Down but Not Out? Russia’s Future Military Capacity in the Shadow of its War on Ukraine

CSDS POLICY BRIEF • 28/2025

By Diego Ruiz Palmer

6.10.2025

Key issues

• Russia’s failures are real but not final and while its army is battered, it is still able to mass-produce weapons and endure losses;
• A dangerous mix persists, as Russia’s weakness in conventional performance coexists with nuclear, cyber and disinformation threats;
• NATO’s priority is speed of response, and it must be prepared to win the first battle of any hypothetical conflict with Russia before Moscow can turn conquest or devastation into victory.

 

Introduction

The war against Ukraine reached this past August a three-and-a-half-year milestone. Despite a deepening mobilisation of resources, Russia has been unable to conquer or defeat Ukraine, or prevent Western military assistance to Ukraine, while its action triggered the largest Western rearmament and economic decoupling effort from Russia since the late 1970s. At the same time, the extent of the devastation wrought upon Ukraine, and the scale of the battlefield losses incurred by Russia, bear witness, tragically, to its capacity to endure adversity, as well as to its determination to dominate Ukraine and bring to heel other former Soviet republics: Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan. Russia’s persistence holds a warning for them, and for the West, that, if it fails to conquer a foreign country, it can and will devastate it.

Against this sombre backdrop, reliably estimating future Russian military capabilities, and Russia’s capacity to regenerate a more capable force, could not be higher in terms of both helping Ukraine resist Russian aggression and strengthening the credibility and effectiveness of NATO’s deterrence and defence posture. Such an estimating exercise must start from the current baseline of a battered army, other Russian military components that are in a better condition and a war economy operating at nearly full strength. Today, Russia mass-produces hundreds of tanks and missiles and thousands of drones a month. At the same time, having the kit alone does not guarantee battlefield success, and the Russian economy is afflicted with several weaknesses: an ageing industrial base; an over-reliance on energy exports; manpower and skill shortfalls; and a growing vulnerability to international sanctions and macro-economic imbalances.

Any estimating exercise must also take account of the ambiguous combination of the military legacies from the Cold War, the two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s, the war against Georgia in 2008 and in Syria from 2015 onwards and the invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. This is a complex and burdensome legacy to build upon for any military establishment, particularly one intent on winning, at all costs, a large-scale war in Ukraine, while, at the same time, restoring depleted inventories, reconstituting forces and regaining a preeminent operational posture vis-à-vis the “collective West”.

The confluence of current circumstances and long-lasting influences carries with it an arc of uncertainty that this CSDS Policy Brief aims to help understand and dissipate. To this end, the policy brief addresses, in sequence, the challenges of forecasting in circumstances of systemic ambiguity and uncertainty; initial insights from Russia’s inconclusive war, so far, against Ukraine relevant to forecasting future capability; the spectrum of force development probabilities; and, lastly, observations relevant to NATO.

The challenge of forecasting in circumstances of systemic complexity and ambiguity

Forecasting reliably the future military capabilities of a foreign power, and attempting to derive from them its intentions and hypothetical future behaviour, is an inherently challenging task. In the case of Russia, this is made even more difficult by the scale, diversity and geographic distribution, across multiple time zones, of its forces, which are connected by fluctuating and often opaque command relationships and supply flows. Furthermore, the baseline for undertaking this estimating exercise is itself in flux, because of a state of war, with the resulting ambiguities and uncertainties regarding the residual strength of fighting formations; the rates of unit reconstitution; and the future geographic and operational layout of new and reconstituted forces. At the other end of this arc of uncertainty, systemic determinants, such as geography, the weight of history, notably the Soviet era, economic and social constraints, and the pervasive influence of the regime’s brand of ideology and of entrenched bureaucratic practices, will all continue, to varying degrees, to shape Russian strategy and force development.

This complex baseline is blurred further by competing policy choices and operational experiences. Over the last three decades, Russian preferences for conventional force employment have oscillated between the Cold War legacy of preparing to undertake large-scale, deep operations against NATO; the experience of local wars in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine in 2014 and Syria; and the “New Look” force model of smaller brigade and battalion-size formations. The “Special Military Operation” against Ukraine, launched in February 2022, borrowed from all three influences:

– A relatively large ground force prepared, on paper, to conquer Ukraine rapidly, in the form of deep, combined-arms ground operations, supported by air assault and air-landing operations, missile, air and electronic attack strikes, and an amphibious landing operation on Ukraine’s western Black Sea coast. All of these elements bore the hallmarks of traditional Soviet operational art to promptly knock out an adversary, through surprise, speed and shock;

– A combination of the indiscriminate use of lethal force, such as in Chechnya and Syria, and non-kinetic methods and tactics, as used to conquer and occupy Crimea in 2014. The closest precedent to the 2022 invasion was Russia’s mix of kinetic and non-kinetic operations in the Donbas in 2014-2015; and

– A reliance on untested brigade and battalion-level tactical groups that had neither the operational capacity, notably because of manpower shortfalls, nor the training, to engage in high-intensity operations at short notice and at scale.

The result in Ukraine has been a sequence of operational mishaps and reversals, as will be seen below, that is reflective of the difficulty that the Russian military has had, since the end of the Cold War, in leaving behind the Soviet doctrinal legacy, while attempting to embrace, under the label of “new generation warfare”, without proper assimilation, imported Western concepts and force constructs, such as deep attack and network-centric warfare. These have held appeal with the Russian military since the 1980s, but they require high levels of technical and tactical skill that many Russian forces typically do not have.

Initial insights from Russia’s war against Ukraine: poor planning and performance

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 highlighted a paradox and a disquieting aspect of the Russian political calculus: while Russia was willing to assume the risk of irretrievably unsettling the post-1990 European political order through war and, possibly, triggering a wider conflict, the poor performance of Russian forces in Ukraine revealed that the planning for the invasion was deeply flawed. In particular, it assumed incorrectly that the Ukrainian armed forces would not resist and that the Ukrainian people would welcome the invaders. Furthermore, the planning did not adequately cater for the contingency of a less-than-perfect execution of the Special Military Operation. In Ukraine, Russian forces lacked suitable planning options to rapidly adapt their tactics and logistics. They have had to improvise endlessly, but cumulative improvisation does not amount to orderly adaptation, much less to dependable, longer-term transformation.

Greater operational agility could, possibly, have resulted in improved battlefield effectiveness, for example, by pulling the tanks back behind the infantry to reduce their exposure to Ukrainian ambushes; redesigning the chain of command to overcome the hodgepodge of units belonging to the Ground Forces, Airborne Forces, Naval Infantry, National Guard, the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, the Cossacks, the Chechens and the private military companies, like the Wagner Group; or repositioning forces from the original layout more deliberately, to optimise force employment by a combination of skilled deception, targeted breakthroughs and rapid encirclement operations. In Ukraine, both the Cold War legacy of “deep operations” by large formations and the more recent “New Look Model”, with its emphasis on smaller combined-arms brigades and battalion tactical groups (BTG), have been found wanting. Neither the much-touted “reconnaissance-strike complex” construct from Soviet times, in the form of deep precision strikes by tactical ballistic and cruise missiles, nor the “information confrontation” campaign (Russian terminology for disinformation activities and deception operations), delivered the hoped-for results. Electronic warfare and cyber operations did not fare much better, despite a doctrinal emphasis on controlling the electromagnetic spectrum. Neither played a decisive role in the 2022 invasion, nor was it able to prevent reversals on the battlefield thereafter.

Lastly, the war in Ukraine has shed little light on Russia’s capacity to generate a so-called Anti-Access/Area-Denial (A2/AD) “bastion” in and around the Crimean Peninsula. This situation reflects Ukraine’s limited capacity, so far, to attack Russian forces stationed in Crimea in a comprehensive way. Accordingly, the various Russian offensive and defensive systems composing such a bastion – ground-launched cruise missiles; surface-to-air missiles; coastal defence missiles; etc. – have not operated as a single A2/AD macro-system. The poor performance of Russia’s command and control in Ukraine has raised questions, however, regarding its capacity to integrate synergistically the multiple components of an A2/AD bastion, such that a capable adversary would be denied access persistently to airspace, territory and sea areas under Russian control.

The intense artillery barrages of 2022-2023 depleted Russia’s vast ammunition stockpiles, but did not help deliver the hoped-for breakthroughs. The sustained drone and missile campaign since 2023 has battered Ukraine, but not changed significantly the parameters of the confrontation on the ground. By comparison, astute strikes by Ukraine against strategic targets deep into Russia, Ukraine’s land incursion into the Kursk region and the disabling of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, while not game-changing, are revealing of both growing Ukrainian skill and persistent Russian disarray.

In reforming its military from 2009-2010 onwards, Russia tried an impossible doctrinal and force structure mix: a combination of Soviet operational art and “new generation warfare” doctrine; advanced command and control and poor officer leadership; ambitious exercises in the Zapad-Vostok-Tsentr-Kavkaz series and insufficiently rigorous tactical training; Soviet-style armies and divisions and Russian brigades and BTGs; and Soviet-era and new equipment. Barring Ukraine’s acquiescence to its conquest, with such a mix, Russian operational failure was almost preordained.

The arc of force development probabilities

Looking forward, Russia will need to consider how best to balance the legacy of a battle-hardened army, but which is severely bruised across all ranks and largely depleted, compared with pre-2022 inventories and stockpiles. Russia’s war economy is producing equipment at a high rate, which would allow Russia to reach in the next several years inventories larger in scale than those available at the start of the invasion. In 2025, the Russian armed forces are expected to take delivery of 1,500 new and repaired tanks and another 3,000 armoured vehicles, over 2,000 tactical ballistic and cruise missiles, 60,000-70,000 drones of all types and 3 million artillery shells.

The challenge for the Russian Army, however, will be to reform satisfactorily to better leverage materiel production and availability, including deliveries of ammunition from North Korea and critical electronic components from China. Otherwise, the recruitment, retention, training, logistical and infrastructure momentum needed to meet the force regeneration demand will fall short. Meeting this challenge will require, in particular, conducting an honest introspection exercise into what went wrong in Ukraine, and why, from the top ranks down to the foot soldiers in the trenches. By the end of 2023, all the force component commanders of the Special Military Operation (the four Military Districts, Airborne Forces, Aerospace Forces and Black Sea Fleet), who had been hand-picked and promoted to the highest operational positions, had been fired for incompetence.

Depending on the length and outcome of the war in Ukraine, and the features of a cease-fire, armistice or peace settlement, Russia will also need to balance the competing requirements associated with garrisoning any remaining occupied territories and those associated with balancing NATO defensive deployments and reconstituting a sustainable offensive capability. As long as the war against Ukraine continues to consume vast resources, wider regeneration of forces will remain challenging. Furthermore, Russia likely will not have the luxury to select exclusively one from among the three constructs it pursued in the run-up to the 2022 invasion. Ambiguity and adversity will likely endure.

Taking action against NATO will require agile and mobile forces able to execute a rapid coup de main operation and deliver a decisive fait accompli, on the model of the initial operations into Prague in August 1968 and Kabul in December 1979. At the same time, in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the initial coup de main by airborne and special operations forces (Spetsnaz) was only the precursor for a much larger invasion force. In June 1984, the Soviet Army rehearsed with 60,000 troops (and, unusually, no participation by the forces of other Warsaw Pact countries) the execution of a large-scale coup de main operation against West Germany, aimed at achieving a territorial fait accompli, during exercise Zapad84.

Accordingly, Russia will likely keep in its force structure larger, combined-arms formations, as a follow-on force, to deter and fend off a NATO counter-attack. Both kinds of operations – the initial coup de main and the larger force engagement – will also likely rely on deception and disinformation activities and nuclear intimidation, as well as on offensive electronic warfare and cyber operations, to fragment NATO operationally and weaken the Allies’ political cohesion and resolve. Collapsing NATO from the inside, rather than defeating allied forces piecemeal, was a core objective of the Soviet Cold War “deep operations” construct. Russian coercive activities against various Allies undertaken in autumn 2025 fit into the pattern of belligerence that could be expected ahead of a daring coup de main operation. In this case, however, they are likely aimed at turning NATO’s attention away from Ukraine and towards its own security, as a means to isolate Ukraine from the West.

Conventional force scaling and composition 

The observations above suggest the following provisional findings for Russian force regeneration, against the current, uncertain backdrop. Indeed, starting in December 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defence has seemingly undertaken a series of reforms, reflecting most likely the painful lessons learned in Ukraine:

– Disbandment of the five regional Joint Strategic Commands (Obedinonnye Strategieheskoye Komandovanie or OSK) associated, since 2010, with the Western, Eastern, Central and Southern Military Districts (MD) and, since 2014, with the Northern Fleet;

– Partition of the Western MD into resurrected Leningrad and Moscow MDs, with the Leningrad MD facing Finland and the High North;

– Resubordination of the Russian Navy’s fleets to the main naval staff and transformation of the three army corps previously associated with the Baltic, Northern and Black Sea Fleets into combined-arms armies; and

– Creation of new combined-arms armies, army corps and motorised-rifle divisions (MRD), and restructuring of several brigades into new MRDs; as well as the conversion of an air assault brigade into an airborne division and the strengthening of two other airborne divisions.

These measures point to the abandonment of the most innovative aspects of the reforms initiated in 2009-2010, notably the pursuit of greater jointness and air-land-sea force integration, in favour of a return to familiar, Soviet-style structures and patterns.

The Russian Army will likely jettison the BTG construct and retain a combination of high-readiness brigades and divisions for initial operations and variable readiness divisions for follow-on operations. The brigades will probably combine air assault and Spetsnaz forces, trained and equipped for high-risk/high-payoff, coup de main operations, with sufficient staying power to prepare the ground for follow-on forces, including air-dropped and air-landed airborne divisions. Among tank divisions, a small number might be kept in peacetime at high readiness and task-organised as a modern-day “Operational Manoeuvre Group”, to back up the coup de main forces with a mobile, armoured fist, on the model of the Soviet Army’s 5^th Guards Army Corps of the early 1980s stationed near Minsk. The coup de main would become a coup de poing. In this context, it is possible that the Russian Army might have looked upon the ill-fated 3rd Army Corps in Ukraine as an impromptu testbed for such a mobile force. Such a tiered force construct, as suggested above, would allow Russia to gradually regenerate its force structure while trying to manage the availability of new and repaired equipment, as well as of battle-tested veterans and new contract soldiers and conscripts.

It is unclear at this time how a lesser emphasis on jointness could adversely affect air-land force integration. In Ukraine, the Aerospace Forces exhibited a low level of operational capacity in conducting offensive sorties, as well as defensive operations to protect Russian airspace, despite having a long-standing doctrinal focus on deep air operations and a fairly modern fighter fleet (Su-30SM Flanker, Su-34 Fullback and Su-35S Flanker E). It is only from 2023 onwards, with the retrofit of Cold War dumb bombs with laser designation kits, that fighters started to have a greater impact on the ground battle, although still limited. Bombers fired their air-to-surface cruise missiles from the safety of Russian and Belarusian airspace, while contending with the constraints of poor fighter/bomber integration skills and declining airborne early warning coverage, following the loss of several A-50 Mainstay aircraft. In retrospect, the standing up of air and air defence armies in 2010, followed by the merger in 2015 of the Air Force with the Space Defence Forces, did not deliver the expected synergies. Russia may restore the separation between tactical and homeland air forces, and also resurrect air armies tasked to conduct offensive operations and equipped with Su-34 and Su-35S aircraft.

The future role of naval forces in Russian theatre warfare remains an area of great uncertainty, given the gaps in maritime capability and capacity exposed during the war against Ukraine. The Russian Navy will likely continue to emphasise the building of nuclear-powered, cruise-missile carrying attack submarines of the Yasen-M class, as well as Admiral Gorshkov and Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates, all equipped with Kalibr land-attack cruise missiles and, in the future, the Zircon hypersonic missile, to threaten adversary land targets from the sea. A key wartime mission would be to interdict European seaports of debarkation for inbound North American reinforcements, rather than sink sealift ships at sea in the North Atlantic. In recent years, the Russian Navy has demonstrated a capacity to flush several cruise missile-armed attack submarines at once into the North Atlantic, building upon the Soviet legacy of earlier, sudden submarine surges in May-July 1985 and March-May 1987. Coup de main operations could also involve the employment of naval infantry demolition teams, as well as pocket submarines, against shore infrastructure and underwater cables.

The nuclear shield

Russia maintains a wide array of strategic and non-strategic nuclear forces to intimidate and deter adversaries and, if necessary, escalate to the first use of nuclear weapons. Russia has demonstrated since the end of the Cold War an enduring capacity to modernise and diversify its nuclear arsenal, including, recently, with land-based intermediate-range ballistic missiles and air- and sea-launched aero-ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Nuclear forces would be the key ingredient to transform a territorial fait accompli against a neighbouring nation by dual-capable conventional forces into a multi-layered “nuclear bastion”. The Kola Peninsula, Kaliningrad, Belarus and, possibly, the Crimean Peninsula, represent, in different ways, potential launching pads for such an expeditionary coup de main.

At the same time, Russia exhibits persistent capability shortfalls in areas such as ground and space-based early warning and attack characterisation; surveillance and reconnaissance; target acquisition and planning; cuing; and damage assessment. Because of these shortfalls, Russia may have only a limited nuclear capacity between a few, demonstrative missile firings and massed missile strikes. Hence, behind all of the belligerent nuclear rhetoric, controlled escalation to nuclear use, including the transition from conventional to nuclear operations and the attainment of desired outcomes in a discriminate way, short of large-scale devastation, could prove challenging to Russian planners and decision-makers. Accordingly, creating compelling dilemmas to boost Western deterrence before or defence after a Russian aggression against NATO, will require addressing, through calibrated counter-measures and demonstrations, putative triggers for Russian nuclear first use, including the ambiguous and uncertain quality of declared, or assumed, Russian “red lines”.

Final considerations

The insights above suggest that any effort to estimate the future path and achievements of a Russian force regeneration process will remain clouded by ambiguities and uncertainties associated with the future direction and outcome of the war in Ukraine; the strategic implications of Russia’s increasingly belligerent behavior towards NATO; Russian policy and doctrinal preferences regarding future force development and military education and training; the capacity of the Russian economy and society to adapt to a more adverse environment, and of the Russian defence industrial base to sustain and expand its design and production effort; and, lastly, the ability of the regime to control society and leverage Russia’s international partnerships effectively. This is, by any measure, a tall order.

In reflecting upon the initial lessons of the war against Ukraine for Russia and for NATO, it is important to bear in mind how challenging it is to undertake genuine military transformation, even in peacetime and in the best of circumstances, and why it has proven so difficult for Russia, which is afflicted with a backward economy, an aging and apathetic population, an inadequate education system and a corrupt military. Russia’s operational failure in Ukraine also illustrates pointedly how challenging it is to recover downstream from faulty setting conditions at the start of a conflict and how a lack of proper preparation at the strategic level compounded gross gaps in operational-level leadership competence and tactical-level skill. For NATO, a clear lesson from this early episode of the conflict is that allied forces must prepare to win decisively the “first battle” of a hypothetical war with Russia, as the surest route to winning the “last battle” irretrievably and bringing the conflict to a favourable end as quickly as possible.

At the same time, in Ukraine, Russia has avoided, so far, a strategic defeat. Great risks would be involved for NATO in misreading the initial lessons from the war in Ukraine, for example, in taking comfort from Russia’s persistent operational failure in Ukraine; the obsolescence of its economy; its growing dependence on China; and its demographic decline. Whereas the lessons of greater import for European security lie in Russia being prone to strategic miscalculation; to persisting in an uncertain military enterprise, despite successive battlefield reversals; and to sacrificing human life and societal well-being to preserve regime integrity and pursue geopolitical advantage.

The greatest risk for NATO would be to misread the most important lesson from the conflict in Ukraine so far and prepare for the wrong war: since summer 2022, Russia has been fighting, by default, a long, contested war, whereas Russia’s preferences and advantages lie in waging decisively and successfully a short war. While the Allies must be prepared for the possibility that a war with Russia could be drawn out, the first priority must be to deter and defeat a short war of either conquest or devastation.

Russia will remain an asymmetric adversary for the Alliance because of its geographic proximity to Europe and enduring sources of strength: a vast nuclear arsenal; a large capacity to generate forces and allocate economic resources to a war economy under duress; and its reliance on subversion and disinformation. Since 1949, NATO has successfully countered and neutralised this Russian asymmetric challenge. Continuing to do so will, in the future, require a much greater collective commitment by European allies and Canada, in partnership with the United States, as part of a rebalanced Alliance.

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