A version of this article was published in The Daily Express, 7 March 2022. © Richard Kemp

On Saturday a humanitarian corridor was arranged to allow civilians in the southern port of Mariupol to escape the fighting. The exodus was abandoned as Russian forces continued to shell the city. A further effort, also disrupted by Russian breaches of the ceasefire, began yesterday morning. This amounts to a test of Russia’s resolve to allow civilians out of other besieged cities before intensive attacks are launched against them.

Meanwhile Russia’s offensive grinds inexorably on, with a land corridor pretty much established between Crimea and Donetsk, one of Putin’s key objectives for this war. Much of the coastline along the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea is now under Moscow’s control. Russian forces continue to push west towards Odessa which, when taken, will effectively deny Ukraine all its sea ports. On Friday it was made known that Ukraine’s naval flagship, the Hetman Sahaidachny, was scuttled early in the war rather than allowing it to fall into enemy hands. The tragic fate of this ship stands as an epitaph for Britain’s agreement signed last year to rebuild Ukraine’s navy, including construction of new bases on the Sea of Asov and Black Sea.

In the north, Russia continues its onslaught against Kharkov and is progressively encircling Kiev with forces advancing on the city from the east, north east and north west. As well as direct Russia-Ukraine talks, planned to resume today, there have been further attempts to mediate by Israel and France. Unless these efforts lead to some kind of diplomatic breakthrough — likely to mean President Zelenskiy’s capitulation — it is hard to see how the Russian army does not eventually overcome Ukraine’s staunch resistance.

Without revealing their own casualty figures, Ukraine claims to have killed 11,000 Russian soldiers. Russia says only 500 of their own troops have died. Neither can be believed. Ukraine’s numbers are intended to boost morale, supporting the widespread talk of Russian Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 6 March 2022. © Richard Kemp

NATO’s strategic objective should now be to bring down Russian President Vladimir Putin and see him replaced by a less dangerous leader. If he fails to achieve his goals in Ukraine, harsh constraints are imposed on Russian oligarchs, and suffering is inflicted on ordinary citizens by Western diplomatic and economic action; his current adventure might cause him to self-destruct.

If that does not happen, Putin will remain a permanent threat to NATO, Europe and the world. Russian law now allows him to hold onto power at least until 2036. He apparently aims to re-create the Soviet Union in a new form and restore Russia’s superpower status by pushing NATO back, regaining Moscow’s dominion over its eastern neighbours. He is now also demanding the nuclear disarming of Europe.

Putin’s next targets could be Moldova or the Baltic states which, like Ukraine, he reportedly considers illegitimate and properly part of Russia’s sphere. If further suffering and bloodshed are to be avoided, the West must do all it can to ensure his current aggression fails. At last we are seeing unity among NATO countries, with unprecedented sanctions already beginning to bite and the Russian economy heading towards freefall. To halt Putin’s broader ambitions, it is also essential that NATO keep the Ukrainian army fighting and that includes financing the war effort and getting lethal weapons and military equipment to Ukrainian forces.

In the event, as seems likely, that Putin does prevail in Ukraine, we should now also be preparing to support a resistance movement against a potential Russian army of occupation. That would include supplying weapons, intelligence and surveillance, as well as offensive cyber capabilities, and sending in undeclared advisors to help. Moscow should be driven into a quagmire in Ukraine, with a stream of body bags heading back to Russia (rather than mysteriously ‘disappeared’ in the mobile crematoria that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says are ominously following behind Russian forces). It is not that we want to see Russian conscripts killed, Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 26 February 2022. © Richard Kemp

We see uncanny similarities between Russia’s aggression in Ukraine today and Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, both encouraged by weakness and appeasement in western Europe. British military preparedness in the 1930s and today are also starkly similar. After the First World War our forces were neglected despite a rising threat from Germany, to the extent they were unable to resist the Nazi scything through France. Since the end of the Cold War, we have greedily spent the ‘peace dividend’ on welfare and other projects while degrading our armed forces in the face of growing threats from Russia and China.

Putin’s invasion is withering confirmation of the misjudgements many of us recognised when we read with disbelief the defence review last year that compounded the damage. The navy and airforce were relatively unscathed but the army was devastated, cut by almost 10,000 to just 72,500 – less than half the number Putin lined up on the Ukraine border.

Even as Russian troops were assembling last year – including 1,200 tanks – the MOD was preparing to reduce our meagre tank force from 227 to 148. Tanks can’t fight without infantry alongside in armoured combat vehicles. Ours were due to be upgraded but are now being scrapped altogether, eventually to be replaced by vehicles without comparable potency. With eight former infantry battalions cut in half and assigned to train foreign forces, we will only be able to field around 12,000 infantry – the men that always bear the brunt of the fighting. Even this paltry figure is optimistic; never in my 30 years’ service was the infantry ever manned to its authorised strength due to a dysfunctional recruiting system.

Meanwhile our war stocks of replacement vehicles, weapons and ammunition have been stripped bare by an ill-judged imitation of Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 25 February 2022. © Richard Kemp

Britain led the world in providing military support to Ukraine. This included training over 22,000 Ukrainian troops, supplying £2.2 million of non-lethal military equipment and 2,000 anti-tank missiles, air surveillance, intelligence and cyber capabilities. It was not enough. For the last two days we have witnessed Russian cruise and ballistic missile strikes against cities, military forces and airports across Ukraine.

To counter such predictable attacks we should have supplied air and missile defence systems. Since the beginning of the Russian build-up on Ukraine’s borders last year there has been plenty of time to deliver such equipment. When Germany, fearful of alienating Moscow, vetoed the supply of artillery by another Nato country, we should have filled the gap by shipping British artillery, shells and trainers. With our land forces systematically degraded by successive governments for decades this would have been difficult, but would have strengthened Ukraine’s defences and sent a stronger message of Western resolve to Putin.

That is history. What should we do now? Britain, the EU and the US have promised, in the words of President Von Der Leyen, ‘a massive sanctions package’. Such measures have been long threatened and failed to deter Putin’s aggression. Sanctions may have a long-term impact but will not get him to pull out now.

Britain should take a lead in immediately supplying whatever weapons and combat equipment Ukraine needs to keep its army fighting. Nato, including British planes, should establish an air corridor over Ukraine and mount an operation on the scale of the Berlin airlift. We should also provide intelligence and defensive and offensive cyber capabilities, including supporting cyber attacks against Russian troops. Putin has set out to destroy the Ukrainian armed forces and bring down their government. If he maintains a long-term occupation, we must be ready to concentrate on direct support to Ukrainian resistance, helping turn Moscow’s offensive into a quagmire like Chechnya or Afghanistan. Tragically, only a relentless Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022. © Richard Kemp

As Russian forces continued to build along the Ukrainian border last month, Netflix released one of its most popular movies to date – Munich: The Edge of War. The film is set in 1938 as German troops prepare to attack the Sudetenland while Chamberlain and other European leaders negotiate away Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty. Today, it’s almost as if President Macron is reading from Chamberlain’s script. Since his meeting last week with Putin, he’s been pressing Ukraine to implement the Minsk accords, brokered by France and Germany in 2015 as Russian forces and their proxies fought in eastern Ukraine.

The imposition of the Minsk accords would see an end to Kyiv’s sovereignty. They would give Russia a say in running the country and its foreign policy and hand seats in parliament to Moscow’s proxies. A few days ago Putin made clear exactly what he wants, telling Ukraine, with undertones of rape: ‘Like it or not, you’ll have to tolerate it, my beauty.’

It is extraordinary that Macron, whose country now holds the EU Council presidency, should entertain such gunpoint bartering of a democratic nation’s integrity. He has a track record of failed conciliations with Russia and has recently suggested there is ‘legitimacy’ in the Kremlin’s concerns over a putative threat from Nato. It must be obvious to him that Putin will not be mollified by such appeasement and that even if President Zelenskiy were to accede to Minsk it would not end there. But Macron has elections in April and perhaps believes that a Chamberlain style proclamation of peace for our time might secure victory for him.

Germany too has looked happy to go along with this ‘grand bargain’. That is no surprise from a government that has blocked another Nato member from supplying defensive arms to Kyiv and is desperate to placate Putin, having allowed an increasing dependence on Russian energy supplies. The Nordstream 2 gas pipeline is designed to bypass Ukraine, removing the only bargaining chip against Russia in Kyiv’s Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2022. © Richard Kemp

On a visit to Washington last week, I was struck by the consistent admiration for Britain’s stance on Ukraine from government officials and think tank leaders alike. Many admitted to previous concerns about the implications of Brexit on European security, due to the misplaced perception that it would herald an era of isolation. The same concern had been shared in many European capitals and featured prominently throughout the Remain campaign.

For our friends on the continent, that worry has now been supplanted by the fear that Britain is taking too strong a role in collective European security, exposing their own disunity and equivocation. There is a sense that we are undermining the Franco-German cartel by strengthening the more hardline security approach of Holland, Poland and the Baltic states.

The reality is that the Franco-German axis does not work when it comes to security. And while the governments in Berlin and Paris may not be ready to accept this view, Washington’s foreign policy establishment is rapidly coming to the same conclusion. The axis’s inadequacy is best demonstrated by the Normandy Format – a grouping of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine, established in the wake of Russian aggression in Crimea to discuss the way forward – which has clearly failed to deter Putin.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, recently caused consternation by calling for a separate EU dialogue with Russia that some feared might impair Nato’s diplomatic efforts. If he thinks alienating Washington is the best route to the EU strategic autonomy he desires then he is making a very dangerous mistake.

Closer to home, his attempts to deal with Putin have helped drive an east-west divide within the EU, with Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania despairing of his approach. They sit directly in the face of Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 22 February 2022. © Richard Kemp

The latest grotesque exhibition of anti-Israel vitriol among NGOs is this week’s publication of a report by Amnesty International that recycles tired, repeatedly disproven yet deliberately provocative antisemitic tropes and accusations of racism. This from an organization that was itself last year branded as ‘systemically racist’.

The title of the report, ‘Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and crime against humanity’, is not only a blatant and unsubstantiated lie but also an insult to black South Africans who suffered so horrifically under a genuinely apartheid regime. Few will read this 200+ page diatribe of falsehoods, distortions and half-truths, but many will see and absorb its title, which has already been plastered greedily across left-leaning newspapers and disseminated to millions in social media. The BBC, for example, trumpeted ‘Israel’s policies against Palestinians amount to apartheid’ in an online article, giving full weight to Amnesty’s claims, quoting several people who support them, but allowing only the briefest opposing view from the Israeli government at the end.

What is provoking NGOs such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, who published a similar discredited report last year, to ever-greater excesses of anti-Israel propaganda? Why has the United Nations General Assembly just approved an unprecedented permanent commission of inquiry into Israel by the UN Human Rights Council? The problem for these anti-Israel lobbies is that things are not going their way. Tactically, their over-arching intent to drag Israelis into the dock at The Hague seems to be faltering, with a seemingly less enthusiastic Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. Strategically, far from the desired retrenchment and eventual termination of the Jewish state, it is getting stronger and stronger with increasing global diplomatic and economic outreach; and there has been an abject Continue reading →