit of everything, but you don't actually still manage to sustain any elements of that program.

You write that there were "myriad" indications that the 2022 war in Ukraine was not a war as Russia's General Staff would wage it. So how has the execution of the current war differed from what you would have expected from Russia's military?

The Russian military, after all, has this very intellectual approach to war fighting, with lots of deeply tedious journal articles being written about it and a very clear, almost methodological approach to actually how they would fight a war, and in particular, they categorize wars along a whole kind of spectrum, and they have different ways in which they would address each type of war.

Now, a war in a country of more than 40 million people is obviously going to be a serious conflict, at the very least a regional war. And according to how Russian military doctrine suggests you'd approach that, you would have, first of all, a long buildup, you would set up carefully structured elements to plan it, to ensure that there's a clear chain of command, to assemble all the various means, whether it's soldiers or ammunition or whatever else, needed for it.

People would spend months preparing something like this, and then when the war starts, you would start with a massed — they call it a MRAU — a massed rocket-artillery strike to shatter every element of the other side, even before your forces roll across the border. And then when they do roll across the border, you would have one clear overall commander who actually has one vision of how the war can be won.

None of that was actually present in this conflict. There was no real concept of what this war would be because Putin didn't think there was really going to be a war. There wasn't the establishment of the specialized structures. There wasn't the long-term planning. There weren't all the necessary logistics in place. There wasn't a central commander. I mean, essentially, it broke every single rule, and that's simply because, as far as Putin was concerned, this was not going to be a war. He genuinely seems to have believed that Ukraine, this noncountry, would not be defended by its own people and it would basically fall apart at the first push.

In the 14 months since Russia attacked, have you seen Russian military leaders revert back to what you would have expected from them, or is Russian leadership still kind of improvising in Ukraine?

To large extent, it's still improvising because its real problem is this: that Putin has not learned the lesson that Stalin learned. Stalin, famously and disastrously, involved himself right at the beginning of the Second World War in terms of asserting that, of course, Germany was not going to attack when it attacked.

After the first hammer blow of the German invasion, Stalin realized that he needed to step back and let the generals do the general-ing while he set political objectives. Putin continues to try and micromanage, so I think, in this case, that the problem is that the generals don't have the authority to do what they may feel needs to be done. The classic example was the previous joint-force commander, Surovikin, who essentially realized that actually the need was to entrench and prepare to defend against a Ukrainian offensive, and Putin had him removed because he wasn't aggressive enough.

So I think the generals do their bests, but they haven't coped with the fact that they've lost their best equipment and their best soldiers in those early weeks and months of the war. So the forces they've got don't really allow them to be particularly inventive or clever, and Putin is constantly placing political demands upon them that distorts any kind of strategy.

On those losses, a little over a year into the war, Russia's military has lost thousands of armored vehicles, dozens of combat aircraft, and taken tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of casualties. The war still seems like it's far from over, but what do you think the ultimate impact of this war is going to be on the Russian military and its ability to function as a military?

I think that in wider terms, it's been shattered. Even if the war ends tomorrow, in my opinion, it would take a decade to reconstitute Russian forces to the level they were at in January last year, and that's assuming that Russia can and is willing to spend what it takes and has access to the kind of computer chips and everything else that will be needed, which are very, very questionable assumptions, quite frankly.

I think that to a large extent, Putin has destroyed his own military structures. This is why I think this is Putin's last war, apart from it might lead to his political downfall, and in any case, he would probably be very, very cautious about any future adventures. But I also just simply think that he won't have the military capabilities for any but the most limited types of military deployments. So essentially, he spent 22 years building a military structure and then just simply destroyed it.