Journal: International Relations and Diplomacy
Year: 2018

The quotation, from Vladimir Putin's annual address as president in 2006, neatly summaries the reason why Russia had to press forward with long-overdue reforms of its armed forces.Two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was still left with an oversized military organization built for large-scale mobilization and the demands of the Cold War, but highly ineffective for the type of conventional military conflicts that Russia was most likely to become involved in.The rationale behind