Authors

Discussion

The destruction of lives, cities, pasts and futures is definitive and unambiguous yet the identity of the destroyer and of the defender is not contained solely in concrete and steel or bones and blood. This presentation focuses on the strategic malleability of categories of identity in military recruitment and socio-military culture in Russian military thought as the force structure transitions from an aspirant contract army to a hybrid composition of different armed units each with their own ideas of self. It will explore categories such as “elite”, “special” and “national” as they are manifested in recruitment drives, unit identity and military undertakings. It will show that though great ambiguity remains about what such identifiers signify as a means of categorising people and how one is to attain them, ambiguity does not entail ambivalence about the manifestation of such identifiers. Finally, it will argue that to understand post-2022 Russian socio-military cultures and force composition, and where such trajectories may lead in the future, we must understand that identity is as important a resource in conflict as arms and ammunition as, after all, war is a cultural phenomenon as much as it is a technical undertaking or political process.