abstract: The quotation, from Vladimir Putin's annual address as president in 2006, neatly summaries the reason why Russia had to press forward with long-overdue reforms of its armed forces.Two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was still left with an oversized military organization built for large-scale mobilization and the demands of the Cold War, but highly ineffective for the type of conventional military conflicts that Russia was most likely to become involved in.The rationale behind 
journal: International Relations and Diplomacy