Traditionally, Russia has relied on strategic mass, brutal attrition and overwhelming firepower to compensate for its persistent tactical clumsiness and inflexible command structures, which have made impossible efforts to modernise into a rapid, precision-based manoeuvre force. Russia achieves strategic goals not through brilliance, but by engineering scenarios where tactical finesse is rendered irrelevant by calculated attrition and immense scale.

Analysing conflicts from the 1939-1940 Winter War and Second World War through Afghanistan, Chechnya and Georgia to the current conflict in Ukraine, confirms a repeating historical cycle. Russian forces often suffer initial, embarrassing and catastrophic failures due to strategic hubris, doctrinal mismatches and rigid, top-down command paralysis. Western observers have frequently misread these failures as systemic collapse. Instead, the Russian military possesses a unique capacity to absorb staggering losses, learn through bloody trial and error, and adapt by reverting to its historical comfort zone: grinding, positional warfare that exhausts the enemy through sheer volume and senior-level political intransigence.

Speaker

Professor Andrew Stewart is Head of Conflict Research at the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, the British Army’s think-tank. An Honorary Professor in the Cora Bell School's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University and a Visiting Professor in King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, he is a widely published author with a focus on military history, conflict and diplomacy and contemporary international security.

This is a hybrid seminar. Zoom details will be sent upon registration.

Image credit: AP: LIBKOS

Additional information:

Registration is required for this event. Accessible parking spaces are available around campus should you require them.

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