Category Archives: Russia

Britain, Europe, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, United States

Is Putin a drowning man?

PUTIN’S WAR IN UKRAINE

Intro: The paranoid dictator has built an impenetrable echo chamber around himself, within which he is told only what he wants to hear

Vladimir Putin’s war to subjugate Ukraine is going from bad to worse for the Russian tyrant.

Originally billed as a three-day “special military operation”, it is now in its fifth year, longer than Russia fought in World War One, and longer than the Soviet Union took to repel then defeat Nazi Germany in World War Two.

Nor is there any end in sight as Putin faces yet another summer of setbacks. The Russian military has long ceased to make any territorial gains in Ukraine and the human toil continues to mount.

British intelligence estimates Russian war deaths at half a million. At least another half a million have suffered horrible, life-changing injuries.

Putin is running out of manpower to replace casualties of over a million. His military is being forced to offer enlistment bonuses of up ÂŁ60,000.

This sounds like a lot of money to most young Russians – until they discover that the average life expectancy of a new recruit once deployed – after training – on certain sections of the frontline is between just 20 and 35 minutes.

Putin is being forced to consider conscription. But that would make an unpopular war even more disliked.

Ukraine has fanned the war’s unpopularity by taking it to Russia’s home front. Increasingly sophisticated, long-range, lethal drone strikes have hit oil refineries, arms factories and other critical infrastructure deep inside Russian territory. They even managed to cripple an oil refinery in Siberia – 1,200 miles from the Ukrainian frontline.

Almost a third of Russia’s oil-refining capacity has been put out of service, some of it for a long time. Fuel depots have also been destroyed. As a result, there are now fuel shortages in more than a dozen regions across the country, even in Moscow (normally shielded from such inconveniences), where bad-tempered drivers are queuing ever longer for fuel.

There are now plans to import gasoline, quite an embarrassment for a country which pumps out 9 million barrels of crude oil a day.

It’s even worse in Crimea, which Putin annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The peninsula is home to a massive Russian military presence, a vital bridgehead supplying Russian forces on the frontline.

But a relentless series of Ukrainian strikes using new, more powerful, semi-autonomous drones on roads, bridges, railways and ferries has effectively isolated Crimea from Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

The drones stalk petrol tankers and military vehicles travelling on the main highways in and out of Crimea. Unsurprisingly, freight traffic has collapsed. The ferries have stopped. Fuel is scarce. And blackouts are common. Russia has even had to remove its powerful Black Sea fleet from Crimea to put it out of harm’s way. Quite the humiliation, since Ukraine doesn’t even have a navy.

It’s not clear how much Putin knows about any of this. The paranoid dictator has built an impenetrable echo chamber around himself, within which he is told only what he wants to hear.

It is populated by a mixture of senior military lackeys and old cronies from his KGB days. Bad news, they have easily worked out, isn’t a career-enhancing move. So they don’t give him any. They even produce a specially sanitised, bespoke version of the news for his delectation.

Stuck in this vortex of disinformation and downright lies, Putin often doesn’t have a clue what’s actually going on.

But even he couldn’t ignore the ominous dark clouds of burning oil over the Moscow sky some days ago, nor the black rain falling across the capital.

Ukrainian drones had struck the city’s main oil refinery again, this time putting it out of action for maybe 18 months and ensuring fuel shortages will remain a daily reality. Another humiliation, given Moscow has some of the best air defences in the world. Putin’s response was to retaliate.

He unleashed more than 70 missiles and almost 500 drones on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, killing at least 21 and wounding 85 in the capital alone.

The death toll will rise as rescuers rake through the rubble of some 20 residential blocks. It’s a gruesome business, but Putin is in no mood for peace.

His echo chamber is still telling him he can win – and nobody is within his earshot to gainsay or contradict that.

There are still more than 700,000 Russian troops massed in eastern Ukraine, maintaining deadly pressure on Ukraine’s fortress belt in Donbas which, if it were to fall, would put the whole country in peril.

Certainly, Russia has far more shells to fire than Ukraine and can deploy swathes of missiles and hundreds of guided bombs a day on a scale Ukraine cannot come near matching.

And frontline reports from battle-hardened Ukrainian soldiers who are aware of Russia’s suffering and setbacks, are reporting that there is still no sign of its forces collapsing.

Putin is being told all that – and more. But the home front continues to deteriorate. The initial war-driven stimulus is petering out: the economy grew by only one per cent last year, it will be less than that this year.

Unemployment remains very low. But that merely reflects the loss of so many lives on the battlefield and the fact so many other young folk have fled the country to escape military service.

Inflation and interest rates are cripplingly high. The national debt and the annual budget deficit were in fine fettle when the war started. But while the debt is still low, budget deficits are rising fast as defence devours almost 10 per cent of GDP (and half of all state spending). The national wealth fund, which has been pillaged to pay for the war, has run out of liquid assets to finance it.

More than 60 per cent of Russians now think economic conditions are worsening, and 56 per cent believe that the war is hitting their living standards.

Concerns about a deteriorating economy are adding to the growing anti-war mood. Public opinion is clearly souring on Putin’s “special military operation”.

Dictators, of course, don’t have to bother about public opinion – at least not for a while. But there’s always the risk they will do something stupid.  

You might think that a stalemate with no end in sight and an increasingly restless populace would encourage Putin to call for a ceasefire and sue for peace. Donald Trump, after all, has said he can keep all his ill-gotten gains in eastern Ukraine in any peace deal and can look forward to all manner of lucrative Trump-inspired business deals. 

Putin is just as likely, though, to double down and strike elsewhere to deflect attention from Ukraine and rouse Russian patriotism. The Kremlin is already waging extensive cyber and hybrid warfare against the Western democracies, including Britain.

That could be ramped up, creating various crises and confrontations on the way, keeping Ukraine out of the headlines.

More seriously, Putin could threaten Poland or the Baltic states or even Scandinavia, contriving a small-scale incursion to test NATO’s resolve.

The timing would be propitious for him: NATO has never looked more fragile, thanks to Trump’s hostility to the European democracies and his penchant for dictators like Putin.

The Trump administration has already cancelled the deployment of an armoured brigade to Poland and withdrawn an infantry brigade from Romania.

Pete Hegseth, the blowhard US defence secretary whose animosity to Europe knows no bounds, is reviewing what further US troop withdrawals should follow. He wants to move quickly.

Nothing is more likely to embolden Putin to seek a way out of his Ukrainian troubles than a show of weakness on NATO’s flank.

One expert has likened it to “drowning man” syndrome – the desperate measures a struggling swimmer will take to keep afloat, even pushing others under water to stay alive.

Thanks, then, to the resolve and bravery of the Ukrainian people, Putin is that drowning man.

The NATO allies have the resources and determination not to be pushed under by him.

If they stay resolute and united he will eventually sink to the bottom – if only President Trump didn’t keep indicating he’s minded to throw him a lifebelt.

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Britain, Europe, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

Europe must awaken or face great insecurity in 2026

EUROPE

THE great Victorian jurist, Sir Henry Maine, wrote: “War appears to be as old as mankind… but peace is a modern invention”. Events in the early part of 2026 will doubtless prove his wisdom by showing the awful fragility of that particular invention.

Even if they had never heard of Maine, the most complacent Europeans should have learnt from Vladimir Putin’s relentless onslaught against Ukraine that peace is neither a natural state nor the default setting of advanced countries, but rather a historical aberration that can only be preserved through strength and vigilance.

Yet, in 2025, we discovered how Europe remains divided between nations that grasp this lesson – or never forgot it – and those that cling with obstinance to old delusions. Leading the former category are Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Having broken free of the Kremlin within living memory, these countries know exactly what it means to be invaded by Russia: they will do anything to prevent this from happening again.

And what of Britain? Despite Sir Keir Starmer’s grandiose rhetoric (“a battle-ready armour-clad nation”), Britain remains firmly imprisoned in the camp of the deluded. The PM revealed his priorities in the Budget when he preferred social policies over defence, such as appeasing Labour backbenchers by abolishing the two-child benefit cap. This Government will allocate another £17bn to welfare by 2030, the exact sum that would have allowed Britain to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP. This looks as if Sir Keir has decided to place his own political survival – and the prejudices of his party – before the national security of his country, and for that there is bound to be a reckoning.

The outcome of those decisions is that Britain will enter 2026 at greater risk than was necessary. The perils ahead could scarcely be greater. The first and most immediate danger is that Donald Trump could collaborate with Putin to impose Russia’s peace terms on Ukraine. The guns along the frozen 800-mile front might then fall silent, but any respite would almost certainly be temporary while Russia rearms and regroups. If Putin achieves what he believes to be victory in Ukraine, he would be emboldened to come back for more. We should remember that today’s tragedy in Ukraine is Putin’s third war of attrition and conquest since the assault on Georgia in 2008. Like all aggressors, his appetite remains insatiable.

If there is a flawed peace in 2026, Putin’s next move could be a renewed attack on Ukraine, to achieve his original goal of subjugating the entire country. He might consider still more dangerous options. If he concludes that Mr Trump no longer cares about defending America’s allies, Putin could risk attacking a NATO member and the signs are ominous. If so, Britain would be obliged to stand with our allies and go to war with Russia, the world’s biggest nuclear power. Do we in Britain have any idea of what this would entail, or where such a crisis might lead?

There are still ways of ensuring that we never have to find out. We can rally our European allies to deliver more support to Ukraine, protecting Volodymyr Zelensky from being muscled into a false peace that rewards aggression. And we must do whatever is necessary to secure America’s commitment to NATO. Both imperatives require Britain and the rest of Europe to emulate Poland and its neighbours and spend far more on defence.

The second danger and the threat is rising is that China’s colossal military build-up might culminate in a confrontation with the United States and its allies in the Pacific. In 2025 alone, China commissioned 14 frigates and destroyers into its fleet; the Royal Navy, by contrast, has only 13 of these warships. 2026 has begun with China conducting intensive exercises in the waters around Taiwan, apparently simulating a blockade of that democratic island.

A full-scale invasion of Taiwan remains unlikely, this year, though Xi Jinping is believed to have ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready in 2027. But no possibility can be excluded and China’s lightning military expansion will heighten the danger. That threat is likely to reach its peak later in this decade.

Elsewhere, Mr Trump is going to have to decide whether to go to war in Venezuela to overthrow Nicolas Maduro’s autocracy. The biggest deployment of US forces in the Caribbean for nearly 40 years cannot be sustained indefinitely. If the president orders US forces into action, the first new conflict of 2026 would be a regime change operation in Caracas, probably combining air strikes with covert action on the ground.

Another authoritarian anti-Western leader who may be fearing for his regime’s future is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. The new year is opening with mass protests in Tehran and other cities.

The Ayatollah’s authority was severely weakened by the successful Israeli-US strike on Iran’s nuclear plants last June. As Khamenei approaches a point of maximum weakness, there must be a chance that 2026 could see the downfall of Iran’s regime, though no-one knows who will take over.

Above all, this has to be the year when Europe finally awakens to the threats and relearns the art of defending itself against aggression. If not, it may be too late to save the modern invention of peace.

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Arts, Books, History, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: The Nuclear Age

LITERARY REVIEW

FOLLOWING that day in the summer of 1945 when, on a testing ground in the New Mexico desert – when the first nuclear bomb exploded – many people of that era and generation have lived their entire lives under the threat of universal extermination.

It caused Robert Oppemheiemer, the brilliant scientist heading the US’s Manhattan Project, to proclaim melodramatically (but entirely accurately) an ancient Hindu prophecy: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Just three weeks later, in early August, the bomb was used for real for the first time against an enemy – in a blinding flash, and a shockwave that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Pavements melted, skin peeled off faces, more than 60,000 perished immediately, and in the following five months another 60,000 died from injuries and radiation.

Three days later, Nagasaki was given the same treatment. The original target had been a different city but heavy cloud cover saved it, diverting the US B29 bomber 125 miles south. Two square miles of the city centre were pulverised. Some 70,000 people died a horrible death.

And amazingly, those were the last fatalities of nuclear explosions. Eighty years on the world has somehow managed to avoid that apocalyptic and life-threatening tripwire of its own making.

So far.

This history is necessary to understand and should be imprinted on all our brains. It’s a miracle we are still here. Because in an unstable world (and increasingly so) we are all one reckless move, one miscalculation, one technical glitch, one individual’s moment of madness, away from Doomsday.

How the lid has been kept on nuclear Armageddon is plotted by acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy in this chilling and bewildering book.

Bewildering because all we have ever done is make the threat greater, while posturing about the importance of containing it, claiming nonsensically that massive overkill is making the world a safer place.

In 1962, Soviet Union ships carrying nuclear weapons headed for a clash with an American blockade of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was the nuclear confrontation between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that came toe to toe.

If no one blinked, it was inevitable that those red buttons would have been pushed, missiles would’ve been fired, and the world would have been a goner. The end of history itself had beckoned.

Other than being flippant towards the world ending, how else could you deal with the apocalypse being hours, minutes, or just seconds away? Because the very idea is impossible to grasp. Do you hide under a desk as a civilisation built up over millennia is blown apart and a world of abundance is reduced to ashes?

With Cuba, the moment passed. The world survived. Plokhy argues that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev was ready to push the button. They both pulled back.

And next time? Can we rely on the same calculated response from today’s leaders, from the likes of Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, Xi?

Since that’s the threat we live under, and yet we not only get on with our lives and look the other way, but we up the arsenal – increasing the destructive power to the point of absurdity.

Only recently, Putin boasted of a new Russian super-submarine with “unstoppable” weaponry that can fire nuclear drones at Western coastlines from thousands of miles away. In direct response, Trump ordered the US to restart nuclear testing.

Escalation and proliferation like this are the underlying narratives of the nuclear age: the powerful few believing they can keep the weapons to themselves, but finding all they have done is to provide an incentive to other nations to follow suit as quick as possible for fear of being left behind. The cat- and- mouse of the nuclear age; history is littered with such examples. The US threw its scientists into nuclear research for fear of Hitler getting there first and the Nazis snatching a late victory in the Second World War.

Then Stalin had to have his, Britain, too, then France, China, Israel, India. The club just got bigger; containment became harder and much more problematic. World leaders talked non-proliferation, but that’s easier said than done once the genie is firmly out of the bottle.

That genie is now ubiquitous. Officially there are nine fully fledged nuclear-armed states in the world. Yet, the most worrying assertion of all in this deeply disturbing book is that around 40 more states have access to the requisite technology, raw material and capability to produce nuclear weaponry, in some cases at very short notice.

That’s the size and extent of the timebomb each and every global citizen is sitting on.

Those scientists – the Einsteins, Bohrs, and so on – who first developed the principle and then the practicality of releasing unimaginable amounts of energy through nuclear fission and fusion, begged their political and military leaders to concentrate on the massive peaceful benefits of their discoveries.

Presidents and generals agreed; but first, they said, there is the enemy to defeat, this opponent and adversary to match, this military threat to see off.

Eight decades on, that’s where we still are. Plokhy’s account of the nuclear age hardly inspires optimism for the future.

He concludes that fundamentally it is the fear of annihilation that has kept us from the brink – the general agreement that it is in no one’s interest to perish in a global nuclear apocalypse. That held true in the Cuba crisis. He writes: “We must enhance the instinct of self-preservation shared by friends and foes alike to save the world once again.”

And keep our collective fingers crossed.

– The Nuclear Age by Serhii Plokhy is published by Allen Lane, 432pp

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