Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 30 July 2023. © Richard Kemp

ime is not on the side of the Ukrainian armed forces in their long-running counter-offensive. They are battling not just against the strongest Russian defences but also the clocks of eastern European weather and US electoral politics.

Despite frustration at the slow pace of Ukraine’s advance, no one can question the need for extensive ‘battlefield shaping’, in military language, before attempting to break through the heavily defended Surovikin line and striking deep into Russian controlled territory. After all, before attacking into Iraq in 1991, the US-led coalition conducted a shaping air campaign that lasted almost as long as the Ukrainian advance has so far.

Denied any comparable ability to soften up enemy defences with airpower, Ukraine’s preparation has had to rely on reconnaissance in force, missiles and artillery to whittle down front line positions and hit headquarters and supply lines while probing for weaknesses to exploit with ground forces. Now it looks like the Ukrainians have identified the most favourable axis of attack, from south of Zaporizhia towards Melitopol, and they seem to be committing elements of the Nato-equipped and trained 10th Operational Corps. Of the various options, that would be the most productive, potentially enabling Kyiv to break Russia’s land corridor from the east, isolating Crimea and cutting off forces in the west of the country.

But if and when Ukrainian troops succeed in smashing through the first line of defences – which they have not yet achieved – the road ahead will be very long and very bloody. They face mile after mile of obstacles including tank traps, barbed wire and minefields, plus dug-in infantry, pillboxes, machine guns, tanks, artillery fire, combat planes, attack helicopters, drones and missiles.

War is more unpredictable than any other human activity, and no one, not even those directing events in Kyiv or Moscow, can possibly Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 21 July 2023. © Richard Kemp

With no significant breakthrough after six weeks, it is worth asking whether Ukraine’s counter-offensive can ever succeed, for it certainly doesn’t look to be succeeding now.

Compare the glacial but costly progress today to the lightning victories at Kharkiv and Kherson last autumn. Back then Kyiv’s forces were advancing against a withdrawing enemy that was pulling back to redeploy troops, trading space for time. Having now built up their forces through mobilisation and dug extensive defence lines, this time the Russians aren’t going anywhere.

That has left Ukraine with one option: launching frontal attacks against heavily defended positions, almost akin to the Western Front in World War I where trench lines ran continuously from Switzerland to the sea, with neither side achieving a decisive breakthrough for four years. Such an outcome today would leave Kyiv vulnerable to shifts in Western opinion, given the possibility of a Trump presidency or European fatigue. This is something President Zelensky must be aware of; and it is perhaps causing great consternation.

The question to be asked is: are the Ukrainians prepared – militarily, politically, financially – to carry out months and potentially years of these attacks to penetrate 1914-18 style defensive belts of tank traps, barbed wire, minefields, bunkers and trench lines? The UK Ministry of Defence has described these Russian fortifications as ‘some of the most extensive systems of military defensive works seen anywhere in the world’.

In the south, which appears to be Kyiv’s main effort at the moment, the terrain is mostly open farmland, with few covered approaches, making surprise, which is a critical factor for success in war, virtually impossible. That lack of surprise only compounds Kyiv’s combat inferiority. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2023. © Richard Kemp

With the counteroffensive in its sixth week, still moving slowly and at considerable cost but without any significant territorial gains so far, Ukraine was in need of a tangible success. That was delivered in last night’s dramatic attack against the Kerch Bridge, the longest in Europe and a major symbol of Putin’s power.

The crossing is one of the most heavily guarded objects under Russian control anywhere, beefed up after it was damaged last year, apparently by a vehicle bomb. Hitting a bridge protected by land, sea and air is a notoriously difficult military feat, even in the era of precision strike. Yet Ukrainian forces have demonstrated they have that capability, reportedly attacking this time with naval drones. The strike makes it clear that there is no safe place for important Russian targets in occupied Ukraine, even far from the front lines.

The Kerch hit was much more than just symbolic. The bridge is an important logistic artery for Russia, delivering troops and combat supplies into Crimea and so to the front lines in mainland Ukraine. Only the roadway seems to have been damaged in this attack. But this strike has shown that the railway spans, which carry the greater volume of combat supplies, are also highly vulnerable, and cutting the road will have had a measurable effect on Russian supply lines.

The only other ground route from Russia to the primary southern battle zone is via the ‘land bridge’ along the north coast of the Sea of Azov that was seized in the early months of the war. Supply lines through this corridor have also been attacked by Ukraine, but there are severe limitations. GMLRS missiles (usually fired from the Himars vehicle) cannot cover the whole land bridge. The Ukrainians have only small stocks of Storm Shadow cruise missiles with their greater range.

Hitting Russian logistics hard is vital to Ukraine’s counteroffensive as it reduces Russia’s combat power on the defensive lines that must Continue reading →

Article published by Ynetnews.com, 14 July 2023. © Richard Kemp

From December last year until this March, Russian-Israeli PhD student at Princeton University Elizabeth Tsurkov was carrying out academic research in Iraq, in her words ‘a country where pro-Iranian militias operate freely, carry out assassinations in broad daylight, blackmail people.

She is now, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the hands of the most dominant of those militias, Kataib Hezbollah, who reportedly kidnapped her in Baghdad four months ago. Kataib Hezbollah is designated as a terrorist group by the US, has conducted lethal attacks against American targets in Iraq and Syria, and fought alongside other Iranian proxies to prop up the Assad regime. It has a long track record of kidnap and murder in Iraq and has made repeated violent threats against Israel.

Like its counterpart Lebanese Hezbollah, which helped train and arm the group following its formation in 2003, Kataib Hezbollah is funded and directed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, an organ of the Iranian government. Its management body includes representatives from the IRGC and Lebanese Hezbollah. It is also substantially funded by the Baghdad government and is an integral element of the Iraqi security forces. Despite that, its primary allegiance is to Iran and it has frequently refused orders from Baghdad and threatened Iraqi political leaders.

This means that even if Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Al Sudani demands Tsurkov’s release, it is Tehran that will call the shots. Although he will likely have known of her kidnapping for the last four months, the fact that she remains in captivity may mean he has been overruled.

On the other hand, perhaps he has no interest in securing the release of an Israeli ‘enemy’ because of the damage that would do to Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 9 July 2023. © Richard Kemp

Iran is pretty much a nuclear threshold state, having enriched enough uranium to build multiple nuclear bombs within a few weeks while hard at work weaponising them in a timeframe that is so far unknown but probably under a year.

Much of this came to pass during Joe Biden’s presidency. When President Donald Trump pulled out of President Barack Obama’s flawed JCPOA nuclear deal, Iran’s uranium enrichment was under 5% and Trump kept it there with his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign of sanctions. The ayatollahs were also running scared of Trump and didn’t want to tempt him to kinetic action, a fear reinforced by his targeted killing of the international terrorist and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

When Biden entered the White House a year later, he wanted nothing more than to resurrect the JCPOA, as part of his obsessive undoing of everything Trump had done — except leaving Afghanistan — along with a determination by him and his Obama-inherited staff to restore their former boss’s legacy. Added to which, Biden decided to slavishly return to Obama’s wrongheaded strategy of rebalancing power in the Middle East by giving Iran the upper hand. So he eased off on sanctions and made it blatantly obvious he would do almost anything for a deal.

The consequence has been uranium enrichment from 5% to 60%, and with some material up to 84%, according to IAEA suspicions — verging on the levels needed for a bomb.

Biden was so fixated on gaining a deal that he allowed Moscow to take the lead on international negotiations, and his plans even envisaged Russia getting control of Iran’s highly enriched uranium. All of this as Putin has been threatening the West with his own nuclear weapons and savaging Ukraine while US taxpayers spend billions of dollars to counter him. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 3 July 2023. © Richard Kemp

Even if Ukraine’s counter-offensive might be unfolding more slowly than many expected, it is Moscow not Kyiv that is running out of time. Since the operation began weeks ago, little territory has changed hands. That is despite expectations stoked by Kyiv’s allies, who have been eager to show bang for their buck to electorates keenly aware of the cost of the war.

But immediate gratification was always going to be elusive. Even with billions of dollars of Western aid, Ukraine lacks the kind of overwhelming force that allowed the US-led coalition to rapidly crush Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Amid a succession of probing attacks to find weakness in the Russian lines, hopes of a quick breakthrough such as we witnessed in Kharkiv and Kherson last autumn are being displaced by fear that Kyiv’s Nato-equipped forces will be dashed to pieces and Russia will go back onto the offensive.

Indeed, that seems to be Russia’s current strategy: to wear its enemy down against a hard defensive belt prepared over many months and then either force President Zelensky to come to terms or to rampage again into a weakened Ukrainian army.

Putin will very much prefer the first option, because he no longer has confidence that his forces can prevail in large-scale offensive operations. He may also fear escalation by the West, whose support for Ukraine against all expectations sent him into shock. That fear will have been reinforced by a resolution introduced last month in the US Senate that any Russian use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine will be viewed as an attack on Nato itself, requiring an Article V response.

Ukraine’s slow-going offensive, which has already sustained significant casualties in both men and tanks, might seem to be playing into Putin’s plan to wait it out. But how much time does the Russian president actually have, especially after Wagner’s abortive insurrection? Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 30 June 2023. © Richard Kemp

Last week the deputy commander of Nato, British General Sir Tim Radford, complained that our army is too small and now the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Patrick Sanders, is saying the same thing. They could not be more right. The British Army has been continuously run down for decades, with regular forces slashed from 97,000 to 76,000 in the last 10 years and another 3,000 slated to follow them out of the door. Tank numbers are being cut by a third from an already derisory 227 to just 148 and tracked armoured infantry fighting vehicles got rid of altogether.

Sanders compared this dire situation with British military neglect in the 1930s, but it is far worse than that. By the time Hitler unleashed his blitzkrieg in Poland, our political leaders had woken up and were frantically re-arming. Now, in the face of the worst European war since 1945, with every other Nato member building its forces, Britain dementedly continues to cut.

Numbers are not everything, but if it were not already obvious, the Ukraine war has again demonstrated the supremacy of mass – in men, tanks, guns, planes and artillery. Bakhmut, the most intensive battle in Europe since the Second World War, with powerful Ukrainian forces defeated after months of combat, is a case in point. Commanders who were fighting there told me how sheer numbers of men, armoured vehicles and above all an endless stream of artillery shells had prevailed. Despite superior Ukrainian battle tactics, leadership, morale, surveillance, intelligence and cyber, brute force – as always in war – won the day.

That sort of thinking went out of fashion years ago in an increasingly woke Whitehall, with too much emphasis on so-called ‘soft power’, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping, propping up the NHS, environmentalism and mentoring other people’s armies rather than the dirty business of mud, blood and violence. That helped influence the prioritisation of nice clean fighting tools like cyber, robotics and IT Continue reading →