What Russia's Avangard announcement signalled in December 2019

What did Russia want the world to take from its news on 27 December 2019? The Russian Ministry of Defence announced the first deployment of the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle and called it a "landmark event". President Vladimir Putin said its top speed was over Mach 20 and that it put Russia's military "ahead of all other nations".

That claim was Moscow's own, made by the defence ministry and the president, and it should be read as such. The announcement was nonetheless a deliberate public statement of military standing, delivered at the close of a year in which Russia was active on several other fronts.

A week of Russian leverage

On 21 December 2019, Russia and Ukraine reached a new five-year agreement on gas transit. The same day, Nord Stream 2 said it would finish construction of its Russian gas pipeline to Europe "as soon as possible", after a contractor suspended pipe-laying because of U.S. sanctions. Energy, in other words, was a live arena of competition and pressure in the days before the Avangard announcement.

On 23 December 2019, the railway bridge over the Kerch Strait linking Russia and the occupied Crimea was inaugurated. It was reported as the longest in Europe. For Kyiv, the completion of a rail link between Russia and the peninsula it occupies was a further physical tie to territory Ukraine considers its own.

Fighting continues in Syria

On 24 December 2019, a war monitor reported that eight people, including five children, were killed when a missile struck a school in Jobas, in Idlib District, which was being used as a shelter for displaced civilians. Opposition activists blamed Russia. The strike came during the northwestern Syria offensive that began in December 2019.

Reading the moment

Set side by side, these reports show Russia presenting itself on several levels at once: as a gas supplier negotiating with Ukraine, as a builder pressing ahead with a pipeline despite sanctions, as a state binding Crimea to its own infrastructure, as a military actor in Syria, and as a power announcing a new strategic weapon. Each item stands on its own report, and none of the reports links them as a single plan.

For international readers, the practical point of 27 December 2019 is the contrast between the claim and the context. The Avangard declaration was a statement of capability from Moscow. The gas deal, the pipeline dispute and the Kerch bridge were concrete developments that Ukraine and its neighbours had to deal with in the same few days.