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 →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 7 January 2022. © Richard Kemp

Last month the UN General Assembly re-affirmed its implacable hostility to one of its own member states. It voted overwhelmingly — 125-8, with 34 abstentions — to fund an unprecedented permanent Human Rights Council (UNHRC) commission of inquiry (COI) into allegations of war crimes and human rights abuse by Israel. Taxpayers’ funds will pay an eyewatering $5.5 million budget in the first year alone, well over twice that of the UNHRC commission investigating the Syrian civil war.

Since its creation in 2006, the council has established 32 inquiries, nine of which — one-third — have focused entirely on Israel. But this latest COI is the first open-ended inquiry it has set up. It has no time-limit and no restriction on its scope. The US voted against the move, saying it ‘perpetuates a practice of unfairly singling out Israel in the UN’. Among the abstainers was Australia, whose representative said, with characteristic plain-speaking: ‘We oppose anti-Israel bias.’

As the US, Australia and others fear, it is inevitable that Israel will be falsely pronounced guilty of the ‘systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity’ that the COI says it will probe.

I understand the COI plans to explicitly brand Israel an ‘apartheid state’. This lie will be taken up across the world, fuelling antisemitic hatred against Jews everywhere. It will contribute to what Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid described this week as an imminent debate ‘unprecedented in its venom, or in its radioactivity, around the words, “Israel as an apartheid state”.’

The lie of ‘Israeli apartheid’ was dreamt up in Moscow during the Cold War and driven home by a relentless Soviet propaganda campaign until it took hold in the UN and across the Middle East and the West. This included the repeated comparison of Israel with South Africa in the Soviet media and in books such as ‘Zionism and Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 2 January 2022. © Richard Kemp

When US President Joe Biden took office, he removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. He should have replaced it with one of Neville Chamberlain. After Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938, Churchill told him: ‘You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.’

The first year of Biden’s presidency has been marked by appeasement upon appeasement. Appeasement of Russia, appeasement of Iran, appeasement of jihadists. China also — and we may now be witnessing his most dangerous appeasement so far: helping Beijing cover up the origins of the most consequential harm unleashed on the globe since the Second World War.

Biden inflicted untold damage on the free world by his catastrophic surrender in Afghanistan, demonstrating to America’s enemies and friends alike that, under his administration, the US was no longer willing to stand by its allies nor to protect its own vital national interests.

Biden’s decision to capitulate to the Taliban revealed a failure of one of two key elements of strategic deterrence: credible political will. Failure of the second element, military capability, was exposed by the shambolic and irrational manner of the withdrawal, in which crucial terrain and assets were abandoned first, American citizens and dependents left to their fate and US and allied forces placed at needless risk. Watchers were rightly shocked by such exposure of the most powerful military in the world. Continue reading →

In wartime, serving men want to be with their comrades. It’s those at home who suffer the real pain of absence

Originally published in The Times, 24 December 2010. © Richard Kemp

As the recently released and much acclaimed film The King’s Speech shows, oratory did not come easily to George VI. But fighting to overcome his nervous stammer, he became an inspirational symbol of this country’s resistance to the Nazi menace. The King’s leadership was never more vital than in the dark days of 1940. That year the theme of his Christmas speech was ‘the sadness of separation’.

Today, our troops in Afghanistan, battling valiantly against a lethal and determined enemy in Helmand’s bone-chillingly cold ‘desert of death’, must also overcome the tremendous ordeal of separation from their loved ones: an ordeal that weighs particularly heavily at this time of year.

Under the British Army’s historic regimental system soldiers frequently serve in the same combat unit for many years. They live together, work together, drink together, fight together — and sometimes even get arrested together. Close relationships develop, extending up and down the ranks, making for a tight-knit community: creating the friendships, understanding, trust and loyalty that are essential to effectiveness in war. They become, quite literally, a military family.

The adrenalin-fuelled horrors of violent combat, the like of which our troops experience day in and day out in Helmand, fire this already close comradeship into an iron bond. King George VI, himself decorated for bravery as a gun-turret officer on board HMS Collingwood at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, spelt this out in his 1940 speech: ‘If war brings its separations, it brings new unity also, the unity which comes from common perils and common sufferings willingly shared.’ Continue reading →