New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Andrew Monaghan, "Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War" (Manchester UP, 2025)

·1 hr 41 min·5 clips

War is “the ultimate resort to armed force to resolve the policy dispute.”

The episode stays with one question: how did Russian military thinking change as the Soviet afterlife gave way to Putin's state? Monahan starts with Boris Yeltsin and the armed forces, where dysfunction, turnover, and difficult reform set the stage. Yeltsin's relief at finding someone he saw as a proper commander becomes part of a larger argument about authority and institutional control. From there, the discussion shifts to Putin's rise in the late 1990s, first at the FSB and then into the Kremlin, and the way he was brought in to take control over different parts of state function. Monahan treats that moment as more than a simple leadership change. He sees it as the start of a push to impose reform on the armed forces. He also connects the story to the language used to divide Russian history into periods, and to the way past, present, and future fold into one another. Geo-economic competition sits in the background of the argument. So does the question of what Russia is planning for when it looks several years ahead. The conversation also lingers on the appointment of Sergei Ivanov as minister of defense. That move is presented as part of the shift away from uniformed control and toward a more centrally managed reform agenda. Monahan points to the huge turnover of officers as a sign of how severe the reform environment was. He also describes the appalling conditions that shaped that period. The result is a portrait of military reform as something lived inside institutions, not just declared from above. Steven Sakavich keeps the conversation moving with patient setup and pointed follow-ups. He gives Monahan room to think aloud while pulling the discussion back to the larger stakes. By the end, the listener has a clear sense that Russian military thought is being treated as a long institutional project, not a narrow battlefield doctrine.

As heard by us

A careful look at Russian military reform, strategic thinking, and the politics behind both.

Andrew Monaghan's conversation treats Russian military thinking as a question of institutions, authority, and reform. It moves from the strained Yeltsin era relationship with the armed forces to the way Putin reshaped defense thinking, then ties those changes to long term…

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If you want to hear how Russian military thinking was remade from the top down, press play.

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