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Putin’s truce shows that stick is better than carrot with him

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 →

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The Israel-Hamas war grinds on. It’s time to try something different

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 9 April 2025. © Richard Kemp

As the IDF intensify their campaign in Gaza while 59 hostages remain in Hamas captivity it is time for some fresh thinking. Eight thousand Palestinian prisoners held by Israel should be committed into deradicalisation programmes outside the country. Their families can go with them. In return – release all the hostages. On its face that might sound crazy, but such programmes have worked elsewhere and, if successful, large-scale deradicalisation of prisoners could also pave the way for wider stability, beyond the failed Western ‘solutions’ which have been no such thing.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict is not a war over land, sovereignty or civil rights. That would be a lot simpler to deal with. Throughout history, societies and nations at war have adapted and reconciled, learning to live in peace with neighbours with whom they have fought vicious, long term conflicts. The root of today’s problem in the Middle East is a radicalised Palestinian population that for decades has been indoctrinated to hate Jews and taught that they have a religious duty to exterminate them and destroy their state.

This has come from within Palestinian society and across the Middle East, often wittingly or unwittingly encouraged by the Western world. In truth the Palestinian Arabs have been used and abused as a weapon against the Jewish state and that remains the case today. Consequently, the Palestinians are now one of the most radicalised societies on earth.

How often have we heard the lazy aphorism that you can’t defeat an ideology? Tell that to the Nazi Party and Imperial Japan. As they were, Hamas and its fellow jihadists in Gaza are in the process of being militarily defeated, and when that is complete their ideology will no longer have the direct capability to inflict harm on their enemies. But the ideology itself will remain and what is left of its leadership will do their utmost to rearm and rebuild what they have lost. The same is true in the West Bank.

So rather than wringing our hands and repeating decades-old and demonstrably unachievable peace formulas, the civilised world should now unite in a concerted effort to deradicalise the Palestinians. Arab states have a particular interest in doing so, as the festering hatred is destabilising in their own countries. Yes, of course it would be a monumental undertaking: significantly more challenging than the successful denazification of Germany, given the deep religious motivations, the much longer term indoctrination and a Middle Eastern culture resistant to authority and order. But what is the alternative? Even more decades of pointless peace processing with its innate appeasement of radical thinking, leading only to ever more violence and death.

What better place to start than with the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails? Over the years Israel has released thousands of terrorists early in exchange for Israeli hostages or at the end of their criminal sentences. Many have returned to terror, often forming the backbone of jihadist groups. Perhaps most notably, Hamas leader Continue reading →

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British boldness has been vital in Ukraine

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

A report in the New York Times this week suggests British soldiers have been operating in Ukraine since the start of the war. It describes heavily-armed, plain-clothed British ‘commandos’ escorting a Ukrainian general from Kyiv into Poland for onward travel to an American base in Germany not long after Russia invaded. Assuming this is accurate, those soldiers are likely to have been SAS troops. Whenever British diplomats or intelligence officers are stationed in danger zones, it is standard practice for them to be protected by the SAS, usually out of uniform, and they may also be assigned other tasks if necessary, including the sort of thing described in this article.

The same article goes on to say that the British had placed small teams of officers in Ukraine after the invasion, in contrast to the Americans, who would not allow any of their servicemen to be deployed in the country until much later in the war. Even then, they were restricted to Kyiv for the most part.

The US approach characterised President Joe Biden’s extreme caution over Ukraine, whereas the apparently more free-ranging British presence, albeit no doubt discreet, reflected Boris Johnson’s bullishness. This would have had considerable advantages, enabling our military advisers to gain greater confidence among Ukrainian commanders and leading to an increased ability to influence the course of the war. It would also have given our forces improved insight into the situation on the ground, beneficial in assessing what military assistance was required and how best it could be configured.

Such knowledge was useful to British decision makers and to our allies alike, with whom information and guidance would have been shared. No doubt such activity played a significant part also in helping our politicians and diplomats to rally support among some of the more equivocal national leaders. When he was prime minister, Rishi Sunak only admitted to small numbers of British soldiers being in Ukraine for diplomatic protection, medical training and unspecified other tasks. But the Germans blew the lid off the deployment of our forces to assist in operations involving Storm Shadow cruise missiles donated to Ukraine to fight the Russians.

In April last year, the Kremlin-controlled news agency RT released an intercepted phone conversation between two Luftwaffe generals discussing the British presence on the ground in Ukraine for Storm Continue reading →

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Trump won’t kill Nato, the alliance is already dead

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2025. © Richard Kemp

President Trump is considering giving up US command of Nato, held by American generals since Dwight D Eisenhower became the first supreme commander 75 years ago. This has further shaken those already panicking about the prospect that Trump might be contemplating pulling out of the alliance altogether. They are right to panic about the state of Nato – but not because of Trump.

We hear never-ending boasts that Nato is the most successful defensive alliance in history. Perhaps it was once, although that was never really put to the test.

I and many other soldiers spent years of our lives manoeuvring armoured divisions across West Germany and rehearsing battles against the Soviet 3rd Shock Army as it rolled across the Inner German Border. It never came, but was that because Nato deterred it or it just didn’t intend to? Certainly Nato is no deterrent to Russian aggression today.

Look at Ukraine. It may not be a Nato member, but when Putin invaded, its defence became Nato’s number one priority. Innumerable summit speeches were packed with hard-charging rhetoric from Western leaders who promised to support Kyiv to the end, and fell over themselves to be filmed with President Zelensky in his besieged capital.

But Churchillian words never measured up to his dictum of ‘action this day’. Yes, lots of military aid poured into the battlefront, but never anything like enough to allow Ukraine to prevail. Putin must have been chuckling to himself and his sycophantic henchmen in the Kremlin, as his threats of escalation and nuclear war scared Nato leaders into stumbling procrastination. No tanks, no planes, no long-range missiles. Then when they eventually plucked up enough courage to gingerly send them, it was too late, too few, and too many restrictions on their use.

As a result it looks likely Ukraine will now end up settling with Russia on Putin’s terms, with 20 per cent of their sovereign territory in his hands.

Weakness provokes. Imagine a new scenario. Having licked his wounds from Ukraine, Putin stirs up the ethnic Russian population in the Baltic republics. Russian militias form in Latvia, take control of Russian population centres and then invite Russia in ‘for protection’. Continue reading →

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The Kursk offensive may prove to have been Ukraine’s most costly mistake

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 13 March 2025. © Richard Kemp

Terrible though it is, Ukraine’s forced withdrawal from Kursk makes peace negotiations with Russia more likely. Indeed had Putin not been able to drive the Ukrainian army out, he is unlikely to have even contemplated peace talks. He would have demanded that Kyiv pull out of his territory first. That would have been a huge political challenge for Zelensky, on top of all the others he faces: the idea of voluntarily withdrawing from conquered Russian land while at the same time ceding large areas of his own country to the enemy.

Putin has the whip hand, and one of the strategic objectives of the Kursk offensive – gaining a bargaining chip for future peace negotiations – could never realistically have paid off. General Oleksandr Syrsky, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian army, now knows that, which is why in recent days he has been talking about preserving as many of his soldiers’ lives as possible rather than fighting to hold his ground.

Kyiv had also hoped that driving its troops into Russian territory would force Putin to deploy substantial forces to recover it, thus easing pressure on the front lines in Donbas. It didn’t work out that way either. Instead Russia contained and assaulted the Kursk salient with limited forces and called up North Korean troops to make up the numbers. Meanwhile, of course, Ukraine had to find the forces to attack into Kursk and, with overall manpower shortages, they had to come from the battlefront. We can’t calculate the net military effect of that. Since the initial offensive in Kursk began last August Russia has continued to advance in the Donbas, albeit slowly, but it is possible that Ukraine might have lost even more of its territory there if it weren’t for Kursk.

Although battles and wars are sometimes won by high stakes gambles, the strategic wisdom of the Kursk offensive was always questionable. It may be that in Kyiv’s high command, political rather than military considerations dominated the decision making. When the operation began, the US election was looming very close and there was the need to strengthen support in both the Republican and Democratic camps as well as in Europe.

Since the failed counter offensive in 2023, Western hopes that Ukraine might prevail had sharply fallen away, and after that, much political bandwidth was diverted to the Middle East. At Kursk, Kyiv hoped to galvanise international support through replicating the optimism created by successful counter attacks around Kharkiv and Kherson in 2022. With this bold new offensive Zelensky wanted to again show the world that Ukraine was still in the fight and could win, if only provided the tools to do so.

But by then it was too late. Governments in the US and Europe had given up on Ukraine being able to push the Russians out and were focused only on some kind of negotiated settlement. That sorry state of affairs had come to pass due to their own timorousness since the war began. Following Putin’s invasion in February 2022, Continue reading →

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Ukraine may keep fighting a guerrilla war, regardless of a ‘peace deal’

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 11 March 2025. © Richard Kemp

Polling in Ukraine shows that most people now want the war to end with a peace deal, rather than fighting on to retrieve the land seized by Russia. Recent developments have proved to those who did not already know it, that there can be no victory without dramatically increased support from the US, which did not happen under Biden and is certainly not going to happen under Trump.

They know therefore that Ukraine will have to cede territory, a reality underscored yesterday by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Obviously not trusting Putin, whatever deal he might agree to, Ukrainians want a back-stop from the West. Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, said today that ‘Ukraine must be given security guarantees that lend credibility to a future ceasefire agreement.’ According to Trump, such guarantees will have to come from the Europeans. The Europeans are not in a position to give any guarantees whatsoever; and Starmer’s proposed peacekeeping force, if it were to happen, would certainly not supply them.

Yarmak also said that Europe must apply economic pressure to prevent Putin returning to the attack by sanctions and seizing frozen Russian assets. European sanctions would count for little without US support and it seems unlikely that governments would be bold enough to take control of frozen assets given the legal difficulties. In any case, despite the voluble rhetoric, they are desperate to get back to business as usual with the Kremlin. After all, since the war began, Europeans have collectively been paying more to Russia in oil and gas revenues than they have provided in financial aid to Ukraine.

Most Ukrainians may simply resign themselves to their fate: loss of 20 per cent of their territory and nothing to stop Putin surging back to the offensive after regrouping his armed forces and rebuilding his economy. But many will not. At the front line I have met several hardened Ukrainian commanders who told me they would never give up the fight against Russia, no matter what the politicians decide. In other circumstances this talk could be dismissed as mere braggadocio.

But such men and their followers in Ukraine today may have far greater power than their predecessors in global resistance movements ever dreamt of. For one thing Ukraine is awash with vast Continue reading →

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A ‘peacekeeping’ force risks national humiliation

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

Back in 2021, then Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says he attempted to convince like-minded Nato countries to stay behind in Afghanistan after Joe Biden decided to withdraw all US forces. There were no takers. Some of his counterparts said they were keen but their parliaments weren’t.

‘Like-minded’ for Afghanistan has now transitioned into ‘coalition of the willing’ for Ukraine. Is this going to become deja vu? It may be early days but so far only Britain and France have made a firm(ish) commitment. A few others have shown interest but will they follow Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘boots on the ground and planes in the air’ or might some prefer to show willing by providing other forms of support at a safe distance from Ukraine?

European political elites have spent decades refusing to stand up for their own national defence and security, preferring to spoon butter into their electorates’ mouths than put guns into the field. Few are likely to do a swerving U-turn now, despite the shock of no longer being able to freeload off the United States. Instead they will have been busily calculating the political costs versus the benefits of joining Starmer’s coalition.

The first cost they will have considered is potential military casualties, perhaps the hottest political potato. Although the proposed force is by no means intended to fight the Russian army, peacekeeping is never without danger, even when deployed with the consent of both sides. My own company in the UN force in Bosnia in the 1990s was frequently shelled and directly attacked by Serbian heavy machine gun fire. Land mines were an ever-present danger. One of our officers was killed when his Land Rover ran over an anti-tank mine and some of my soldiers were wounded when their armoured vehicle detonated another.

Then there is the very real risk of national humiliation. The Netherlands will never recover from the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys by the Serbs in 1995 at Srebrenica. Dutch UN troops failed to protect them, leading to the resignation of the government in The Hague.

Last year it was revealed that Hezbollah terrorists had for years been building infrastructure to carry out a October 7 2023 style attack against Israel from Lebanon under the nose of the 10,000-strong UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) that was there to prevent exactly that. UNIFIL includes troops from France, Spain, Italy and Ireland.

Another as yet unknown form of national embarrassment might also be lurking in the shadows. Putin has rejected the idea of Nato forces deploying near his borders whatever flag they might fly. He is only likely to allow it if he foresees an opportunity to humiliate the peacekeepers, or worse.

The financial cost of a potentially indefinite deployment of a substantial force, if one can be cobbled together, will not be small. Continue reading →

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Ukraine isn’t Starmer’s Falklands, it’s his Iraq

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 4 March 2025. © Richard Kemp

Sir Keir Starmer rightly says that Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted, and therefore the US needs to provide a security guarantee for any peace deal. What could that security guarantee be? America and Europe have been sending weapons to Ukraine for 10 years, even more so since 2022, and that hasn’t deterred or stopped Russia. It has slowed up Putin’s army and inflicted heavy casualties, but three years on from the full-scale invasion, Russia is still advancing inside Ukraine. Had significantly more munitions been supplied much earlier in the war then the picture today might be different. But that won’t happen now, not even with Starmer’s promised 5,000 air defence missiles. Nor did economic sanctions achieve very much given Western fears of excessive self-harm plus continued unrestrained Russian trade with many countries including China, India and Turkey.

President Zelensky’s number one security guarantee would be membership of Nato but that is off the table. Nor is there any prospect of any country threatening military action in response to Russia breaching a peace deal or launching any further aggression.

Starmer’s and French President Macron’s idea of a security guarantee is sending a European coalition of the willing into Ukraine to ‘defend’ a ceasefire. That could only happen with the consent of Russia. But Foreign Minister Lavrov has repeatedly said that will not be allowed and any Nato forces on the ground in Ukraine will be regarded as combatants and attacked. It doesn’t matter what flag they might fly, they would be seen in the same light. Indeed allowing peacekeepers in would make no sense from the Russian perspective given that Putin’s most oft-repeated excuse for invading Ukraine is the alleged encroachment of Nato towards Russian soil.

Furthermore Starmer and Macron have both made clear that a peacekeeping force could not be committed without a US ‘backstop’, presumably meaning the American cavalry would ride to the rescue if European forces bit off more than they could chew. During his visit to the White House last week, Starmer failed to persuade President Trump to agree to any such thing.

Even if these two apparently insurmountable obstacles could be overcome, does Britain have the military capability to lead the force Continue reading →

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Labour’s defence spend increase still won’t impress Trump

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 25 February 2025. © Richard Kemp

Boris Johnson says the UK defence budget should ‘get to 3 per cent [of GDP] by 2030. 2.5 per cent is not enough’. Hang on a minute. In 2022, when he was prime minister, he said 2.5 per cent was enough and he pledged an increase to that amount. And then two years later, with a flourish, Rishi Sunak unveiled exactly the same promise. So what became of Johnson’s earlier undertaking? Is it possible it was only words rather than the action he now demands?

At the time of Johnson’s alleged increase, Labour’s shadow defence secretary, John Healey, attacked his proposal, claiming the increase was required immediately, not in eight years’ time. He was absolutely right, the more dangerous world that Johnson said justified the increase had already engulfed us, not least with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

But, when appointed defence secretary, Healey’s plans were to get to 2.5 per cent at some undetermined time in the future. Only now, under growing pressure from President Trump, Labour has been forced to bite the bullet and up the budget to 2.5 per cent; still not ‘immediately’, but by 2027.

Even this rise, however, will barely cover the defence equipment black hole between existing commitments and budgetary allocation and will not enable significant additional capabilities.

Those increased capabilities are sorely needed. In the second half of last year we heard two shocking statements from the upper echelons of British defence. In October Healey admitted the armed forces are ‘not ready to fight’. And not long before that the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Roland Walker, said the Army must be ready to ‘fight a war in three years’. The problem with war is that it often comes along when you least expect it and maybe we won’t have those three years. The armed forces should of course be ready to fight and ready to fight immediately.

When it comes to defence our political leaders seem to be like rabbits in the headlights. Even as the war in Ukraine reminded the world how vital conventional defences continue to be, plans to cut our already minuscule Army by over 10,000 men continued apace. Continue reading →

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How Britain would go about bringing back conscription – with women and asylum seekers called up, but not Gen Z snowflakes

Article published in The Daily Mail, 22 February 2025. © Richard Kemp

On first impression, the grime rapper Stormzy has little in common with Field Marshal Lord Kitchener.

But should conscription be reintroduced in Britain, it would be the likes of Stormzy, Ed Sheeran and footballing ace Harry Kane tasked with reprising the moustachioed general’s immortal refrain: Your Country Needs You.

Last week, Sir Keir Starmer said he was ‘ready and willing’ to put British boots on the ground in Ukraine. My first reaction was to laugh. Like it or not, our military is on its knees.

Since the end of the Cold War, successive governments have slashed defence spending leaving us with an army that would struggle to defend Dover let alone hold back a Russian advance over the steppes of eastern Europe.

The British Army currently has just over 74,000 full-time personnel of which around just 20,000 are battle-ready soldiers. Russia, on the other hand, boasts close to 1.5 million active soldiers, making it the second-largest fighting force in the world behind its close ally China. Our army is slightly smaller than that of Romania and slightly larger than that of Armenia.

Considering Ukraine shares an unenviable 800 mile-long border with Russia, any Nato force stationed there would need to be formidably large, highly-skilled and ready to combat Russian aggression at a moment’s notice.

Short of discovering a division or two of soldiers behind the sofa, I’m not quite sure what Starmer is thinking. The British Army is already responsible for maintaining a pair of permanent military bases in Cyprus and a garrison in the Falklands, as well as keeping obligations in the Baltics and other parts of the world. That’s before you factor Continue reading →