Article published in The Daily Mail, 3 June 2025. © Richard Kemp

Russia is wounded, far more badly than the Kremlin ever believed possible. Ukraine’s extraordinary special forces mission deep inside enemy territory has done vast damage to Putin’s war machine.

There will be retaliation. The Russian president, afraid more than anything of appearing weak, cannot be seen to let such a devastating attack go unanswered.

Since he first ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has frequently warned he is willing to use tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield – often issuing these threats through lackeys in Russia’s state-controlled media.

Now he might well calculate that, by unleashing such a device, he can demonstrate his invincibility and force Ukraine’s surrender. The appalling reality is that such a calculation might be right.

Europe does not have an effective nuclear deterrent. Britain, once the predominant nuclear power of the continent, has shamefully dismantled its own arsenal. We used to have tactical nuclear weapons, with immense blast power but limited radiation yields, which could be dropped from Vulcan bombers.

We also possessed short-range Lance tactical ballistic missiles capable of being armed with atomic warheads. But no longer. Our only nuclear option now is the Doomsday weapon, a strategic missile of cataclysmic power, designed solely for self-defence, to deter an enemy from waging all-out war on Britain.

To use one of these against Russia as punishment for anything they do in Ukraine would be a suicidal escalation. A global holocaust would ensue. And Putin knows we will never provoke that.

The French do have tactical nuclear weapons, which can be delivered by cruise missiles launched from the air. But these also are intended for last-ditch self-defence. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 3 June 2025. © Richard Kemp

Nobody in their right mind thought Putin would come to the latest round of peace talks in Istanbul with any seriousness. And so it has proven. His demands are straight out of Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko’s negotiating playbook: demand the maximum, present ultimatums and do not give one inch.

Putin’s terms for a final settlement are no different from his diktats from the start, including international recognition of Moscow’s occupation of the four regions he considers Russian territory, and a guarantee Ukraine never joins any international alliances. Even Putin’s pathways to a temporary ceasefire require withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from all of the four regions, demobilisation of the armed forces, cessation of international military aid and electing a new government.

In other words: total capitulation, with Ukraine surrendering its sovereignty, partitioned, isolated, disarmed and a Russian puppet government in Kyiv. That doesn’t mean negotiations shouldn’t continue in the hope of achieving less punitive terms. The Ukrainian government has already signalled it would be ready to accept the temporary occupation of territory Russia has already captured. But it is hard to see how Putin will climb down from his maximalist position without significant changes on the battlefield or to the economic situation.

President Trump tried a softball approach with Putin, extending the prospect of major economic benefits through a return to normalisation in US-Russia relations. Putin hasn’t bought that even though he has ham-fistedly attempted to mollify Trump and encourage him to abandon Ukraine with his disingenuous ploy of engaging in negotiations. Trump obviously sees right through that. He said he was ‘p—-d off’ by Putin’s proposal that Ukraine should be placed under external administration with elections overseen by the UN.

The US now needs to try a different approach. Trump can say he did everything he could to end the bloodshed in the first months of his presidency but Putin’s intransigence now demands different tactics.

What would those tactics be? Continue to hold out an olive branch while doubling down on US military backing to Ukraine and Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 1 June 2025. © Richard Kemp

Britain must urgently restore tactical nuclear weapons to its defence arsenal. That thought understandably fills many minds with horror but the logic of strategy means that these weapons would in fact make us safer. If the enemy possesses a devastating capability that we do not he is far more likely to use it on us. And Putin, not to mention China, has vast and growing stockpiles of tactical nuclear weapons while we have none. Now it seems the Government may be thinking about tackling this vulnerability in the defence review due to be unveiled this week.

After the Cold War ended Britain dropped tactical nuclear weapons from its inventory. Before that, faced by the conventional superiority of the Warsaw Pact, these bombs had been intended to halt Soviet armoured thrusts into Western Europe if our ground and air forces couldn’t hold them back. They are relatively low yield, including in radiation, and are intended to obliterate major military targets such as troop concentrations, massed tank formations and airbases, rather than laying waste to entire cities and creating wide area nuclear fall-out.

With highly inadequate European conventional forces now confronted by a violent menace, shown only too clearly by the war in Ukraine, we are again back in a situation where Nato nations are faced with the choice of resorting to tactical nuclear weapons or losing everything to Russian advances. Of course our strategic nuclear forces are intended to deter enemy aggression, but their credibility in a situation short of nuclear Armageddon now lies exposed. Is Putin likely to think that our response to his tactical nuclear strikes would be to go to ultimate escalation with a nuclear attack against Moscow or St Petersburg? And if not, what?

The Americans have tactical nukes deployed in Europe but they can withdraw them at any time. And with so much at stake, can we any longer rely absolutely on the US nuclear umbrella to defend us and our Nato allies? Hopefully yes, but optimism is a fool’s strategy. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 30 May 2025. © Richard Kemp

The EU’s foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas, says ‘Israeli strikes in Gaza go beyond what is necessary to fight Hamas’. Perhaps she should head to Jerusalem and give precise instructions to the IDF on what they should be doing to eliminate the Hamas terrorist regime – assuming that’s what she actually wants. She can tell them how you kill terrorists entwined into the population, hiding in tunnels beneath schools, hospitals and houses, protected by the most comprehensively booby-trapped terrain in the history of warfare, all while minimising harm to civilians.

Of course, like so many other blowhard Western politicians, she doesn’t have a clue. Fortunately the IDF does and has been waging this hugely complex war for 19 months with a combination of fighting prowess and humanitarian restraint that no other army could match. That is the true picture that I have witnessed with my own eyes, unlike the vast array of armchair commentators and rabble-rousers with their lies and distortions intended to break Israel or signal their own non-existent virtues or both.

And Israel has had unparalleled success. They have killed something like 20-25,000 Hamas terrorists, including many senior commanders. The latest of these is Mohammed Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, blown apart in an air strike earlier this month as he was skulking in a tunnel beneath a hospital in Khan Younis. His older brother Yahya, from whom he took over the reins of Hamas, met his maker last October. Shortly before that Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s military commander, saw the same fate.

The list goes on, and many more would have joined it had the IDF not been so determined to avoid killing the hostages and where possible to avoid harm to civilians in line with their scrupulously observed obligations under International Humanitarian Law. Those who have been dispatched have been replaced, though by less experienced and less able terrorists, but I’m not sure how long the list of applicants will be for the Sinwar brothers’ uniquely hazardous job. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2025. © Richard Kemp

US diplomacy has potentially brought India and Pakistan back from the brink of what could easily have turned into a much wider and more violent conflict. For the time being at least – the ceasefire over the weekend, if it holds, is due to be followed up by more substantive negotiations.

On Saturday morning, a couple of hours before Pakistan’s air force launched missiles at Indian military bases, lieutenant general Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the army spokesman, accused India of ‘pushing the whole region towards a dangerous war with its madness’.

In fact it is Pakistan’s madness that is responsible for the most ferocious conflict between the two countries since the war in 1971. India’s air strikes against terrorists were an entirely justified response to the April 22 slaughter of 26 civilians in Pahalgam, the most deadly attack on Indian civilians since the 2008 bomb and gun attacks in Mumbai.

Indian intelligence has linked the Pahalgam shootings to Lashkar-e-Taiba, an internationally proscribed terrorist group. LeT’s primary focus is on violently separating Kashmir from India to use as a base for the eventual conquest of India in order to force Islamic rule on the subcontinent, destroying Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity. It also has strong connections with Al Qaeda and has been implicated in global terrorist attacks including in the UK, US and the Middle East. LeT is a proxy of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency which funds and directs it.

Of course Pakistan denies that, claiming only to provide moral, political and diplomatic support to Kashmiri separatists. But some years ago, when working in British intelligence, I saw numerous reports confirming the ISI’s direct role with LeT and other jihadist groups, and the situation won’t have changed since then. Furthermore, Pakistan’s extensive use of a range of terrorist organisations as instruments of state policy is widely understood and has been admitted by Pakistani leaders. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 7 May 2025. © Richard Kemp

In his first interview since leaving the White House, Joe Biden accused President Trump of appeasing Russia over Ukraine. Well, Biden certainly knows all about appeasement. It was the hallmark of his presidency and accounts for much of the instability in Europe and the Middle East today.

Before Putin invaded, Biden sent the worst possible signal, seeming to suggest that a ‘minor incursion’ might not be too big a deal. Then when the tanks rolled in he offered to evacuate the leader of the embattled country to safety. That would have been like Roosevelt flying Churchill out of Britain in 1940.

Zelensky’s response was: ‘The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.’ He got some of the ammunition but never enough, despite Biden’s claim in this interview that he had given Ukraine ‘everything they needed to provide for their independence’.

In reality his administration gave Ukraine just enough to enable them to defend against Russia but far from sufficient to achieve much more than prolonging the bloodbath. Biden may have treated Zelensky nicely in the White House but every plea for battle-winning weapons was met by months of procrastination and delay. That included tanks, ATACMS long-range missiles and F16 combat planes, all of which, if delivered rapidly and in sufficient quantities, could have turned the tide.

Furthermore, every offensive weapon that was provided was grudgingly handed over with the caveat that it couldn’t be used against targets on Russian soil, a restriction only partially eased late last year.

With Putin launching assault after assault from his side of the border, that really did force Ukraine to fight with one hand tied behind its back. And it was all down to appeasement and fear in the White House in the face of never-ending bombast from the Kremlin.

Biden rejected Trump’s attacks on European Nato members freeloading on the US, fantastically claiming that ‘it saves us money Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 26 April 2025. © Richard Kemp

The death of Pope Francis brought Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky together face to face for the first time since their abortive meeting in the Oval Office in February. Both sides described their 15-minute discussion as productive, with Zelensky hailing it as potentially ‘historic’.

The French president Emmanuel Macron appeared to try to muscle in on the meeting but was sharply waved off by Trump. Perhaps no bad thing, as it is understood that the Europeans were involved in preparing Zelensky for the White House meeting that went so badly wrong.

Putin did not attend the funeral. He had met Francis three times in the years before he invaded Ukraine, but rejected the Pope’s offers to travel to Moscow since the conflict began. During the Second World War, one of Putin’s predecessors, Joseph Stalin, famously asked ‘How many divisions does the Pope have?’ It’s said that when Stalin’s wit reached the Vatican, Pius XII responded, ‘You can tell my son Joseph that he will meet my divisions in heaven.’

For Zelensky’s comments on his meeting with Trump to be even partially right, we may assume that Pope Francis’s celestial divisions intervened in Rome. On X, Zelensky wrote: ‘Good meeting. We discussed a lot one on one. Hoping for results on everything we covered. Protecting lives of our people. Full and unconditional ceasefire. Reliable and lasting peace that will prevent another war from breaking out.’

Following a meeting between the US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin the previous day, Trump had said: ‘A good day in talks and meetings with Russia and Ukraine. They are very close to a deal, and the two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to “finish it off” … most major points are agreed to.’

If this also is right (we have heard such comments before), we may be at the closest point to achieving a full ceasefire in this war than at Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2025. © Richard Kemp

Did Putin just blink first on Ukraine? Since taking office in January, Donald Trump has been demanding an end to hostilities. The US president proposed a full ceasefire which Ukraine accepted but Russia rejected, conditioning it on a halt in Ukraine’s mobilisation efforts and Western arms supplies.

Following complex negotiations between Washington and Moscow, on Friday the Americans indicated their frustrations, with both Trump and Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, threatening to walk away from brokering peace unless there were signs of progress in the coming days.

That must have rattled Putin because the next day, today, he announced a unilateral Easter truce.

This is a clear ploy to keep Trump’s attention and allow him to characteristically declare some kind of negotiating victory. Although Putin will not submit to any of Ukraine’s demands, in particular that of giving up the territory he has seized, he does want this war to end – for the time being at least.

The Russian economy is in dire straits and Moscow needs a lengthy pause in hostilities to begin to rebuild it. What is more, Russia can ill-afford the stronger sanctions that are currently under discussion between the US and European countries, with further talks expected on that in London next week.

Putin is also fearful of Trump. He knows well that Trump’s cajoling of Ukraine and what has appeared to some to be cosying up to Russia, are in fact merely negotiating tactics.

He also knows that the unpredictable figure in the White House is more than capable of turning on a dime – in any direction, and in a way that could be extremely damaging for Russia. From a wider perspective, Putin has recently lost significant influence in the Middle East with the fall of Assad’s regime in Syria. Putin can ill Continue reading →