This Week’s Highlights:

• There is a striking disconnect between the consensus in Washington and the views of most Americans, writes Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security. In a survey released by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, respondents ranked Russia as the ninth most pressing threat to U.S. interests and China as the 11^th, Fontaine writes, and while 95 percent of foreign policy elites would seek retaliation in the case of a Russian attack on a NATO ally, according to a recent Eurasia Group Foundation survey, only 54 percent of the public would do the same.
• China is using its political and security ties with Russia to exploit tensions between Tokyo and Seoul in a broader bid to undermine the U.S. regional alliance system, argue Bonnie S. Glaser and Tanisha M. Fazal, the director of the China Power Project at CSIS and an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Sino-Russian military cooperation in East Asia may become more sophisticated and frequent in pursuit of this goal, they write.
• Over time, anti-access and area denial has evolved from a vehicle for useful conversations about Russian conventional capabilities to a vision of a Russian doctrine or strategy for warfighting that frankly does not exist, argues Michael Kofman, senior research scientist at CNA. The result, Kofman writes, is a general misreading of the Russian military’s operational concepts and strategy for large scale combat operations.
• After weeks of rumors that a prisoner swap between Moscow and Kiev was in the cards, the two sides finally exchanged thirty-five prisoners each on Sept. 7, writes Alexander Baunov, editor of Carnegie.ru, signaling that both sides are ready to put an end to the current limbo that is neither war nor peace, and move toward something that could truly be described as peace.
• In all 16 gubernatorial elections held in Russia on Sept. 8, candidates from United Russia or backed by the party won comfortable majorities in elections marked by an absence of fair competition and free access to media, writes Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky. The city council election in Moscow was the most contentious; more than half of the Muscovites who turned out to vote were willing to support anyone except the Kremlin candidates, Bershidsky writes. That’s a scary result for the Kremlin after this summer’s suppression and it means the only way it can win is by cheating and using force—not a sustainable state of affairs in the long run, according to Bershidsky.
• Richard Stengel, a former Time editor who became the State Department's undersecretary for public diplomacy, admits in his new book that the Obama administration was slow to react to Russia's 2016 election manipulation, but he's skeptical that Russian intervention was decisive in 2016, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius writes.

I. U.S. and Russian priorities for the bilateral agenda

Nuclear security:

• No significant commentary.

North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs:

• No significant commentary.

Iran and its nuclear program:

• No significant commentary.

New Cold War/saber rattling:

• No significant commentary.

NATO-Russia relations:

“Putin Plays Erdogan Like a Fiddle: In the increasingly close relationship between the Russian and Turkish presidents, there’s one clear alpha,” Henri J. Barkey, Foreign Policy, 09.03.19: The author, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University, writes:

• “If Erdogan has succeeded in manipulating Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in turn, has played him to the hilt. Erdogan has just completed a visit to Moscow, where a savvy Putin demonstrated to the much-impressed Turkish strongman the latest in Russian military hardware, including the SU-35 and the SU-57 air fighters.”
• “The fact remains that the two leaders are completely at odds over Syria. Russia, together with Iran, saved Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s odious regime, whereas from the onset of the rebellion the Turks supported the opposition to Assad, including its determined jihadi components. The agreement Turkey negotiated with the Russians over the future of the last remaining opposition stronghold, in Idlib province, is coming apart as the Syrian regime begins a determined push to recuperate the area, exposing not just the civilian population to harm but also the numerous Turkish military observation posts established to monitor the area.”
• “Turkey had hoped that Idlib province would remain a separate enclave buffering Turkey from another exodus of Syrian refugees until the Syrian conflict was resolved. All signs indicate that the Syrian military advance against Turkey’s allies and their jihadi collaborators will be picking up steam.”

Missile defense:

• No significant commentary.

Nuclear arms control:

• No significant commentary.

Counter-terrorism:

• No significant commentary.

Conflict in Syria:

• No significant commentary.

Cyber security:

• No significant commentary.

Elections interference:

“Why America is Losing the Information War to Russia,” David Ignatius, The Washington Post, 09.03.19: The author, a veteran foreign correspondent-turned-columnist, writes:

• “Richard Stengel, a former Time editor who became the State Department's undersecretary for public diplomacy, writes that he was once an information ‘idealist.’ He believed that in the marketplace of ideas, the truth would ultimately prevail. Not anymore.”
• “Stengel's account … is titled ‘Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It.’ Unfortunately, the first half of the subtitle is more convincing than the second. This is a tale of how government bureaucracy, inertia and, most of all, the inherent constraints of an open, democratic society made the United States so vulnerable to covert action via the Internet.”
• “Stengel frankly admits that the Obama administration was slow to react to Russia's 2016 election manipulation. … But he's skeptical that Russian intervention was decisive in 2016. … ‘Russian messaging had a lot of reach but hardly any depth.’ And he includes this memorable zinger: ‘By televising hundreds of hours of Trump's campaign speeches, CNN did a whole lot more to elect him than Russia Today did.’”
• “Stengel documents our vulnerability to manipulation, foreign and domestic. … ‘I don't believe government is the answer,’ Stengel writes ruefully. He argues for self-regulation of the ecosystem on which journalists and advertisers both depend.”

Energy exports from CIS:

• No significant commentary.

U.S.-Russian economic ties:

• No significant commentary.

U.S.-Russian relations in general:

“Great-Power Competition Is Washington’s Top Priority—But Not the Public’s. China and Russia Don’t Keep Most Americans Awake at Night,” Richard Fontaine, Foreign Affairs, 09.09.19: The author, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, writes:

• “[Washington’s] foreign policy establishment is settling on a rare bipartisan consensus: that the world has entered a new era of great-power competition. The struggle between the United States and other great powers, the emerging consensus holds, will fundamentally shape geopolitics going forward, for good or ill. And … the threats posed by these other great powers—namely, China and Russia—will consume U.S. foreign-policy makers in the decades ahead.”
• “There is a striking disconnect, however, between the consensus in Washington and the views of most Americans. … That could pose a problem for the United States’ new competitive strategy.”
• “In a survey released … by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs … respondents ranked Russia as the ninth most pressing threat to U.S. interests (tied with immigrants and refugees) and China as the 11th most pressing threat … Two-thirds of respondents preferred to deal with the rise of China through friendly cooperation and engagement, and just 30 percent preferred to limit its power.”
• “ A recent Pew Research Center poll asked Americans to rate seven threats … China came in fourth and Russia last. For the past decade, Americans have consistently ranked terrorism and cyberattacks as the two most pressing national security threats, as they did in the Chicago Council survey. Climate change increasingly finishes near the top, and … Americans still tend to rate North Korea as a bigger threat than the great powers. … Whereas 95 percent of foreign policy elites would seek retaliation in the case of a Russian attack on a NATO ally, according to a recent Eurasia Group Foundation survey, only 54 percent of the public would do the same.”
• “[T]he United States cannot compete with China and Russia while at the same time minimizing or dismissing other critical threats, especially those that animate the public more than worries about great-power trajectories. How to balance these worthy priorities in a manageable and sustainable way will be the overarching challenge for U.S. foreign policy.”

“Putin and Global Health: Friend or Foe?” J. Stephen Morrison and Judyth Twigg, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 09.06.19: The authors, senior vice president and director of the Global Health Policy Center at CSIS and a senior associate with the CSIS Russia and Eurasia program, write:

• “Over the course of this decade, Russia has consciously enlarged its engagement and commitments, at home and in the wider world, in battling both tuberculosis (TB) and non-communicable diseases (NCDs).”
• “Despite these positive steps, Russia remains a serious global health security threat. … There is a live risk of uncontrolled HIV/AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) epidemics within Russia itself, as well as ongoing risk of export to neighbors in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.”
• “Beyond Eurasia, Russia stands out as one of several flashpoints in the world that could contribute to a resurgent HIV/AIDS and DR-TB epidemic that reverses the global gains of the past 15 years. Russia’s social media practices deliberately spread confusion and distrust surrounding a wide range of preventive health measures, ranging from vaccines to harm reduction.”
• “The United States should welcome Russian contributions and collaborate with serious Russian partners in the service of broader shared health goals. At the end of the day, however, Russia will only earn a legitimate global health leadership seat through progressive, evidence-based policies and actions, which can never be wholly segregated from the noise created by its geopolitically destabilizing actions.”

II. Russia’s relations with other countries

Russia’s general foreign policy and relations with “far abroad” countries:

“Why Germany Is Ignoring Its Own Russian Spy Scandal,” Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg/The Moscow Times, 09.04.19: The author, a columnist and veteran Russia watcher, writes:

• “Last March, after the attempt to poison the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, U.K., it took the British government only a week to accuse Russia of being responsible; by the 10th day after the crime, it was already expelling Russian diplomats. Now, the same length of time after a very similar event in Berlin, the German government is reacting very differently.”
• “The victim of the Aug. 23 attack, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili (or Changoschwili, as it’s spelled in German), was an ethnic Chechen from Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge region who had arrived in Germany via Ukraine in 2015.”
• “Khangoshvili had been a field commander against the Russian army during the second Chechen war in the 2000s. … The Khangoshvili execution doesn’t come out of the blue. Russia has been suspected of ordering the killings of former Chechen fighters in Turkey, Austria, the United Arab Emirates and the U.K.”
• “Still, even though Germany knows at least as much and likely more about Khangoshvili’s murder today than the U.K. knew about the attempted poisoning of Skripal a week after that crime, the government is curiously silent about the incident. Why? Possibly because Chancellor Angela Merkel doesn’t need a public spat with Russia right now, something former British Prime Minister Theresa May likely welcomed last spring.”
• “As a mediator in Ukrainian-Russian talks on eastern Ukraine, she’s [Merkel] helping arrange a summit on the issue that could bring the first signs of progress since 2015. … In addition, Russia is about three-quarters done building the NordStream 2 natural gas pipeline to northern Germany, which her government is trying to protect from possible U.S. sanctions.”

“A Killing in Berlin Raises Uncomfortable Questions About Germany's Relationship With Vladimir Putin,” Boris Reitschuster, The Washington Post, 09.03.19: The author, a Berlin-based journalist and specialist on Russia, writes:

• “On Aug. 23, an assailant gunned down a Chechen dissident during broad daylight at a park in the center of Berlin, just a short walk from the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Now, a week later, Germans are still agonizing over the shooting's likely effect on their country's relationship with Russia.” 
• “The victim, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, was a 40-year-old ethnic Chechen from Georgia. Starting around 2001, he fought … against Russian troops during the Second Chechen War. The Kremlin, correspondingly, considered him a terrorist. For his supporters, he was a fighter for the independence of Chechnya.”
• “Germans' incredible naivete about Russia isn´t likely to change—even if there is clear proof of Russian government involvement in the Berlin killing. Needless to say, conclusive evidence will be difficult to come by, given the nature of Moscow's intelligence operations abroad. It's difficult to escape the impression that most members of the political elite … prefer not to look too closely at the incident. Murder is so messy, after all—especially when it's committed right in the middle of your capital, in full view of witnesses. Why let something like that get in the way of a flourishing relationship?”

“Russia and the Western Balkans: A Last Stand or More of the Same?” Maxim Samorukov, Institut für Sicherheitspolitik/Carnegie Moscow Center, 09.05.19: The author, deputy editor of Carnegie.ru, writes:

• “Russia’s main objective in the Western Balkans remains the same: to stymie the expansion of NATO and the EU. … This is not to say that Russia sees the accession of the Balkan states to NATO as a direct military threat. … Rather, it fears that the renewal of NATO enlargement after a decade-long hiatus will create an expansionist impulse, which later may extend to Ukraine or Georgia: countries Russia deems vital to its security.”
• “Inertia is the most probable scenario as far as Russia’s relations with the Western Balkans are concerned. The Kremlin will continue to criticize the West for its arrogance, unilateralism and disregard of Russian interests in the region. It will step up its opposition to the West’s mediation efforts if the Bosnian or Serbia-Kosovo conflicts get close to being resolved. But once a compromise is forged, Russia will grudgingly put up with the new status quo and concentrate on more pressing issues.”

“Why Foreign Investors Steer Clear of Russia’s Far East,” Alexander Gabuev, Carnegie Moscow Center, 09.09.19: The author, a senior fellow and the chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center, writes:

• “The Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) that drew to a close in … Vladivostok on Sept. 6 was the fifth time the event had been held, which makes it a good time to evaluate the forum’s work.”
• “Is it [the EEF] successful as an instrument for attracting money to the Far East? On the one hand, the methods advertised at the EEF, such as establishing advanced development zones and a free port of Vladivostok, really are leading to a rise in investment: more than 600 billion rubles ($9.1 billion at current exchange rates) has been invested in the region since 2013.”
• “But less than 20 percent of that is from foreign investors. They have invested less than $2 billion in Russia’s biggest region, rich with natural resources spanning the entire periodic table. The rest is all Russian investment.”
• “There are a multitude of reasons for investor reluctance, and many of them are articulated not only at the EEF, but at the St. Petersburg forum too. It’s guaranteed at any forum in Russia that the topics of discussion will include the ever-changing rules of the game, the growing tax burden, excess regulation, corruption, sanctions, high interest rates on loans and the interference of the security services in business.”

China-Russia: Allied or Aligned?

“How an Alliance System Withers,” Bonnie S. Glaser and Tanisha M. Fazal, Foreign Affairs, 09.09.19: The authors, the director of the China Power Project at CSIS and an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University, write:

• “For more than half a century, U.S. power in Asia has rested on the alliance system that Washington built in the years after World War II. Now, a dispute between Japan and South Korea … threatens to undo decades of progress. … Washington has largely watched from the sidelines—leaving the field to China, which has moved quickly to benefit from U.S. inaction.”
• “There are also signs that China is using its political and security ties with Russia to exploit tensions between Tokyo and Seoul in a broader bid to undermine the U.S. regional alliance system. In July, China and Russia conducted their first ever joint air patrol, which included an incursion by a Russian aircraft into airspace over the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands disputed between South Korea and Japan. Likely aimed at testing U.S. allies’ air defenses, the patrol suggests greater willingness by China to challenge the U.S. military presence in Northeast Asia.”
• “Sino-Russian military cooperation in East Asia may become more sophisticated and frequent in pursuit of this goal, and with U.S. allies divided, Beijing will have less fear that it will suffer repercussions, reputational or otherwise, for such maneuvers. … Beijing wants tensions to escalate enough to undermine the U.S. alliance system in Asia, but it does not want the relationship between Seoul and Tokyo to sour to the point of complete estrangement.”

Ukraine:

“Fresh Approaches Enable Russia-Ukraine Prisoner Swap,” Alexander Baunov, Carnegie Moscow Center, 09.09.19: The author, editor of Carnegie.ru, writes:

• “After weeks of rumors that a prisoner swap between Moscow and Kiev was in the cards, the two sides finally exchanged thirty-five prisoners each on Sept. 7. They included high-profile prisoners such as the film director Oleg Sentsov and Kyrylo Vyshynsky, a journalist for Russian state media, as well as the twenty-four Ukrainian sailors taken prisoner by Russia in the Kerch Strait last year.”
• “[T]his latest landmark prisoner exchange is designed to show that both sides are ready to put an end to the current limbo that is neither war nor peace, and move toward something that could truly be described as peace.
• “President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s team appears to have come to the conclusion that an economically successful Ukraine … is incompatible with war and a hostile Russia. Meanwhile, the fact that Russia was prepared to even start a discussion on … exchanging prisoners means … Russia has acknowledged that it is dealing with a different Ukraine, and that diplomatic tools considered useless under Zelensky’s predecessor Petro Poroshenko can be deployed.”
• “There’s also a third party in the process: the West. This has come about as a result of … the unexpected hand of friendship proffered by French President Emmanuel Macron, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s purely rhetorical but symbolically important proposal to bring Russia back into the G8. 
• “The prisoner exchange is only the first step, and Macron, Zelenskiy and even Putin can each in his own way see it as the start of relaunching the peace process. … Moscow is not opposed to the idea if the Steinmeier formula signed to bring peace to the Donbas conflict is observed … things Poroshenko was prepared to promise, but not implement, but that Zelensky, backed by a wider and more neutral-minded electorate, could do. This kind of quasi-federalization would allow Russia to save face and so would in theory suit Moscow.”

“Trump Tries to Force Ukraine to Meddle in the 2020 Election,” Editorial Board, The Washington Post, 09.05.19: The news outlet’s editorial board writes:

• “Not only has Mr. Trump refused to grant the Ukrainian leader a White House visit, but also he has suspended the delivery of $250 million in U.S. military aid to a country still fighting Russian aggression in its eastern provinces.”
• “Some suspect Mr. Trump is once again catering to Mr. Putin, who is dedicated to undermining Ukrainian democracy and independence. But we're reliably told that the president has a second and more venal agenda: He is attempting to force Mr. Zelenskiy to intervene in the 2020 U.S. presidential election by launching an investigation of the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.”
• “If his recalcitrance has a rationale, other than seeking to compel a foreign government to aid his reelection, the president has yet to reveal it.”

“Pope Francis’ Holy Diplomacy in Ukraine,” Victor Gaetan, Foreign Affairs, 09.05.19: The author, senior international correspondent for The National Catholic Register, writes:

• “In the last year, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decisively split from the Moscow patriarchate, with the explicit approval of the United States. [Pope] Francis did not follow the U.S. lead and instead cautioned Ukrainian Catholics not to meddle in the Orthodox proxy war. The pope has used his relationships with important players on all sides of the dispute—including in Moscow—to calm nerves.”
• “The pope’s neutral line on Ukraine is the latest example of how Catholic doctrine and Vatican diplomacy have diverged from U.S. foreign policy preferences since the end of the Cold War. … In the Vatican’s view, the United States’ post–Cold War foreign policy has been overly militaristic and dismissive of the benefits of peaceful diplomacy.”

Russia's other post-Soviet neighbors:

“Turkmenistan Is Suffering an Economic Crisis of Its Own Making,” Sam Bhutia, Eruasianet, 09.06.19: The author, an economist specializing in the former Soviet Union, writes:

• “Turkmenistan is tremendously rich in natural resources, with around 10 percent of the world’s total gas reserves. But the news trickling out of the isolated country does not paint a rosy economic picture.”
• “Turkmenistan suffers because it hasn’t diversified. Its immediate neighbors all have ample energy reserves, so they’re not interested in buying Turkmenistan’s chief export: gas. Gas buyers are, instead, far away. And the Central Asia-China gas pipeline, through which Turkmenistan exports gas to China, its most important buyer, is close to maximum capacity. Ashgabat has also been lousy managing other trade partners. … Gas sales to Russia only recently resumed after a 40-month hiatus.”
• “Despite these geographic challenges, Turkmenistan’s economic misfortunes are largely its own doing. A cornerstone of Ashgabat’s economic policy in recent years has been to defend its overvalued currency, the manat. To achieve this, the government has clamped down on imported goods with draconian import controls and by limiting access to hard currency. … [T]his has created severe shortages of basic goods as imports have nosedived.”
• “[T]hough officials often talk about diversifying from gas, a propped-up manat hurts its few other exports because anything Turkmenistan sells abroad is artificially expensive on global markets. … An overvalued currency means that one Turkmen manat translates into more dollars than it would if it were depreciated. This policy favors anyone with money to transfer out of the country. In other words, … someone wanting to buy dollars and send them abroad—exactly the kind of pursuit often attributed to senior Turkmen officials.”

III. Russia’s domestic policies

Domestic politics, economy and energy:

“The Kremlin Won—and Proved It Can’t Win Fair: In local elections, frustrated Muscovites voted for Communists and oddballs to keep out pro-Putin candidate,” Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg/The Moscow Times, 09.09.19: The author, a columnist and veteran Russia watcher, writes:

• “United Russia, the party once led by President Vladimir Putin himself and now headed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, has been losing popularity. According to Levada Center, … its support stood at a mere 28 percent in August, down from 39 percent in 2017. Even state-owned pollster VTsIOM put it at 32.6 percent. But in all 16 gubernatorial elections held in Russia on Sunday [Sept. 8], candidates from United Russia or backed by the party won comfortable majorities.”
• “ ‘Won’ is probably the wrong word here. All the ‘elections’ were marked by an absence of fair competition and free access to media. … The city council election in the capital was the most contentious since … 1993. A number of young politicians from what’s known in Russia as the ‘non-system opposition’ … decided to participate. They had stellar chances …, but all of them were barred from running for allegedly faking signatures they’d had to collect to be put on the ballot.”
• “Controversially, Navalny endorsed mostly Communist Party candidates as the ones with the best chances against the Kremlin team … Navalny’s tactic bore fruit to some extent … With a turnout of just 21 percent, pro-Kremlin candidates got 25 seats on the 45-member city council, down from 38 after the 2014 election. The Communist Party won 13, tame center-left party Fair Russia garnered three, the liberal Yabloko four.”
• “The low election turnout suggests most Muscovites are apathetic about politics or at least don’t think they can change the status quo. Even so, more than half of those Muscovites who turned out on Sunday were willing to support anyone except the Kremlin candidates. That’s a scary result for the Kremlin after this summer’s suppression. It means the only way it can win is by cheating and using force—not a sustainable state of affairs in the long run.”

“Repression Rollback: First Moscow Protesters See Charges Dropped,” Tatiana Stanovaya, Carnegie Moscow Center, 09.05.19: The author, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, writes:

• “In the near future, circumstances—growing social discontent, increased activity by the opposition, the crisis in political governance and the Kremlin’s losses in the elections—will force the regime to decide which section of the elite is more important: does it want to survive thanks to the merchants, or seek refuge under the shield of the warriors? Combining the two will become harder and harder. It’s possible that it will not be Putin who has to choose between them, but someone capable of demonstrating real results: something the siloviki have not yet been able to do.”

Defense and aerospace:

“It’s Time to Talk About A2/AD: Rethinking the Russian Military Challenge,” Michael Kofman, War on the Rocks, 09.05.19: The author, a senior research scientist at CNA Corporation, writes:

• “Anti-access and area denial, commonly known as A2/AD, is more than another defense community buzzword. … The term has enjoyed great utility as short-hand for a select grouping of adversary capabilities that pose major problems to America’s preferred way of conducting combat operations (unrestricted and uncontested). … But when applied to Russia, the ‘A2/AD’ frame has become dangerously misleading.”
• “Over time, anti-access and area denial has evolved from a vehicle for useful conversations about Russian conventional capabilities to a vision of a Russian doctrine or strategy for warfighting that frankly does not exist. The result is a general misreading of the Russian military’s operational concepts and strategy for large scale combat operations.”
• “There needs to be a higher-level conversation about the operational and strategic challenge posed by Russia, of which A2/AD simply forms one component. … Russian thinking is based around a theory of war that posits the adversary as a system with key subsystems or nodes, concepts that are not dissimilar from the writing of well-known U.S. strategist John Warden.”
• “Although the Russian General Staff would love to impose a cost to theater access and maneuver, they expect a U.S. aerospace blitzkrieg which cannot be blocked at the outset. Their answer is to deflect, degrade, suppress or preempt in order to functionally destroy the adversary’s ability to fight, and ultimately win the attrition exchange.” 
• “The prevalence of poor assumptions when analyzing adversary strategy remains an enduring challenge. … Russian strategy flows from a coherent vision about the relationship of technology, operational art and strategy. It is born out in a strong belief in the decisiveness of strategic operations as force integrating concepts. By organizing the force around scalable operations with strategic objectives, the Russian intent is not to attain tactical advantage with advanced capabilities, but instead to overcome tactical shortcomings through superior operational design and strategic thinking.”

“Anticipating a New Russian Military Doctrine in 2020: What it Might Contain and Why it Matters,” Dara Massicot, War on the Rocks, 09.09.19: The author, a policy researcher at RAND Corporation, writes:

• “Although Russian officials have not announced that an updated doctrine is in the works, there are several reasons why unveiling one in 2020 makes sense. … 2020 has long been an important year for Russian military planning, and it would be an ideal time to transition past the tumultuous, expensive and difficult modernization and readiness recovery work of the last decade. … From a purely bureaucratic standpoint, it is simply time for an updated military doctrine.”
• “Nine Things to Look for in the New Doctrine: A continued emphasis on non-military methods before and during military conflict … The strategy of active defense … The strategy of limited action … Congested battlefields and the growing role of private military companies … The uneasy future of arms control … No major revisions to declared nuclear-use policy … The importance of emerging classes of weapons, combat robotics, and artificial intelligence … Coded barbs against U.S. focus on great power competition … The United States would probably not be upgraded into the ‘military threat’ category.”

• “An updated military doctrine in 2020 would most likely be the last doctrine that Gerasimov will approve as chief of the General Staff.”

Security, law-enforcement and justice:

• No significant commentary.