A Ukrainian Reality Check

Starmer And Macron Are Building A Coalition Of The Deluded.

The great and the good of the modern European defence and foreign affairs world are yapping like a roomful of Chihuahuas confronted by a bear. Their general chorus is along the lines of “Putin must be stopped, Zelensky supported, if Trump won’t do it we can.” With the notable and praiseworthy exception of Italy’s Georgia Meloni they continue “It’s our moral duty to put in a peacekeeping force and we’ll build a coalition of the willing.”

Willingness is one thing; ability is quite another. While Two Tier seeks to insert himself as a key link in American foreign policy it is time for a reality check.

The Facts

Firstly, despite all the western firepower, technology, information and knowhow that has been made available, Ukraine is losing. It’s imposing a terrible blood price, but the Russians are inexorably advancing. The Ukrainian armed forces are being pushed back by old school artillery and infantry assaults which drone technology so admired by western defence writers (who should know better) is unable to prevent. The F16s and Mirage 2000 fighter aircraft haven’t transformed the battlespace, although they have shot down a fair few incoming cruise missiles. Wealthy Ukrainians avoided the fight by paying bribes and fleeing to tax havens – Ukrainians call them the Monaco Division.

The Ukrainians do not have the military strength to push the Russians back, let alone liberate the 20% of Ukraine that Russia has occupied. Their Kursk escapade has pretty much ended and it achieved little more than being a diversion. The thinking behind it was never clear; now its irrelevant. There’s not much sign that the Russians can achieve a decisive break through either. Their strategy seems to be to continue to apply pressure across the front and wait for the Ukrainians to collapse.

That collapse came closer when Zelensky made the colossal error of trying to bounce America into more than it was prepared to give on live TV. The western chatterati seemed to think Trump a bully. I thought Zelensky recklessly impertinent. Whatever, he learned the crucial lesson; Trump feels no obligation to arm him, nor to risk starting World War Three over a former Soviet republic. That in turn means that the chance of Ukraine recapturing the Russian occupied areas less than zero. To stay in the fight they must agree to a Trump’s ceasefire without preconditions.

Russia’s slow victory comes at horrendous human and economic cost. Those who predicted the collapse of the Russian economy under the twin pressures of Western sanctions and military expenditure were wrong. Russia can pay the price of victory because it must. It saw a west leaning Ukraine as an existential threat, so it acted. There is no point in Russia ceasing offensive operations, giving Ukraine a pause to regroup, unless its preconditions are accepted, chief among them being that Ukraine is never part of NATO (or its successor).

And yet the geo-political pygmies of Europe insist that Trump is wrong and that Ukraine must survive. So they have decided to rearm, increase their support to Ukraine and prepare a peacekeeping force. To support that the EU has cooked its books to enable €800 billion of military spending. (Note that bending the accounting rules is not the same thing as actually having the ready cash, which can only come from EU taxpayers).

Instant Sunshine From 2035

Macron has gone further, pledging that the French will extend their nuclear umbrella to cover Europe. This is pure sophistry. His proposal is to buy some more nuclear missile toting Rafael fighters and base them on an existing base in France, to be operational by 2035. The complexities of the nuclear umbrella are arcane and the real information is highly classified. However the French ASMP missile is far from invincible. It flies at a leisurely (in missile terms) Mach 3 for around 200 miles and delivers a warhead with the power of about 10 to 15 Hiroshimas. The replacement, the ASN4G is faster and will have a 600 mile range. It's been in development for a decade and might be in service for Macron's extended umbrella in a decade’s time.

France also has a submarine based nuclear deterrent, broadly equivalent to the British one, but with the important distinction that the French make the missiles and the warheads as well as the submarine. The UK makes the submarines and the warheads, but the missiles are of US origin. Pick your conspiracy theory as to whether the UK can launch without US consent. Macron hasn’t said much about that.

Getting from Willing to Able

Modern weaponry is complicated. Ramping up production of existing weapons takes time – the supply chain for the NLAW anti-tank rockets in Belfast includes five factories in four countries. Even simple artillery shells take time to manufacture and increasing manufacturing capacity is not straight forward. Some of the materials required are rare in the UK, be it Germanium for thermal imager lenses or high carbon steel for armoured vehicles. Rearmament of the UK is possible but it won’t be instant or cheap.

This means that Starmer’s “coalition of the winning” has problems. Some of the willing countries lack key military capabilities. The British have few tanks. Spare parts for them are rare as going to Ukraine – which is where all our self propelled artillery went. (We bought 18 Archer guns to cover the capability gap, but that's not enough artillery for a single brigade).

Reality is no challenge for the chatterati. They suggest that a composite multinational organisation can cover all the necessary capabilities. They say that the UK has always fought as part of a coalition and other parties bring the bits that the UK doesn’t have. The other party is usually the United States and as the British Armed Forces (and the Army in particular) have slumped from Tier One the US has become increasingly irritated ad having o support the British, whose presence in any war undermines their own in-theatre capability by requiring more support. (The US Army is Tier One - and then some).

This has already become apparent in the Starmer Macron “plan” to provide air cover for their putative peacekeeping force. The RAF does not have an airborne early warning capability. (The Air Marshals scrapped it to save money to buy the F35, thinking that they would replace the aging Boeing 707 based E3 Sentry AWACS with the Boeing 737 based E7 Wedgetail.) Unfortunately it made a hash of the order and is purchasing just three, the first of which has arrived and the initial operating capability is slated for next year. Any air cover will be dependent on the four French E3 Sentry aircraft. Four airframes are just about enough to keep one aloft (and working) all the time, which means that any other operation or training cannot be given AEW support by the French.

The Legal Position

Then of course comes the vital question of rules of engagement. What are the fighter pilots to do if, say, they are illuminated by a Russian air defence radar. (Jargon buster: “Illumination” means that the radar is acquiring a potential target. “Locking on” means that a missile is now tracking. “Launched” means a missile is on the way, pulling some g, turning and burning and deploying counter measures would be a good idea.) When the no fly zone over Iraq was in place radars that illuminated NATO aircraft were routinely engaged and destroyed before they could lock on. NATO member aircraft killing Russians on Russian occupied soil has potential for escalation along the route to World War Three. Has anyone explained this to Starmer and Macron? IF so, did they understand?

Do Starmer and Macron have any hint as to what sort of peacekeeping operation it will be. There are many varieties. The base level is passive observers, (as the Irish were for the UN on the Syrian / Israeli border. Then there is patrolling a buffer zone, as the British Army still does (with others) in Cyprus. Then there are the rather more robust methods used in the former Yugoslavia. All need clear rules of engagement and the ability to act effectively and decisively when challenged – as they will be.

This needs thinking through and scenarios played out. How does one platoon (25 soldiers) of peacekeepers stop an errant company (100 soldiers) of Russians or Ukrainians bent on revenge? When peacekeeping goes wrong, which it easily can, it gets messy. Srebrenica was the consequence of an ill-equipped and ill-prepared peacekeeper’s inability to stop a Serbian raid. At one point in the former Yugoslavia it was taking twelve hours to get clearance to drop a bomb on a threatening air defence radar.

The Force Structure

Starmer and Macron envisage a multinational force of 20,000. That’s about a division and about the size of the force the US maintains in Korea to deter a restart of hostilities, although the Ukrainian line of contact with Russia as very much longer than the Korean Demilitarised Zone. Multinational divisions can work – NATO has two of them in the Baltics and there was a Commonwealth Division in the Korean War. But they need to train together a lot before they become operationally credible. Language is one problem. Capability gaps and mismatches are another. Incompatible tactical approaches and (inevitably) jargon a third, although that’s less of a problem for NATO forces as in theory they operate the same way and their radios should be able to talk to each other. Logistics are always a challenge, and that challenge gets harder when there are (say) three or four types of tank to support in the filed as opposed to just one. Finally there is the legal basis of the operation, the chains of command and the rules of engagement. As recent events in the UK have shown, retrospective lawfare is a huge problem for British soldiers. Will they have robust indemnities? Will those indemnities last?

What Peace? What Ceasefire?

In any case, today there is no peace or ceasefire. President Putin has already said that he will not accept NATO member countries deploying military forces in Ukraine. That was, after all, part of his causus belli, so seeking to station them there is an obstacle to the ceasefire. Whether you, me or Starmer agree with President Putin’s fear of NATO in Ukraine is irrelevant - President Putin went to war about it and won’t accept it as a precondition for ending a war that he is winning, albeit at terrible cost to Russian, Kazakh, Chechen and Korean mothers.

President Trump knows this. He and Putin also both know that Starmer and Macron are posturing windbags, not military powers. They’re filling newspaper column inches for domestic consumption and, perhaps, to prop up their egos and put themselves in the running for a Nobel Prize. They’re not building a credible military force and they’re not adding anything to ending the killing.

Supporters of Ukraine will argue, with good reason, that a ceasefire without security guarantees and friendly forces of the ground is tantamount to surrender. However that misses the point that President Trump is not prepared to risk World War Three to support Ukraine. With equally good reason he wants the fighting to cease forthwith. While many professional diplomats and their chattering colleagues may despise Trump’s approach, their efforts have delivered nothing but prolonging the agony of Ukraine’s occupation. They didn’t prevent the war and they sure as hell aren’t helping Ukraine win it.

If President Trump can deliver a ceasefire, Ukrainian mothers may rename the various Johnson Streets and Squares to Trump Boulevards and Piazzas.

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