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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians

growth and was among the vanguard in embracing
e-government and other innovations associated with
a modern open society. Since the invasion of Ukraine
and the Russian military’s menacing gestures along
its border, Estonia has ramped up defense spending
and launched war games to increase preparedness.
Indeed, all three Baltic countries announced major
increases in military spending in 2016.

Conditions are even worse for states where Russia
has instigated frozen conflicts. Russia maintains
military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both
on the territory of Georgia, and in Transnistria. These
enclaves, as well as the occupied portions of Ukraine,
are impoverished, heavily militarized, and marked by
gangsterism and corruption.

Crimea is an instructive case for neighboring peoples
who live under the threat of Russian military interven-
tion. Residents of the peninsula enjoyed a reasonable
array of civil liberties under the Ukrainian government.
Under Russian occupation, all that has changed.
Moscow has sent Russian officials to run the region as
de facto viceroys. Freedom of the press, which was rel-
atively vigorous before 2014, has been extinguished,
and independent voices have been arrested or forced
into exile. Property rights are routinely ignored, and
expropriation is used as a blunt instrument against
those who oppose the new order.

The fate of the Crimean Tatars is especially tragic,
given the group’s history of persecution and mass
removal during Soviet times. Their leaders have been
silenced or driven out of the region, their commemo-
rations banned, and their media muzzled. By support-
ing a still-deadly frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, the
Russian leadership has ensured that the attention of
policymakers in the democracies will be focused on
the fighting there, and not on the dreadful conditions
in Crimea.¹²

Since its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has done its

best to maximize the intimidating effect on other
neighbors. It conducted war games in which 33,000
troops rehearsed the invasion of Sweden, Norway,
Finland, and Denmark.¹³ The Russian navy has held
multiple, large-scale exercises in the Black Sea to defy
NATO, assert its control over Crimea, and threaten
Georgia.¹⁴ Russian and Abkhaz separatist officials
have announced what amounts to a merger of troops
from the two sides under the command of a Russian
officer.¹⁵ Russia’s military is developing the capacity
to simultaneously carry out several operations on the
scale of the Ukraine conflict—limited, rapid offensives
involving elite troops, deception, and propaganda that
would leave opponents fumbling for an appropriate re-
sponse.¹⁶ The intervention in Syria has already demon-
strated Russia’s ability to project force unexpectedly in
a new theater while maintaining its existing engage-
ments in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Russia’s renewed embrace of cross-border aggres-
sion has had wide repercussions in Central Europe,
a region that had expected a secure alignment with
the democratic world after the end of the Cold War.
Poland, for example, had achieved something quite
remarkable prior to 2014, given its history of domina-
tion by outside powers. It enjoyed friendly relations
with Germany, one of its past occupiers, and stable
ties with Russia, traditionally the other main threat
to its sovereignty. After the annexation of Crimea,
Poland’s leaders were forced to seriously contemplate
the possibility of a Russian invasion, especially given
Putin’s bellicose language about the speed with which
his tanks could reach nearby capitals.¹⁷ As a result, Po-
land has embarked on a military buildup to maintain
its hard-won independence and territorial integrity.¹⁸

But no single European country could ever match
Russia’s present military might. If Poland, the Baltic
states, and their allies fail to maintain solidarity based
on shared democratic standards, it will not be long
before their sovereignty erodes under pressure from
the Kremlin.

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