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

A cutting-edge investigation of how Russia makes war.

Russian strategy in the twenty-first century has been described in terms of 'hybrid' warfare, an approach characterised by measures short of war, such as cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. But as the invasion of Ukraine has brutally demonstrated, conventional armed violence remains a key element of Russian power.

In Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War (Manchester UP, 2025), Andrew Monaghan offers a high-level view of Russian thinking about warfare. Drawing on extensive Russian sources, he addresses important questions that have been overlooked by most Western commentators: what is the military leadership's distinctive idea of twenty-first-century blitzkrieg? How does it understand holistic territorial defence? How does it manage the shifting balance between offence and defence?

Introducing key concepts from Russian military thinking, Blitzkrieg and the Russian art of war is a crucial resource for understanding Russia's resurgent role on the global stage and the devastating threat the country poses to the international order.

Andrew Monaghan is Academic Visitor at St Antony's College, Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. 

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He served as the editor of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) newsletter from 2016 to 2018 and is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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