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East View Press
(paperback)

Authors: Vasiliy Kashin, Sergey Denisentsev, et al;
Edited by Colby Howard and Ruslan Pukhov;
Foreword by David M. Glantz
ISBN: 978-1-879944-22-0
Year: October 2014
Language: English
Price:
Print $44.95
Online $44.95

Purchase for Kindle

Brothers Armed: Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine is the latest book from the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank focused on military and security issues. Presenting a collection of essays by leading Russian and Ukrainian military, security and political analysts, Brothers Armed charts the history of military reform and progress in Ukraine and Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Brothers Armed consists of four sections. Section one traces Crimea’s political history from the fifteenth century until its 2014 annexation by Russia. A crucial aspect of that history is Nikita Khrushchev’s seemingly arbitrary yet ultimately fateful decision to transfer Crimea from the jurisdiction of the RSFSR to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Bitter feelings and a deep-seated desire to right a historical wrong in part led to Russia’s sudden decision to annex Crimea some twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Section two offers a close examination of the military reform efforts of both Russia and Ukraine following the collapse of the USSR. While Russia’s Armed Forces experienced many growing pains in its effort to move from a Soviet-era conscription-based army to a versatile rapid-response army staffed mainly with contract soldiers (an effort still underway), Ukraine let the powerful military potential it inherited from the USSR simply founder and decay amid bureaucratic malaise and a failure to properly assess potential future military threats.

Section three features a set of essays analyzing the political circumstances and events leading to the annexation of the Crimea, including the role of Russia’s troops stationed in Sevastopol with the Black Sea Fleet, as well as the “little green men.”

Section four looks at the challenges in the road ahead for Ukraine and its military, including the specter of a full-blown Russian military invasion.

Mikhail Barabanov: Mikhail Barabanov is a graduate of the Moscow State University of Culture and Arts (MGUKI), and before coming to the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), worked with the Moscow City Government. Barabanov is a naval historian and an expert on naval armaments. Since 2004 he has served as the lead science editor of the arms export journal, Eksport Vooruzheniy, and is currently a CAST researcher and the Editor-in-Chief of the Moscow Defense Brief, an English-language defense magazine.

Dmitry Boltenkov: Dmitry Boltenkov is a graduate of Rostov-on-Don State University, where he specialized in quantum radiophysics. Boltenkov is a naval historian and independent naval analyst, and the coauthor of numerous books, to include: “A Century in the Ranks of the Navy: Russian Naval Aviation 1910-2010” and “Russia’s New Army.”

Sergey Denisentsev: Sergey Denisentsev graduated in 2006 from Moscow State University with a Master`s in Geography. Beginning his career as a research fellow at the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) in Moscow, Denisentsev was promoted to senior research fellow in 2012 and then to his current position of Deputy Director of the Centre in 2013. Denisentsev writes extensively on the defense industry and armed forces of Russia and the post-Soviet states.

Vasiliy Kashin: Dr.Vasiliy Kashin is a 1996 graduate of the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University. He has held positions at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for Far Eastern Studies (IFES), written for Vedomosti business newspaper, and served as deputy chief in the Russian Information Agency (RIA Novosti) Beijing office. Dr. Kashin is currently a senior researcher and contributor at the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) in Moscow, and is also a senior research fellow at the Far Eastern Studies Institute, North-East Asia Center.

Anton Lavrov: Anton Lavrov is a graduate of Tver State Technical University and an independent military analyst specializing in issues of Russian military reform and modernization and Russia’s military-industrial complex. Lavrov is also a leading researcher and authority on the Russian-Georgian conflict in 2008, and is a frequent commentator and regular contributor in the professional media on Russian military affairs. Lavrov is the coauthor of “Tanks of August,” a book detailing the military aspects of the Five-Day War, and is the coauthor of “Russia’s New Army,” an in-depth look at recent Russian military reforms.

Alexey Nikolsky: Following his military service in the Soviet Army, Alexey Nikolsky graduated from the Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics (MESI), specializing in population statistics and demographics. Since 1993, Nikolsky has reported for various daily newspapers in Moscow, and since 2001 has been a reporter for Vedomosti, a joint-venture publication of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Nikolsky is currently the Deputy Editor of the political department at Vedomosti with an interest in crime in Russia, the Russian defense industry, defense construction, Russian arms transfers, and domestic and international security.

Vyacheslav Tseluyko: Dr. Vyacheslav Tseluyko graduated from the faculty of physics and technology at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, where he is now an associate professor of political science. Dr. Tseluyko is an expert on paramilitary and nongovernmental armed groups and wrote his doctoral thesis on the “Destatization of the Military Sphere by Non-governmental Armed Formations in the Modern World.” Dr. Tseluyko has authored numerous articles on contemporary armed conflict and military reform, to include contributions to Eksport Vooruzheniy, Moscow Defense Brief, Air Fleet, and the KNU Bulletin of Political Sciences. He has also coauthored works with the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) in Moscow, to include: “Tanks of August,” “Russia’s New Army,” and “Foreign Wars;” and with the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies (CACDS) in Kiev, including: “Features of Reforming the Armed Forces and Defense Sector in Central and Eastern Europe: Lessons for Ukraine.”

Colby Howard (editor): Colby Howard is a graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, with a degree in foreign service and a master’s in security studies. Howard is an eight-year veteran of the United States Marine Corps. As an Alfa Fellow in Moscow, Howard was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) in 2013-2014.

Ruslan Pukhov (editor): Ruslan Pukhov is the cofounder and director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), a private Moscow-based think tank, founded in 1997. Pukhov graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in 1996 and attended the French-Russian Master d’Etudes Internationales Sciences Po as a postgraduate student in 1996-1997, while serving as a researcher for the Conventional Arms Project (PIR Center). Pukhov has been a member of the Public Advisory Board of the Russian Defense Ministry since 2007.