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 →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 4 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

You might think in the run up to the general election Labour would be able to get its act together on one of the areas where many voters have traditionally trusted the party the least. But as Keir Starmer tries hard to burnish his credentials on defence and to distance himself from Corbyn, his deputy, Angela Rayner, comes out with an opposing view.

To much fanfare, Starmer announced his ‘triple lock’ commitment on nuclear defence, which in reality seems no different to current Tory policy of maintaining the nuclear deterrent, building four new subs and making upgrades when necessary. But shortly after he claimed his commitment to the nuclear deterrent was ‘absolute”, Rayner announced she wants to rid the world of it. She said she seeks multilateral disarmament but has never supported unilateral disarmament. History tells a different story. In 2016 she, and many other members of her party, voted not to renew Britain’s nuclear deterrent, which very much amounts to unilateral disarmament.

In the face of this Labour record, Starmer was forced to flex his muscles, insisting that as prime minister he would be calling the shots on the nuclear deterrent. That might not be so easy, with a dozen other members of his current front bench team among those who voted the same way as Rayner over renewing the deterrent, including his shadow foreign secretary. David Lammy claims to have changed his mind after seeing how Ukraine got invaded by Russia. That’s a somewhat curious justification for his u-turn given that Putin first invaded Ukraine in 2014, two years before Lammy was voting in parliament for unilateral disarmament of our own country.

With the eye-watering sums needed to maintain the deterrent into the future, can we really believe that a government with so many ministers seemingly ready to change tack on such a fundamental issue as nuclear defence will stick by it at the expense of other spending demands to which they are much more ideologically attached? Rayner herself tweeted about the vote to renew the Trident nuclear capability in 2016: ‘Amazed we can find money for this but we steal £30 a week off disabled people.’ Continue reading →

Article published by Ynetnews.com,  14 May 2024. © Richard Kemp

Biden’s cynical obsession with preventing Israel from finishing off Hamas in a major offensive in Rafah will have the opposite effect from the one he intends. His analysis of US electoral projections has convinced him that he must be seen to stand against Israel as the voting intentions of some of his supporters, especially young people, will be damaging to his prospects for a second term unless there is a course correction.

Thus we have seen direct public attacks on Netanyahu and his cabinet by Biden and his supporters such as Chuck Schumer, outrageously calling for replacement of the democratically-elected government of an allied country. There was the failure in March to veto UN Security Council Resolution 2728 demanding a cease-fire without linkage to hostage release.

Then there have been repeated false accusations of Israel blocking aid into Gaza and creating famine. We have seen Biden’s unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations of the IDF going ‘over the top’ in attacks against Hamas in Gaza.

The Biden administration has threatened to sanction an IDF unit on the basis of information supplied by a hostile American NGO with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is an offshoot. There are even suspicions that Biden encouraged an International Criminal Court plan to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his defense minister and military chief of staff.

In the last couple of days, the State Department reported to Congress its suspicions that Israel has breached the laws of war in Gaza, while stopping short of making any conclusive accusation. Such a public attempt to vitiate a close American ally at war must be almost unprecedented.

Most damningly of all is Biden’s withholding supplies of some armaments to Israel, including precision-guided munitions. This from a man who said in 2019 that any such action would be ‘absolutely preposterous’ and ‘beyond comprehension’. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 7 May 2024. © Richard Kemp

Hamas’s agreement on Monday to a ceasefire deal that was never on the table was yet another ruse to buy time and build international pressure to halt a major IDF operation in Rafah. It was a sign of the terrorists’ desperation to prevent the destruction of their final stronghold. An IDF move into Rafah has been delayed far too long. It is the result of months of fruitless negotiations over release of hostages that never showed any sign of materialising. Yet Israel had little option than to play along while even the smallest glimmer of hope existed.

The delay was also brought about by unbearable pressure from the US and other Israeli allies, with Biden repeatedly forbidding an attack on Rafah without what he called a ‘credible and executable plan’ to protect or evacuate the civilian population there. Similar demands were recently parroted by Lord Cameron during a visit to Jerusalem. No plan the IDF drew up ever met Biden’s stipulations, but then no plan could have done so if his real intention was to block the final destruction of Hamas amid growing concerns about adverse effects on his own electoral prospects. Of course one credible plan would have been to allow civilians to take temporary refuge through the Egyptian border into Sinai. Biden could have brought that about by pushing Cairo to agree but neither he nor any other international leader ever even raised a finger to do so. That unforgivable failure, which played right into Hamas’s hands, has contributed to many of the civilian deaths during this war and will likely lead to many more.

Now the IDF has been making preliminary moves against Rafah on the ground and from the air. Quite rightly, Jerusalem has not signalled its immediate intentions. Those may be to shape the battlefield for future large-scale operations, including spurring the civilian population to evacuate Rafah to designated humanitarian zones and adding pressure on Hamas to free the hostages. Nor is it impossible that an apparently inevitable push into Rafah might impel elements of the Hamas leadership to make good their escape from Gaza while Continue reading →

Article published by Ynetnews.com,  29 April 2024. © Richard Kemp and Rafael Bardaji

Is the International Criminal Court about to issue arrest warrants for top-level Israeli political and military leaders? That is certainly the view of some legal professionals in the court’s Hague ecosystem — and perhaps as early as this week. Any indictment for international crimes within the ICC’s jurisdiction cannot possibly be made with a solid legal basis in wartime.

The court has not been able to carry out any investigations on the ground in Gaza and will not be able to do so for perhaps many months. That means any such move would be politically motivated, intended to undermine Israel’s ability to defend its citizens from terrorist violence.

Given the high stakes in the region, and the direct involvement of the US in the conflict, it is inconceivable that ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan would issue indictments without the approval and maybe even the active encouragement of the White House.

With the presidential election approaching and a desire to gain votes from both supporters and opponents of Israel, Biden has been trying for months to restrain Jerusalem’s legitimate self-defense while at the same time backing its war effort. That amounts to disgraceful duplicity at a time when America’s closest ally in the Middle East needs full-throated support.

Members of Biden’s administration and his political allies have also shown extraordinary hostility to the democratically-elected prime minister of one of America’s closest allies, going back well before this war began. What better way now of heaping pressure on Israel and trying to drag down its prime minister than having the ICC-level charges at Netanyahu directly as well as his defense minister and military chief of staff?

Just the threat of such a highly dangerous move also opens up other duplicitous opportunities for Biden to coerce Israel. He can perhaps Continue reading →