SCEEUS Guest Report No. 3
Introduction
In May 2025, the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS) at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs gathered a group of leading specialists and researchers focusing on various dimensions of Russian security and military affairs. The conference, “The Future Russian Way of War”, was organized around four broad themes: 1) state mobilisation; 2) hybrid tools; 3) military reform; and 4) nuclear deterrence.
Part 1: State Mobilisation
This is the first installment to be published from the conference, centered around its first theme, state mobilisation. It contains three papers.
The first paper, by Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) in Virginia, USA, summarizes how Russia has managed the problem of mobilisation for its armed forces, with particular emphasis on the years leading up to, and beyond, the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The second paper, by Yury Fedorov, an independent expert on Russian politics and military affairs based outside of Russia, expands on this topic around two broad challenges: Russia’s goal to keep enough troops in Ukraine to win the current war, and to increase its military capabilities in the Baltic Sea region and on the Kola Peninsula for a potential future conflict with NATO.
The last paper, by Margarete Klein, head of the research division for Eastern Europe and Eurasia at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin, Germany, provides a detailed analysis of various Russian mobilisation efforts, and how they may be sustained into the future.
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About the Authors
