Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 12 July 2024. © Richard Kemp

Sir Keir Starmer has humiliated Britain, embarrassed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and handed an undeserved victory to Russia at his first international summit as Prime Minister. It’s one thing to flip-flop on domestic policies but quite another, and far more dangerous, to do a screeching U-turn on a vital strategic subject with the eyes of the world on him.

But that’s precisely what he has achieved on the crucial issue of Storm Shadow missiles.

Only a couple of days ago, the international press hailed a new, more hawkish policy from the Government as Starmer suggested that Kyiv would be permitted to fire British Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russian territory, lifting previous restrictions on their use. That decision was greeted enthusiastically by Zelensky, who added that he had discussed operational implementation with Starmer. Inevitably, the Kremlin condemned the move as a dangerous escalation.

A day later, however, Downing Street clarified that Ukraine will not be able to use Storm Shadow to attack into Russia after all. What’s going on? Pressure from the White House, cold feet in the face of Moscow’s outrage, or bungling by Starmer? Whichever it is, it is shambolic.

The first decision was the right one. For over two years, Russia has been hitting any corner of Ukraine it likes. It took months for Britain and the US to summon up the courage to supply Ukrainian forces with the long-range missiles they needed to hit back. But both countries, fearing Putin’s wrath, hogtied Kyiv by insisting they not be used against Russian targets outside Ukraine.

That has left Moscow free to build up supplies, deploy forces, and launch air attacks from within Russia with virtual impunity. We were Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Mail, 3 July 2024. © Richard Kemp

It is no exaggeration to say that Britons today are living through the most dangerous geopolitical period since the Second World War.

The threat is all around us: from ever-multiplying jihadi terrorism, a resurgent Iran, a muscle-flexing Russia waging its unjust war in Ukraine and even from China, which only two months ago GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler warned posed a ‘genuine and increasing’ cyber risk to the UK.

It is against this bleak and unsettling backdrop that, if the polls prove correct, Sir Keir Starmer will be appointed our country’s new prime minister on Friday.

It is a prospect that profoundly alarms me.

As the Mail reported on Tuesday, former Ministry of Defence chief Dr Rob Johnson has just issued a devastating assessment of our ever-depleting military capability, warning that a country once renowned for its might is now so short of infrastructure, personnel and weapons that we are, as Dr Johnson put it, unprepared for a ‘conflict of any scale’.

What a terrifying prediction that is — a state of affairs that, I believe, would sharply deteriorate under a Labour government.

Nor is this just my view as a former commanding officer who saw action in some of the world’s fiercest warzones, but one shared by many senior military figures, both retired and operational, with whom I speak often.

The numbers speak for themselves: When I joined the army in 1977, it boasted a regular fighting strength of about 150,000. Today, those numbers have diminished to less than half that at around 73,000. As Dr Johnson made plain, it is not just people we lack either: we are desperately short of ammunition, ships and aircraft too.

Yes, it is only fair to point out that successive governments from both sides of the House have presided over this diminishment of our Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 3 July 2024. © Richard Kemp

Kyiv has been told that, before it can join Nato, it must fix its problems with corruption. These are very real: the latest Corruption Perceptions Index ranks Ukraine below Belarus and Kazakhstan. But that is not the true reason why there will be no good news on accession for Zelensky at Nato’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington next week.

The simple reality is that very few in Nato wants to let Ukraine in, despite endless platitudes including a declaration by the North Atlantic Council at Vilnius last year that ‘Ukraine’s future is in Nato’. There has been discussion about taking that further at the July summit, but Joe Biden vehemently opposes anything more than the meaningless formulation of ‘a well-lit bridge’ to Nato membership. The best he is willing to do is sweeten the pill with a 10-year bilateral defence pact that changes very little and, tellingly, is cancellable with six months’ notice.

We have seen Sweden and Finland become Nato members in the blink of an eye and with no need for any kind of a bridge. That won’t happen for Ukraine. With Putin’s battles raging, all of the member states know that they would effectively be at war with Russia from the moment of Ukrainian accession.

Zelensky has been pressing for a solid guarantee of Nato membership ‘after the war’. But when will that be? Putin is not going to withdraw his forces, and without a surge of Western military support at a scale not so far contemplated by the West, Ukraine will not be able to push them out. That leaves an endless war or a frozen conflict at best. Whether the latter results from a negotiated settlement or battlefield paralysis, it will certainly re-ignite while Putin or anyone like him occupies the Kremlin. Well aware of that harsh reality, which Nato leader is going to sign up his country’s young men and women to fight against Russia at an unknown point in the future and potentially within his own electoral cycle?

Putin has drawn us into a trap which damns Nato if it accepts Ukraine and damns it if it doesn’t. According to US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, ‘Nato is the most powerful and successful Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 28 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

Russian hackers have caused chaos in the NHS and put patients in danger. This month, one of the most serious cyber attacks we have ever faced hit London hospitals and GP surgeries by locking pathology service providers out of their own IT systems. This has forced more than 1,100 operations to be postponed, including cancer treatments and organ transplants. Thousands of outpatient appointments have been cancelled and vast numbers of patients’ records stolen, some of which have been published on the dark web. They include results of blood tests for cancer and HIV.

Make no mistake. This is a terrorist attack on the UK, which has already resulted in widespread suffering and may cause deaths.

The hackers, who call themselves Qilin, operate out of Russia. They were first known to be active in 2022 and their activities have so far been thought to be criminal, using cyber attacks to extort large sums of cash from their victims. But Qilin claim they carried out this attack – in which a £40 million ransom was demanded – over Britain’s role in an unspecified war.

That may or may not be the motive, but it is far from implausible. Vladimir Putin seeks to create chaos in the West, to undermine support for Ukraine by demonstrating the high costs of that support. He has reportedly recruited criminal gangs to carry out sabotage against Western factories supplying arms to Ukraine, including cyber attacks. We have already seen indications of such action in Britain, the US, Germany and Poland.

Links between freelance hackers and Russian intelligence services have been growing since the 2022 invasion. It is possible Qilin is run and directed by one of the Kremlin’s agencies, and that it is provided with encouragement, information and technology. As a minimum, Russian law enforcement are turning a blind eye on these cyber gangs. For that, Putin is culpable.

It must be a priority to shut down Qilin, which has expanded into the largest Russian enterprise of its kind. That won’t be easy, although Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 23 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

Nigel Farage’s claim that Nato and EU eastward expansion provoked the war in Ukraine have been greedily seized on by Russian state broadcasters and social media channels as endorsing Vladimir Putin’s claims of Western culpability for more than two years of bloodletting and destruction.

Farage’s words unintentionally feed the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, boosting domestic support for continuing the conflict at a time when even Putin seems to be contemplating some form of negotiations. They also help undermine Western resolve, which is already wavering in its support to Ukraine. Those are the dangers of a prominent British politician seeming to endorse Putin’s own excuses for his violent aggression, even though Farage believes the Russian invasion ‘immoral, outrageous and indefensible’, sentiments that were not of course picked up by the Russian media.

While he disapproves of Putin’s actions, it appears Farage actually believes that his pretext for war is genuine. That is something he has in common with Jeremy Corbyn, who appeared to justify the 2014 invasion of Crimea, claiming Putin was protecting against Nato’s ‘attempt to encircle Russia… one of the big threats of our time’. That was the man Keir Starmer said would have made a better prime minister than Boris Johnson, one of Ukraine’s most staunch defenders.

If Farage and Corbyn are right, then what is the answer? Should we expel Poland, Romania and the other eastern European member states from the alliance to end the war and prevent further aggression? The Baltic states would also have to go, as Putin says he considers their independence and Nato membership as threats to Russian security and sovereignty. Likewise Finland and Sweden, who have recently joined Nato, in response to which Putin threatened action if any Nato military infrastructure or forces were deployed on their territory.

Perhaps all our foreign policy decisions should be calibrated to avoid upsetting Putin. Should we, for example, withdraw our support from Israel, currently under attack from Putin’s ally Iran, which has been one of Russia’s main weapons suppliers in Ukraine? If so, it might be Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 22 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

Nigel Farage’s analysis of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine could hardly be more wrong. He claims that Nato and EU expansion was provocative. In fact it was Western weakness and timidity that encouraged Putin’s aggression in 2022. Rather than making any attempt to oppose Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, or helping Ukraine to do so, Western governments called on Kyiv to take no action that might lead to escalation. In spirit, it was a foreshadowing of Joe Biden’s offer in February 2022 to give President Zelensky a ride out of Ukraine.

When Putin saw the West was unwilling to confront him, he rapidly followed up with aggression in the Donbas. In the face of that, Europe desperately sought to revert as soon as possible to business as usual with Russia, even taking steps to increase energy dependence. Seeing he had nothing to fear, an assessment reinforced by Nato’s abandonment of Afghanistan, Putin returned to the charge in Ukraine in February 2022.

To give credence to Putin’s frequently trotted out excuse for starting this war is, to say the least, naive. Farage says that he admires him as a “political operator”. Well, the political operator understood only too well that Russia had nothing to fear militarily from Nato, having rubbed shoulders with the heads of Western governments for so many years. Not one of them has any aggressive instinct let alone intent.

Quite the reverse. As we have seen repeatedly in the pusillanimous responses from both Europe and the US to the 2022 invasion, with pretty much whatever Ukraine has needed to fight back being provided reluctantly, inadequately and with crippling restrictions, if at all. If Putin has any genuine fear of Nato’s eastward expansion, why has he withdrawn 80 per cent of Russian forces from the border with Finland shortly after it joined the alliance?

Beyond his imperialist motivations to recreate a greater Russia with him as Tsar, what Putin did actually fear was a democratic Ukraine and a Ukraine that has benefited increasingly from alignment with Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 13 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

Despite the alarm among some in the Western media, we are not in Cuban missile crisis territory with Russia’s deployment of two warships and two naval support ships to Havana. The nuclear-powered submarine Kazan is certainly one of the most potent vessels in Moscow’s fleet, but in reality it is not the sub that you can see that you need to be worried about.

This deployment is a political statement, not a genuine military threat. It is aimed at strengthening ties with Cuba at a time when Vladimir Putin needs all the allies he can get, even a small Caribbean basket case. It is also a show of force meant to demonstrate Russia’s ability to project maritime power around the world. But with half the flotilla made up of a fuel tanker and a rescue tug, it’s not a very impressive one.

Much as Putin might hope to relive the ‘glory days’ of the Cold War, this is a mere shadow of the kind of force the Soviet Union was able to generate at its height. Today, Russia can’t hope to challenge the US Navy anywhere in the world, least of all off its own eastern seaboard. Don’t forget, even in its home waters, the Black Sea Fleet has been battered by a country without a navy. Using a combination of Western-supplied and home-made missiles, plus explosive-laden drone boats, Ukraine claims to have severely damaged or sunk a third of the fleet.

There is little doubt, however, about the intent behind this deployment. The visit to Havana will be followed up by a large-scale multinational air and maritime exercise in the Caribbean, the first that Russia has organised in five years. So far, little more than angry threats have been bandied about by the Kremlin in response to multiple red lines being crossed by Ukraine’s Western supporters. But now, for the first time, America has allowed long-range US-supplied missiles to be fired at targets inside Russian territory and it seems that the first tranche of Ukrainian-piloted F-16 combat planes may take to the skies within weeks. The Russian ships appear to be a display intended to rattle Putin’s Western adversaries and undermine their resolve.

Wise to that ploy, the Americans have gone out of their way to shrug it off and explain it away. Lest anyone should suggest that the appearance of Russian warships 90 miles from US shores might in any Continue reading →

Article published in The Sunday Telegraph, 8 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

Spain’s hard-Left pile-on against Israel is a foretaste of dangerous things to come under a Labour government in Britain. Madrid is the latest capital to join South Africa’s obscene accusation of genocide at the International Court of Justice. This twisted charge comes straight out of the Soviet playbook which denounced the Jewish state for the same alleged crime in the 1970s. It is intended to taunt and vilify a country that was built to a large extent by survivors of an actual genocide, and is today fighting against a terrorist army whose very charter calls for the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of Israel.

Indeed, Hamas demands ‘the full and complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea’, meaning the replacement of the State of Israel by an Islamic state. These words, often heard from the mouth of Yahya Sinwar, the terrorist leader who planned and led Hamas’s slaughter on October 7, were precisely echoed the other day by Spain’s deputy prime minister Yolanda Díaz when she herself said ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’.

It is a sign of the depths to which Pedro Sanchez’s government has descended that one of his ministers should be repeating such slogans.

Here in Britain we can expect similar levels of depravity if Labour wins the election in July. The party manifesto is set to include recognising a Palestinian state, in the wake of Spain’s decision to do so along with other European governments. This has been hailed as vindication of its ‘resistance’. But what has Palestinian ‘resistance’ entailed so far? The murder, torture, rape and abduction of Israelis. Just yesterday, Israeli hostages were freed in a reminder of Hamas’ brutality and vindication of Israel’s continued operations in Gaza.

Labour recognition of a Palestinian state will achieve nothing whatsoever beyond mollifying anti-Israel voters and rewarding terrorism. It certainly won’t bring any progress towards the two-state solution Starmer says he wants, something that can only be brought about by agreement between Israel and Hamas.

But it will have immense costs. Contrary to any hope Starmer might have that appeasing Hamas in this way might lead to peace, it will in Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Express, 6 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

Vladimir Putin was not invited to the 80th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. But he was an honoured guest at the 70th in 2014, even though just months earlier his forces had invaded Ukraine the first time. His presence at Normandy then symbolised the West’s preference for appeasement over confrontation. In the face of Putin’s aggression, we imposed sanctions that Russia shrugged off, went through the motions of ineffective deal-making and returned as quickly as possible to business as usual — opening the door to a follow-up invasion in February 2022.

And the door was wide open when Putin marched in. European nations had shown him their abject weakness, failing to make any attempt to re-arm following the 2014 invasion or any of Putin’s other aggressions. And Biden opened it wider still with his abandonment of an ally of 20 years by catastrophically pulling out of Afghanistan in 2021, signalling to Putin he had nothing to fear from the White House.

In his speech at Normandy on Thursday, Biden told us: ‘Hitler and those with him thought democracies were weak and the future belonged to dictators.’ He went on to speak about the need now to stand up against present-day despots like Putin. Biden and his allies might talk the talk but they are certainly not walking the walk. After more than two years of war, Ukraine is still in dire straits, with NATO nations failing to provide anything like sufficient combat power to enable it to push the Russians back.

Nor are Biden and his European allies making any serious effort to present a united front against that other anti-Western despot and Putin collaborator, Ayatollah Khamanei in Iran, whose proxies including Hamas and Hizballah are violently attacking our Israeli allies. Instead they have been doing all they can to restrain Jerusalem from achieving victory over its attackers. On top of that, desperate to appease Khamanei, they have failed to take any serious action to prevent Iranian export of attack drones to Russia and done their best to turn a blind eye to Tehran’s accelerating nuclear weapons programme. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Express, 5 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

On Tuesday bidding was opened by the British government to provide drones to Ukraine that might have a major influence on the course of the war.

The UK and Latvia are leading nine other states in a programme to supply large numbers of ‘first person view’ (FPV) drones to Ukraine, leveraging Western industrial capacity. These are small quadcopter drones controlled directly by an operator using the system’s camera to hit the target with explosives.

FPV drones have had a major impact on the battlefield in this conflict and have been used to target armoured vehicles, defensive bunkers, infantry soldiers and ships. The Ukrainian Army now has a dedicated drone force, and most frontline units have specialist operators assigned to carry out surveillance of enemy forces and strike them with explosives.

Ukrainian drones have played a significant role in slowing the current Russian offensive in the Kharkov area, which now appears to be bogged down. I observed them in action at Bakhmut last year and saw first hand their remarkable accuracy and killing power against Russian troops, as well as their ability to coordinate with other combat forces to help direct artillery and armour against the enemy.

Drones are of course used by the Russians as well, and are notoriously hard to defend against. We have seen the devastating effects of Hizballah drones in northern Israel only this week, against a country that probably has the best air defences in the world.

Stopping them before they go into action is therefore extremely important, including in manufacturing, transportation and storage facilities.

The Pentagon recently lifted restrictions against using US supplied weapons against Russian territory, but only in specific areas. Continue reading →