Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2023. © Richard Kemp

I was in Kyiv on Monday night when Ukraine’s capital was hit by its biggest missile attack since the war began.

It was more than just another attempt to terrorise the city. Following hard on the heels of President Zelensky’s visit to Europe with renewed guarantees of military aid, it amounted to a demonstration of force by an increasingly beleaguered Russian dictator.

In half an hour the city was attacked from the north, south and east. In came ballistic missiles, Iranian Shahed loitering drones, Kalibr ‘hypersonic’ cruise missiles launched from warships in the Black Sea, and Kinzhal hypersonic missiles fired from MiG-31K fighter planes.

The result of this tremendous firepower was nothing short of abject humiliation for Putin.

I watched as Ukraine’s combined air defence forces, including American Patriots and German Gepards, seemingly knocked every Russian missile out of the sky. Just three people were injured by falling rocket debris, there was minimal physical damage and – by daylight – the city had returned to normal as though nothing had happened.

This event symbolises both Ukrainian resilience and Russian weakness. Especially the latter.

After Putin was taken aback by the unexpected failure of his initial invasion last February, he came up with a hasty Plan B. That was to invest in Wunderwaffe (‘wonder weapons’), in the same way as Hitler did in the second half of the Second World War, while building up his forces for a renewed offensive this spring.

That much-heralded assault has not materialised, with the Russian army so far barely able to push forward a few miles in one or two places – and at the cost of massive casualties. I spoke today to a Continue reading →

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

Operation Shield and Arrow has been carried out to date with breathtaking effectiveness. The shield of Iron Dome and David’s Sling have prevented major loss of life among the civilian population, although so far one man has been tragically killed and some have been injured, despite a barrage of 547 deadly rockets fired at Israel at the time of writing.

The arrows of target intelligence, air strikes and missile attacks have decimated the Gaza terrorist leadership and destroyed many of their weapons. No other military is capable of defending its people with the ferocity and precision the IDF has been showing.

Unfortunately, some of Israel’s arrows have also killed uninvolved civilians. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said yesterday that the civilian deaths in Gaza are ‘unacceptable’ and called on Israel to ‘abide by its obligations under international humanitarian law’.

This amounts to a grave slur against the IDF which is known by all Western military commanders to be more effective than any other force in the world in preventing the deaths of civilians in enemy territory. Instead, Guterres should have held the Gaza terrorists directly responsible for the killing of their civilians, for it is they who have a deliberate policy of using human shields — a war crime. Not least, Islamic Jihad commanders keep their wives and children close to them as proper military commanders would wear their body armor and helmet.

Guterres’s comments — and their echoes in the media and among human rights groups — also play directly into the hands of terrorists whose prime operational objective, short of its destruction, is international vilification of Israel. The UN Human Rights Council’s condemnation of the IDF that will follow this conflict as night follows day, flowing from thinking such as the Secretary General’s, will help ensure that Islamic Jihad and terrorists everywhere continue to use human shields and will cost many more lives. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 28 April 2023. © Richard Kemp

In recent weeks, optimism has been the main feature of analysis regarding Ukraine’s chances this summer, as Kyiv gears up for a major offensive. The failure of Russian forces to gain any significant territory since the winter has, quite understandably, excited Western pundits. But there is a risk that we are over-estimating Kyiv’s abilities and becoming complacent in the process.

Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, is now trying to damp down expectations. ‘It is definitely overheated – everyone wants another victory,’ he says. ‘We didn’t believe in victory before. We used to want Ukraine to survive at least minimally.’ His words are a critical reality check for those predicting the imminent collapse of Russian forces. We should all adopt such caution; not just to avoid disappointment, but also because it signals the need to plan for a sharp change of gear in our support for Kyiv.

The Ukrainian army says it has been generating more than a dozen brigades with tanks, artillery and engineers, much supplied by the West, to hurl at the Russians. While continuing to fight in the Donbas, the general staff has been conserving reserves and building them up to form a corps that can have a decisive effect against a strengthening Russian defence. But while this makes strategic sense, the fighting, especially in Bakhmut, has been very costly in artillery shells and missiles, depleting Kyiv’s reserve forces.

Armoured assaults against heavily defended enemy positions – which will define the Ukrainian offensive – are complex operations requiring extensive training and the ability to co-ordinate attack forces, combat engineers, air defence and air support. Yet the picture that emerged in the apparent leaks of classified Pentagon papers is one in which Ukraine will struggle to maintain these functions.

One reported leak stated that the ‘enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive’. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Express, 23 April 2023. © Richard Kemp

On Saturday night, British embassy staff and their families were flown out of Sudan from an airport near Khartoum, in an operation mounted by 1,200 British troops from 16th Air Assault Brigade, the Royal Marines and the RAF.

That still leaves several hundred British citizens in the country, including aid workers.

They may not be deliberately targeted for attack, but in what has rapidly descended into a violent and highly volatile zone, all of them are in great danger.

Many live near the airport at Khartoum, the scene of some of the worst fighting. As well as shelling, gunfire and air strikes, we have seen random violence, looting and vicious assaults on the streets of the capital, as well as elsewhere in the country. On top of that there are growing food and water shortages.

Although the Government was right to close the embassy and evacuate diplomats, who could do nothing to help British citizens in this situation, those who remain will be feeling isolated and abandoned.

The Sudanese government is not in a position to assist them and the internet, pretty much their only lifeline for advice and information, is precarious and often blacked out. That is likely to worsen.

In London, Cobra, the UK crisis management committee that co-ordinated the embassy withdrawal, will be actively monitoring the situation and considering options for a further evacuation. British diplomats and intelligence staff in the region will be using their contacts in Sudan to identify potential opportunities.

It is likely the military forces involved in pulling out embassy staff will remain on standby to give further assistance if and when possible. Special forces are also likely to be poised in the region to mount a specific rescue operation if British citizens are taken hostage. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 22 April 2023. © Richard Kemp

On Wednesday the European Parliament voted to set up a new force of 5,000 troops to allow the EU to ‘respond decisively … in order to assert itself as a credible security and defense actor’. The plan is to start exercising this year and have full operational capability by 2025.

This amounts to nothing more than another military white elephant. Even its name – the Rapid Deployment Capability – smacks of bureaucratic impotence. And the very idea is absurd: given the wide array of national self-interests and often fundamentally diverging geopolitical priorities among member nations, its deployment would inevitably be met with opposition by one country or another, even if – as is planned – there was no need for agreement from all members. You just have to look at the dithering and division in the EU when Putin invaded Ukraine, which was a black and white case compared to pretty much any future conflict scenario: Germany initially sent only combat helmets to help Kyiv in its hour of need, and for months vetoed plans by other countries to donate German-manufactured tanks and other lethal weapons. So much for responding decisively.

Underlining the nonsensical thinking behind this plan, Brussels has actually had such a force at its disposal since 2007, the EU Battlegroups, each 1,500 strong and intended for exactly the same purpose as is now proposed. But they have never once been used despite several compelling opportunities to do so over those years. As the EU itself admits: ‘Issues relating to political will, usability, and financial solidarity have prevented them from being deployed.’

This latest Brussels vanity project could be dismissed as just another waste of EU taxpayers’ money, but it has much more serious consequences. It is the latest of many attempts to create an EU army through the back door. That would be a disaster: centrally controlled, languid, neutered by 1,001 national caveats and pulled in a hundred different directions. Had an EU army been responsible for arming and training Kyiv’s forces then Ukraine would have collapsed. Continue reading →

Article published in The Sunday Telegraph, 16 April 2023. © Richard Kemp

With more than 50 civilians and many more military killed already in the power struggle between rival governing factions that erupted in Sudan over the weekend, there is no good side in this battle. But as with so many other conflicts in Africa and the Middle East in recent years, one thing we do know is that Russian troublemakers are not far from the action.

The fighting in Khartoum and elsewhere in the country was triggered by clashes between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese armed forces, and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or ‘Hemedti’ for short. Burhan and Hemedti staged a coup in 2021, seizing power from the transitional council put in place following the ousting of the Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir. Hemedti is commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group formed from the Janjaweed militias that helped conduct, under Bashir, the Darfur genocide, which is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people in western Sudan.

Rather unsurprisingly, the RSF has been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, which has reportedly helped train and equip them. Wagner is believed to have been brought into Sudan by Bashir to help shore up his faltering regime in 2017, following a meeting with Putin in which Bashir promised to make the country Russia’s ‘key to Africa’. Among his plans was a Red Sea base for the Russian navy at Port Sudan, a Wagner-supported project.

Ever since, Wagner has supplied large quantities of weapons and equipment to Sudan, including military trucks, amphibious vehicles and two transport helicopters. And after the downfall of Bashir, the Russian mercenary group realigned with Burhan and especially Hemedti. It continues to operate the Meroe Gold company, which reportedly exploits Sudan’s mines and smuggles vast quantities of gold out of the country, supposedly lining Prigozhin’s pockets and denying much-needed revenue to Sudan. For Putin, this would help efforts to evade Western sanctions, allowing him to fuel his illegal war in Ukraine. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 13 April 2023. © Richard Kemp

President Biden’s visit to Ireland this week gifts the country an opportunity to sell itself to the world. Pomp, pubs and progressive values are the order of the day; a nation portraying itself as historically oppressed yet forward-thinking and open for business. Through such spin, it is inviting us to just ignore its woeful contributions to Western defence, the elephant in the room given the current war in Europe.

While Biden spoke with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar about the conflict in Ukraine, there is no evidence the President asked for anything tangible to support the Ukrainian war effort. When was the last time an American president included Ireland in their vocal – and justified – criticism of Europe for slacking on its commitments? The fact is, with so many American voters claiming Irish heritage, Ireland gets a free pass, something it shamelessly exploits.

Even if Biden had asked for more military support from Dublin, he’d have been wasting his time. The Irish cupboard is bare. Yes, they have provided some humanitarian aid to Ukraine, including seed potatoes, but their military commitment is limited to an agreement to assign ‘up to 30’ soldiers to help train Ukrainian troops in de-mining. By percentage of GDP, Dublin has the lowest defence spend of all 27 EU members – just 0.3 per cent.Former Foreign Minister Simon Coveney admitted this is ‘roughly a quarter to a half of what other similar-sized countries in Europe spend’.

Ireland’s army is less than 8,000 strong. It has no combat planes and its navy has just mothballed two of six patrol vessels for lack of crew. It is neither capable of monitoring its own air space nor conducting subsurface maritime surveillance. A 2021 Irish government Commission on the Defence Forces damningly concluded that Ireland cannot ‘meaningfully defend’ its own territory.

Most of the country’s military capacity, such as it is, has been used not for self-defence but for international peacekeeping. Whilst valuable, and convenient for virtue-signalling, the dose of reality Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2023. © Richard Kemp

Are we seeing the beginning of a Night of the Long Knives in Russia? In the summer of 1934, Hitler ordered the murder of leaders of the SA, a Nazi private militia that was running out of control and threatening his power. The apparent assassination of Maksim Fomin, aka Vladlen Tartarsky – a vocal pro-war critic of the Kremlin’s handling of the invasion of Ukraine and cheerleader for the Wagner Group of mercenaries – has been interpreted by some as a shot across the bows of Wagner’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Prigozhin is sometimes spoken of as a potential successor to Putin and in recent months has frequently crossed swords with Putin’s inner circle, publicly alleging incompetence and even accusing defence minister Sergei Shoigu of treason. This appears to have rattled Putin as well as the military top brass to the extent that the army has been accused of deliberately and needlessly expending Wagner mercenaries’ lives and depriving them of ammunition in order to clip their wings and even get rid of them.

Now the UK Ministry of Defence reports that Russia is looking to sponsor and develop alternative private military companies (PMC) to replace Wagner in Ukraine. Wagner, with 30,000-50,000 fighters in the country, has been essential to Putin’s faltering war effort, undertaking missions the regular army wouldn’t do, and so the apparent moves against the group indicate just how great a threat Putin must believe Prigozhin poses.

Wagner will not be easy to replace. Aside from its activities in Ukraine, its web, entwined with Russian foreign and economic policy, extends from Syria to Africa, Europe to Latin America. It was fed and engorged by this war, and has arguably become too large to eradicate entirely.

Yet while Putin may be better off dispensing with private military outfits and the internal risks they represent, they bring him many benefits. For one, he knows that past Russian leaders have been Continue reading →