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On 12 April, Keir Starmer announced that Labour would commit to increase UK defence spending to 2.5%. While the Conservative Party has been talking up the need to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP for some time, Rishi Sunak made his formal announcement on 24 April. On the eve of Rishi’s reveal, the UK Defence Journal declared ‘Britain to boost defence spending due to threat from Russia!’  Out of the blue, spending 2.5% of GDP on defence had become a joint Tory-Labour commitment. For voters, at a time of an ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, Israeli atrocities in Gaza and growing fear of China, spending an extra 0.5% of GDP on defence a headline grabber. But why is there no debate between the two main political parties in the UK general election campaign about foreign, security and defence policy? The Tories and Labour have been completely silent on how much this additional 0.5% will cost in hard-earned, tax-payers’ cash.  At a pre-election debate, the phrase ‘2.5% on defence’ slipped off Deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner’s tongue quicker than the sale of her council house in Stockport.  In its review of the Conservative Manifesto, the Institute for Fiscal Studies only refers to increased defence spending in percentage terms, and not in pounds and pence. In fact, the Tory-Labour pact on defence spending will cost in excess of £13bn each year. Apparently, cutting the size of the civil service and cutting benefits will largely fund this. Although no actual plans for this have been set out.  So we should assume an increase in UK government borrowing which has now risen above 100% of GDP, with a government deficit that is currently twice as high as the limit set within the European Union (3%). Let’s be clear, the Tory-Labour plans for defence spending exceed the total cost of their respective election spending pledges. Labour spending plans top off at around £10bn and Keir Starmer and crew can barely breathe without being pressed on how they’ll fund breakfast clubs for primary schools, or a warm house plan to stop elderly people dying because they can’t afford to pay for heating.  The Conservatives are looking to cut taxes, despite massive debt and a large deficit. But where they are planning to spend more, for example on Sunak’s bizarre kids’ army, those costs fall far short of the assumed Tory-Labour increase in defence spending. And what the public doesn’t know is that most of the new money for defence has already been spent. The UK already spends 2.3% of GDP following a huge recent splurge.  The remaining 0.2% will disappear quicker than a British Minister’s deleted WhatsApp messages. But this money isn’t giving us anything new.  In fact, the day-to-day budget this year to pay for the lads and lasses on the front line of our defence has been cut by £2.5bn. Many service personnel worry about whether they’ll have a house to live in. Submariners talk about the increased stress of longer deployments which have been driven by the need to cut costs. No, this 0.5% increase in defence spending will be shuffled towards completely out of control spending on the defence procurement programme and the proxy war in Ukraine. In March 2024, the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee reported that the Ministry of Defence has been consistently unable or unwilling to control the spiralling costs and delivery schedules of its 1800 (that’s right, eighteen hundred) defence projects. The MoD has a woeful track record: whether it’s a £430m overspend on the Warrior programme or £2.5bn over on new aircraft carriers, a 59% delay in delivering the Challenger 3 tank or an extra 7 years for Dreadnought. On 4 December 2023 the National Audit Office produced a review of the MoD’s equipment plan for the next decade concluding that it was ‘unaffordable and facing the largest budget deficit since the plan was introduced in 2012’.  Note here that the current plan was developed two years before the Ukraine crisis started.  So the motto for UK defence procurement should be ‘delivering last decade’s technology in the next decade at whatever cost.’ According to the MoD’s estimates, the costs of the equipment programme have shot up by 27% or £65.7bn over the past year alone. And that is based on their ‘most likely’ scenario for spending. In the ‘worst case’, the total increase in cost will amount to almost £80bn.  Add in other expected cost overruns that the MoD reassures us can be absorbed by efficiency savings, then the cost shoots up to over £104bn. The Public Accounts Committee noted that these estimates do not account for an estimated £12bn in additional requirements for the Army. By far the biggest area of budgetary pressure is in the nuclear programme which is currently overspent by 62%. These include the much-delayed ‘Dreadnought’ submarine as a replacement for the SSBNSs that carry the UK’s nuclear missiles.  There is a joint UK-US project to build a new class of submarines to counter the apparent threat from China under the AUKUS programme; however, the current generation of Astute class fleet submarines in the UK has only been operational for ten years. We have a programme to design a new nuclear warhead with the US, as if having 225 nukes wasn’t enough. None of these massively costly projects are giving us capabilities that we don’t already possess. While they are undoubtedly strengthening the UK’s military industrial supply chain, they aren’t making us safer. After expensive nukes, the Tories and Labour are jointly committing to prop up proxy conflicts. £3.9bn will be allocated from the Treasury reserve in the current financial year, principally to fund the UK’s weapon shipments to Ukraine, but also the cost of supporting US strikes against Yemen. As I understand it, this ‘reserve’ funding for proxy conflicts will become normalised within the defence budget from 2025/6, after the general election dust has settled.  With practically no parliamentary scrutiny, a massive financial commitment to the government in Kyiv has been baked into the government’s spending plans under the next parliament. There has been no discussion of either expensive nukes or support for proxy conflicts by the Conservatives or Labour in the election campaign. The UK is practically the only country in the western alliance where any discussion of defence spending on nuclear weapons or war in Ukraine is almost completely stifled, by the government, the main opposition party and the mainstream media. Afraid to show weakness, the Labour party has refused to chart its own policy on foreign defence and security policy. As they will most likely win the election, we should assume big spending on nukes come what may, and on proxy conflicts until a negotiated settlement is reached in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza (arguably the flashpoint for Houthi strikes against western shipping).  A brief attempt to shift debate towards spending more on international engagement including through overseas aid and diplomacy evaporated. UK electors now face a terrifying lack of choice, with both the Tories and Labour preferring war-war, over jaw-jaw.

In one of his more bizarre outbursts, Volodymyr Zelensky, red of face, jabbing his finger, recently accused China of being “an instrument in the hands of Putin”. He said this at the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore as part of a world tour, in which he is encouraging participation at what Ukraine calls the Global Peace Summit.  This will take place in Switzerland from 15-16 June, and China has said it will not attend. Zelensky was treading a now well-worn path in which he and other senior Ukrainian figures insult countries that don’t bend to Ukraine’s demands for support in the war with Russia. He believes that China has been discouraging countries from attending the Summit but provided no evidence of this.  Some reports suggest that up to 107 States may attend. Although, in addition to Xi Jinping, there’s a chance Joe Biden may also not attend because of a fund-raiser in Texas.  Those who do send country delegations will undoubtedly enjoy the comforts of the Bürgenstock Resort on the shores of Lake Lucerne.  Though I suspect many will be confused about the purpose of the event. For, despite its billing, this won’t be a Global Summit. If it was, it would undoubtedly look at the appalling situation in Israel and Gaza, and no doubt other conflict hotspots across the world too. It might consider more broadly how to strengthen the adherence of states to their obligations under the UN Charter or review progress in strengthening international peacebuilding architecture. But it won’t do those things. Indeed, the Swiss Government, which is hosting, refers to it as the Summit on Peace in Ukraine.  Although it isn’t clear that Switzerland is in charge, as most of the press reporting about invitations appears to issue from Zelensky’s office. So this raises a diplomatic question as to the precise scope of the event itself?  Summits are normally hosted by the countries in which they take place; those countries shape the agenda and try to steer a communique that represents the best outcome of what can be agreed among the parties. In this case, there appears to be a diplomatic tug of love between the Swiss and the Ukrainians about who is running the show. For Ukraine, the Summit is explicitly an opportunity to push Zelensky’s so-called ten-point peace formula, which is essentially the points he made in a speech at UNGA.  The formula does contain some helpful lines on nuclear safety, food and energy security and environmental protection.  But it also contains three points that are probably unachievable.  Namely, the full restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, by which it means Ukraine’s border pre-2014.  This, according to Zelensky, ‘is not up to negotiations’. Secondly, the full withdrawal of Russia’s military and, third, the establishment of a tribunal to investigate alleged Russian war crimes. However, Ukraine’s pre-2014 border won’t be restored because the west tacitly gave up on Crimea in 2014 and focussed its energy instead on attempts to mediate a peace in the Donbass. These attempts notably included the Franco-German orchestrated Normandy format, which failed in the teeth of US and UK interference; namely, the locking in of sanctions against Russia under an unattainable notion of full Minsk II implementation. European leaders won’t commit to a plan where retaking Crimea is a key element, indeed, western war aims in Ukraine are now utterly unclear, beyond helping Ukraine to hold on from further territorial losses. Even though hardline and now sidelined figures like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have long supported the aspiration to re-take Crimea, Ukraine does not now and will never have the military capabilities to do so.  So the second and related aspiration of the full withdrawal of Russian troops is also unrealistic, however the map is drawn. Using western weapons to strike targets in the west of Russia won’t change the balance of power on the battlefield in Ukraine which favours Russia. It also won’t decisively shift Russian public opinion away from support for Putin in this war. Rather, it will ramp up the risk of escalation by Russia, which has still not committed its forces to the fight in Ukraine, in any numbers. While there is clearly a need to investigate allegations of war crimes committed by Russian forces during the war, the west will struggle to deliver this, not least because of the inevitable pressure to consider allegations of war crimes committed by Ukrainian forces.  And as neither Ukraine nor Russia are signatories to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, neither country would recognise the legitimacy of any investigation should it materialise.  That would render the endeavour toothless in the absence of more coercive measures to hold either country to account under international law. So, Zelensky’s plan is nothing more than Ukraine’s maximalist position that will inevitably be bargained down in any future peace negotiations that take place with Russia. But, and here’s the rub, Russia hasn’t been invited to the Swiss Summit. The Swiss Government believes that Russia should be invited. The Swiss MFA website says “Switzerland is convinced that Russia must be involved in this (peace) process. A peace process without Russia is unthinkable.” But Zelensky clearly doesn’t agree. It has been an explicit aim of Ukrainian foreign policy to exclude Russia from any dialogue on a settlement of the conflict. Indeed, this mirrors long-standing UK policy of talking about Russia and not to Russia. Rather, and in a recent visit to Madrid, Zelensky encouraged western partners to force Russia to make peace.  By that, he meant specifically to continue to provide Ukraine with offensive weapons that it can use to strike directly into Russia. Or force Russia into peace by continuing to make war, even though there is no evidence that NATO plans to join the fight in any decisive way. And just to be clear, on the summitry itself, Zelensky’s so-called Peace Formula isn’t a communique either as the Swiss are (or should be) holding the pen. The Swiss are shooting for peace. But, whenever Zelensky talks about peace, what he really means is ‘keep funding the war’.  So this creates a recipe for diplomats finessing any public statements at the end of a Summit that will, most likely, achieve nothing. Since his unhelpful comments about China, Zelensky has also suggested that Donald Trump is a 'loser'. The event in Switzerland is shaping up to be another echo chamber for an increasingly boorish Zelensky to publicly hector countries that don’t agree with his deluded and completely unsupportable position.  It’s time for real peace talks with Russia to begin. This article will be published on antiwar,org

I recently spoke with Dr Pascal Lottaz of the Neutrality Studies podcast, to discuss a range of topics related to the current stalemate in Ukraine, against the backdrop of a failure in western diplomacy. Both segments of the interview are below.

I joined Pelle Neroth-Taylor again on his show on TNT Radio Live, to talk about the effectiveness of sanctions and recent pronouncements by President Macron on deploying NATO troops to Ukraine. I argue again that sanctions against Russia have been an ineffective alternative to either making peace or making war with Russia. On Macron's recent statements about deploying NATO troops to Ukraine, I opine that only a more substantive threat of NATO deployment would alter the direction of the war which, at this stage, Ukraine seems unable to win on its own. But that a far less risky course would be to strike for peace. You can find my interview from 37:37 in the video.

Dame Harriet Baldwin, the Chair of the UK Parliament’s Treasury select committee rightly recognises that UK sanctions are not working. She doesn’t seem to know that the majority of Russia-related sanctions imposed by Britain have no impact at all. In an interview with the Financial Times, she suggested the intent of sanctions ‘is to cause real problems for the Russian economy,’ but that the IMF is ‘forecasting it’s going to be one of the strongest economies this year.’ Her committee is midway through an inquiry into the effectiveness of the Russia sanctions regime, which is due to report in July. Treasury officials were quick to point out that since the start of the war, “the UK has sanctioned over 2,000 people and entities connected with Russia, with the OFSI significantly upscaling its resource at speed to support that robust response.”  I take little pleasure in saying that I authorised a large proportion of those 2000 sanctions while at the Foreign Office; I also led on sanctions policy at the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014-2019. However, I also know that most of the individuals or entities that I sanctioned had no assets in the UK to freeze.  For every sanction that I authorised, I had to review a detailed form which indicated whether the individual or entity had assets in the UK; the vast majority said nyet! I therefore asked HM Treasury recently to tell me the numbers of asset freezes where the individual or entity concern had actual assets frozen.  They indicated that only 8% of individuals and 23% of entities sanctioned had assets frozen. In aggregate, that means almost 90% of UK sanctions have frozen nothing but thin air (NB: there are far more individuals sanctioned than entities). Bear in mind, too, that most of those individuals and entities sanctioned by Britain will also have been sanctioned by the US, Canada, EU, Switzerland, Japan and Australia.  You don’t need razor sharp skills in maths to conclude that over 14000 of the 16000+ asset freezes imposed are of people and companies with no assets in the west.  Because Russia banned state officials from banking in what it calls ‘unfriendly countries’ several years ago. So, most of the time, sanctioning a new set of individuals and entities is a completely meaningless gesture. I haven’t asked the Treasury, but I should imagine that the prison guards sanctioned over the recent death of Alexei Navalny had very little money anyway, let alone enough to deposit any in the City of London. So sanctioning them represents nothing more than vacuous virtue signaling. And of course, the sanctions process is not only meaningless but politically corrupt.  Liz Truss seemingly wanted to sanction every Russian with a bit of cash in the UK while she was Foreign Secretary. Indeed, she is so dense that she even seemed to believe that Londongrad was a real suburb of London. I therefore suggested the UK sanction Elena Baturina. She was at one time Russia’s richest woman and is alleged to have gained her wealth through massive corruption, having been married to Moscow’s former (also extremely corrupt) Mayor. That prompted an anxious sucking of teeth in King Charles Street, given Baturina’s previous involvement in Sadiq Khan’s charity and her links with Hunter Biden.  She wasn’t sanctioned. Foreign Office officials were in deep anxiety about upsetting the White House if the UK sanctioned Evraz, a company formerly linked to Roman Abramovich. Evraz had holdings in the US and Canada and employed several thousand personnel at steel mills there. Sensing a massive dollop of duplicity, I encouraged colleagues to stiffen their sinews and sanction Evraz anyway, just like we were sanctioning other companies. So the UK did eventually sanction Evraz two and a half months after the war started. However, the OFSI issued a licence to allow Evraz North America to continue its operations. I never really understand why the UK hasn’t sanctioned Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who despite successful efforts to rehabilitate himself as a paragon of western liberal capitalist virtue, originally gained his wealth, allegedly, through acts of the most egregious corruption. And yet we sanctioned Mikhail Fridman and Roman Abramovich who appeared well disposed to the UK (I’m not saying they are pure as the driven snow). Let’s be completely clear that Russia has undoubtedly endured economic pain since the Ukraine crisis started in 2014 because of sanctions. Financial sector sanctions in particular, led to a big, albeit fairly short-lived, shift in how investment works in Russia, with most of the pain felt in 2014-15. 2014 saw huge capital flight of over $130bn as foreign lending stopped completely in July of that year and Russian capital continued to flow out of the country, until the Central Bank hit the brakes. However, the inconvenient truth is that since 2015, the quest for ever more sanctions has represented a hunt for increasingly diminishing marginal returns. And Russia has had the same duo of Central Bank Governor and Finance Minister holding the reins of economic policy since that time.  They have navigated through two oil price collapses and COVID, which were more damaging economically than sanctions. While there has never been a clear articulation of the purpose of sanctions, the Atlantic Council describes the aims of sanctions thus: Significantly reduce Russia’s revenues from commodities exports; Cripple Russia’s military capability and ability to pursue its war; Impose significant pain on the Russian economy. Even the Atlantic Council, one of the most hawkish commentators on Russia, accepts that limited progress has been made against each of these measures.  For their part, Whitehall Officials will no doubt try to delude the Treasury select committee further that, with some tinkering and tightening up here and there, we can make sanctions more effective. But it is abundantly clear to me that sanctions against Russia have failed. And, of course, resentment about sanctions is now so high in Russia, that policy makers in Moscow will do anything to avoid making concessions to the west, including going to war. Which brings us back to the real foreign policy choice in Ukraine, which has always been whether to commit to war or peace with Russia. The eight Foreign Secretaries since 2014 have wanted neither.  Dame Harriet undoubtedly wants to show she’s doing her bit to support Ukraine through her select committee’s work; she’ll more likely be fiddling while Kyiv burns.

I recently appeared on Daniel Davis' Deep Dive podcast, to talk about my book - A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019 and to share my thoughts on the direction of the war in Ukraine.

I recently wrote an article for Antiwar.org on why Ukraine's fundamental economic frailty, and the lack of action in tackling corruption and driving reform, will ultimately lose it the war with Russia. The text of the article is below, link at the foot of the page. In his recent article on attritional warfare, Alex Vershinin at the Royal United Services Institute remarked that ‘war is won by economies, not armies’. Put another way, the country that can outspend its rival in military endeavour will ultimately prevail. To defeat Russia, Ukraine would need economic resources that it does not have and will not be able to obtain. It isn’t just that Ukraine’s economy is now more than ten times smaller than Russia’s. The problem runs much deeper. Since the Ukraine crisis started in 2014, Ukraine has ducked opportunities to enact the structural reforms it needs to tackle deep-seated corruption and diversify/strengthen its economy. Ukraine needed either to set a course towards an economic model that exports and has spare capital to invest, including overseas, or towards an economic model that is comfortable to import and can attract foreign investment to offset the difference. At the moment, Ukraine is neither and it can’t make the cardinal shift while war is raging.  Real economic reform in Ukraine has therefore sat in the pending tray for a decade. Data from the National Bank of Ukraine shows that the country consistently imports more than it exports. Not since 2022. Since 2006, the year after the Orange revolution. While on average, Ukraine’s yearly trading shortfall was $11bn in the ten years before war broke out, that figure almost tripled to $31.6bn in 2022 and 2023.  Yes, exports of goods have fallen since war broke out, by 17% and 30% in 2022 and 2023 respectively compared to the average.  But, critically, imports of services have also doubled since 2021. Ukraine’s trading surplus in services amounted to $3bn p.a. between 2012 and 2021; since 2022 it has slumped to a deficit of $9.8bn. Service imports have in large part been driven by the large scale relocation of Ukrainians to other countries. Ukrainian people spending Ukrainian money in other countries counts as an import, just as spending by foreign tourists in London counts as a service export for Britain. For Ukraine, that imbalance won’t be resolved until war ends and its citizens return en masse. Why does this matter? When a country imports more than it exports, it burns up supplies of foreign currency. If it runs out of foreign currency, then it can’t pay for imports and external debt.  Just look at what happened in Sri Lanka in 2022, which ran out of reserves and defaulted for the first time in its history. Functional economies avoid this trap by attracting foreign investment, look at the US and the UK for example, which consistently run deficits but maintain healthy foreign exchange reserves. Ukraine, however, isn’t a functional economy.  Few foreign companies are making productive investments in Ukraine, and this challenge dates back to 2014, and the onset of the Ukraine crisis.  Foreign investment into Ukraine’s private sector since then has averaged a paltry $2.2bn p.a. compared to $15.6bn p.a. from 2010 to 2013.  That’s mostly because investors generally avoid zones of conflict and war.  But it is also partly driven by the power vertical in Ukraine in which a handful of Oligarchs maintain an iron grip on business interests across the country. The war hasn’t changed and won’t change that fundamentally negative economic picture. Ukraine can’t attract significant foreign capital while at war.  And efforts to boost its exports have run into headwinds, particularly in Europe, with EU farmers rebelling against the flood of cheap imports from Ukraine. So Ukraine needs to depend on a friendly lender of last resort. In the Soviet Union, that would have been Russia.  Today, it is western donor nations. Look at Ukraine’s balance of payments and you’d see that it received on average $5bn p.a. in secondary income between 2010 and 2021; largely hand-outs from other governments. In 2022 and 2023 respectively it received massive inflows of $28bn and $24bn, to help stabilise its current account and prevent a collapse in foreign exchange reserves. More concerning, with Kyiv now spending an astonishing half of its ballooning budget on defence it has been forced to go to the lenders as well, borrowing a staggering $40bn in the two years since 2022, or almost one quarter of its current GDP.  That’s a 2000% increase in central government borrowing compared to the average in the ten years prior to war.  After much huffing and puffing, Victor Orban reluctantly agreed the EU’s most recent programme of support to Ukraine, amounting to 50bn Euro which runs to 2027.  But 33bn Euro of this is loans, equating to another 19.9% of Ukraine’s current GDP. Today, Ukraine’s gross external debt is already around 90% of GDP.  In a downside scenario, the EU has predicted that Ukrainian debt could hit 140% of GDP as early as 2026.  If that doesn’t worry you, it should. With war widening Ukraine’s current account deficit, western nations will need to provide ever greater amounts of macro-financial assistance just to prop up the country’s reserves.  Because if Ukraine ran out of reserves and had to devalue the Hryvnia, then it would simply not be able to service its debt and would go into economic meltdown, requiring even greater western assistance. Across the line of contact, much boiler plate analysis is churned out daily about Russia’s putative economic woes, but what does the data from Russia’s Central Bank tell us? Despite the structural challenges it faces, and notwithstanding the legally questionable freezing of $300bn (or around half) of its foreign exchange reserves, Russia is anything but short of liquidity. With western journalists blowing a collective raspberry at the rouble’s collapse after war broke out, Russia nevertheless brought in a staggeringly large current account surplus of £238bn in 2022.  That’s more than Ukraine’s pre-war yearly economic output, and over two times the value of western financial and military assistance to Ukraine in 2022. It is almost four times larger than Russia’s average current account surplus in the ten preceding years.  Russia’s current account surplus stabilised to $50bn in 2023, which is consistent with the long-term trend, and from the first two months of data, may come in slightly higher in 2024. The Russian economy is trimmed to export and reinvest earnings. The country hasn’t run a yearly current account deficit since 1998, the year it defaulted.  Largely because of this, Russia has very low external debt, at less than 20% of GDP.  Russia’s military spending could rise to 10% of GDP this year, with defence spending comfortably outstripping Ukraine’s by three times.  It doesn’t need to borrow significantly and has enough liquidity left in the tank to fund huge social programmes, which mean consumer spending in the economy remains strong. Russia’s current economic model brings downside risks in terms of the country’s inability to diversify into new, more value-adding sectors of industry.  These risks have been acknowledged by Putin but are too long-term to affect decision making on Ukraine. For now, Russia holds a significantly better economic hand in prosecuting an attritional war. No credible western military analyst now predicts a complete victory by Ukraine in this war that would push Russia back to its pre-war (let alone pre-2014) lines. But, in any case, it is clear that victory hinges on the balance sheet, more than on the battlefield. Ukraine will never have the economic resources it needs to out gun Russia. So, setting aside issues of weapons’ supplies to Ukraine and, indeed, who will pay the reconstruction bill when war ends, how long are western powers prepared to keep plying Ukraine with more debt as it prosecutes an unwinnable war? The economic policy no-mans-land that Ukraine has chosen to occupy didn’t start in 2022, but rather in 2014, when the Ukraine crisis began. We were told that Ukraine wanted to make a ‘European choice’ and cast off the rusted-over shackles of Soviet era mismanagement. It is therefore an irony that western assistance has not prompted a genuine and meaningful effort at reform in Ukraine that would speed the process towards eventual EU membership.  Rather, it has created and will continue to solidify a state of truculent dependence which weakens Ukraine economically and leaves it as ungrateful for western support as it was for Russian. Ukraine could still make its European choice. But first that would require painful political choices.  A choice to end the war through negotiations and a choice, for the first time, to face down vested interests and undertake meaningful reform in Ukraine. It’s far from clear to me that Zelensky has the power to make either choice. For now, and to paraphrase from the movie Top Gun, I fear Zelensky’s ego is writing cheques his country can’t cash. Ukraine's Economy Will, Ultimately, Lose It the War - Antiwar.com

I recently participated in an interview with Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris. You can watch it here.

Below a copy of an article I recently placed on the Brave New Europe website. Diplomats should be remembered for preventing or ending wars.  Victoria Nuland will be remembered for her role in starting a war in Ukraine.  Nuland’s early retirement from the US Foreign Service allows us to reflect on how badly off-track western diplomacy with Russia has drifted over the past decade. At best, Nuland was guilty of cutting across EU efforts towards a peaceful resolution to the Maidan protests which started in late 2013, plotting the removal of Russia-leaning President Yanukovych, and choosing who should govern Ukraine after he was gone.  Russia believes she, and the machinery of the US state arrayed behind her, directly orchestrated Yanukovych’s ouster on 22 February, which to this day they describe as an illegal coup d’etat. However you interpret her involvement, Nuland epitomised the contradiction in western diplomacy towards Russia which prompted the eight-year slide towards eventual war in 2022; she neither wanted western powers to go to war with Russia nor did she want to live at peace with Russia.  Between these two points of duplicity, a mire of twisted tanks and grey-faced legions of the dead, upon which Ukraine now lays broken and betrayed. Ukraine has no chance of escape from this devastation until western powers choose between War and Peace.  Ukraine’s current leadership is set on war and western leaders have urged them on in this endeavour. But the west itself has never wanted a war with Russia over Ukraine.  It didn’t in 2014 and it doesn’t now.   Right from the start of the Ukraine crisis, western policy makers whispered behind closed doors, including in London, that the annexation of Crimea by Russia was irreversible and that we would not deploy NATO troops to seize it back. I’m not saying that’s right, but that was the prevailing Realpolitik at the time (and that position has not changed). The Donbass insurgency was put in a diplomatic pending tray, with Germany and France mediating with Russia and Ukraine on a resolution using the Minsk II agreement as the foundation. But these efforts ultimately collapsed, in part because western powers were unwilling to urge Ukraine to meet its obligations on some form of decentralisation. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, NATO leaders held up their hands and were sorry that they could not close the skies over Ukraine as Russian troops bore down on Kyiv.  One of the first announcements made by the UK Government – which was the most ardent in urging Ukraine to bear up to Russia - was to ban serving British military personnel from joining the fight. Emmanuel Macron’s recent bid to secure consensus for the ‘declared’ deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine met with a collective sucking of teeth, in the ethereal corridors of the Elysee Palace. It’s easy to talk a good fight from a distance of 2000 kilometres, while Russian and Ukraine troops are locked in bitter face to face combat.  Easier still to send weapons and wash our hands of the fighting. So why the reluctance to fight? In a conventional war, NATO would arrive at the battlefield with an overwhelming military advantage over Russia in manpower, equipment and reserves. Even though I believe NATO would prevail over Russia in a conventional war, no plan survives contact with the enemy.  With Russia undoubtedly moving to a full mobilisation, we can’t assume that any war would result in a quick victory. War would mean heavy NATO, including UK, casualties. While I was posted to Helmand Province in 2010, working alongside the British Army and the US Marine Corps, the UK was losing 4-5 service personnel each week. People who remember the dignified return of the British fallen through Royal Wootton Bassett, should expect to see a far higher coffin count in any war with Russia. Arguably, the time for NATO to intervene and restore Ukraine’s territorial boundaries was in 2014.  Russia’s annexation of the four oblasts in southern Ukraine in September 2022 served in part to give the Kremlin a legally trumped-up pretext to deploy tactical nuclear weapons should NATO push into what they (wrongly) now consider sovereign Russian territory.  So a hard fought, high casualty NATO battle with Russia might at best serve to solidify a line of contact in Ukraine that exists today. I also judge it highly unlikely that a conventional war wouldn’t result in Russian missiles targeting European cities in some way.   While from the comfort of our homes, we have been shocked by scenes of devastation in Ukrainian cities, European public support for war would crumple as soon as European citizens were killed by stray missiles.  Because people would ask why we are not suing for peace? And in the UK, at least, no one in Whitehall would have an answer. So, while I am pleased that we have stayed out of a direct conflict with Russia, the question remains why we haven’t pursued a path to peace in Ukraine since 2014?  The UK abandoned efforts to search for peace with Russia in 2014 when Phillip Hammond became Foreign Secretary and cut all high-level dialogue with Russia. That position hardened when Theresa May became Prime Minister in 2016 and remains practically unchanged to this day. Events in Crimea and the Donbass were considered an affront to the newly labelled Rules Based International Order, and engagement with Moscow would imply endorsement. “No return to business as usual!” became the propaganda slogan of choice. We’d do our talking via strategic communications campaigns, virtue signaling to a generally receptive, overwhelmingly hawkish, UK media audience.  We’d apply pressure via sanctions and the politicisation of everything to exclude Russia from international sport, Eurovision and many other things besides.  We’d talk about Russia, rather than talking to Russia.  Not talking is now the prevailing tenet of British diplomacy and our Embassy in Moscow is a Potemkin House with a cardboard cutout Ambassador. Post-Brexit, we took back control of our foreign and security policy from Brussels and immediately handed the keys to decision makers in Washington DC.   Before Trump was elected President and Nuland was shoved to one side for four years, London colleagues regularly gushed about the latest Russia read-out they’d received from ‘Toria’ (Nuland) and Dan (Fried) another hard-boiled neo-con who set up the Russia Sanctions taskforce at the start if the Ukraine crisis. In the same way that Nuland’s toxic clique was pulling the strings in Kyiv, they were doing so in Whitehall and undoubtedly in other European capitals too.  And the lines were simple. It’s not up to Russia to decide which countries join NATO and Russia has no right to raise its concerns about the expansion of the world’s biggest military alliance into its back yard.  If they don’t like it, then “Fuck E-you!” Refusing to engage substantively with Russian concerns over NATO was not only bad statecraft, but it was incredibly foolish, given events that happened in Georgia in 2008.  Everything that Russia has done in Ukraine was predictable, signalled for years before the war started and therefore avoidable. However, after Biden was elected US President, Nuland was quickly reinstated and another member of her clique, Jake Sullivan – now National Security Adviser – wrapped their warm hands around the unattractive hairy balls of America’s Russia policy once more.  Open war between Ukraine and Russia became inevitable as soon as the Forty-Sixth President laid his frail and forgetful hand on the bible on Capitol Hill in January 2021.  And it was clear that theUK would blindly follow any hair-brained US approach to Ukraine, come what may.  Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and Liz Truss as Foreign Secretary actively discouraged Ukraine from settling for a peace deal in March/April 2022. The likes of Johnson and Truss, like Nuland, now sit in the indignant comfort of their ivory towers watching the muzzle flashes and fighting in Ukraine from afar. Ukraine is expected to beat Russia on the battlefield with insufficient men (and women) and materiel, before the NATO military alliance considers offering their shattered country Article 5 protection at an unspecified later date. But anyone who believes Ukraine can beat Russia on its own is deluded and not looking at the evidence.  All the fraternal hugs, (clearly, now, disingenuous) offers of support for ‘as long as it takes’, and big-screen appearances at Glastonbury by Zelensky have brought their country no closer to NATO membership. Jens Stoltenburg pontificates that Ukraine is nevertheless a member of the NATO family.  But when I was growing up, my older siblings would step in if I was getting beaten up by a bigger kid. To save Ukraine from complete destruction, the West must now get off the fence and choose between War and Peace and consult their citizens on which approach to take. Choosing peace means a difficult conversation with Zelensky in which western leaders are clear that his country won’t receive further aid unless it meets Russia at the negotiating table to agree a ceasefire and start a long and painful process of peace talks.    This will be difficult. The US and UK in particular have spent so many years telling Ukraine that their posture towards Russia is right and just, that its leaders no longer listen to anyone (including the Pope) who points to looming disaster and suggests a change of tack. Choosing war means an honest discussion with citizens about the direct consequences for large numbers of NATO personnel who may make the ultimate sacrifice and the feeling of safety in western cities for a mission that may deliver, at best, only marginal gains.  There would also be another, I assess more grinding, global economic shock which cast more Europeans into poverty. If western politicians are finally honest with their citizens about the stark choices available, it’s my belief that most people would insist on peace. https://braveneweurope.com/ian-proud-why-the-west-must-choose-between-war-and-peace-with-russia-and-be-honest-with-its-citizens

Below the text of an article that I recently published in Brave New Europe Website When Donald Trump invited Russia to invade ‘delinquent’ European NATO members who weren’t spending 2% of their GDP on defence, the liberal media went into a collectively indignant cringe. NATO potentate, Jens Stoltenburg, jumped on the bandwagon, accusing Trump of “endangering American and European soldiers”. Dutch General Rob Bauer, Head of NATO’s Military Committee, had already warned in January of the risk of eventual war with Russia within twenty years. European leaders from Tallinn to Berlin then fell over themselves conjuring up even more terrifying and imminent doomsday scenarios, to the point where we might expect the Katyusha rockets to start falling on us as soon as next year.  Keen not to be outdone, Britain’s Chief of the General Staff hinted at our possible conscription into a modern day Dad’s Army; don’t panic! This two month period of hysteria all adds to a state of fear the securocrats want us to live in each day that Russian tanks – probably rusted T-55 tanks, as we are also told that Russia’s new tanks have all been destroyed by Javelin missiles – will soon roll into Estonia/ Lithuania/ Latvia/ Poland (pick any from the list). This is utter balderdash of the most self-serving kind, intended only to line to coffers of western arms manufacturers. Just look at the numbers! NATO’s own statistics [1] show that the military alliance spends almost $1.3 trillion every year on defence at today’s prices. If NATO was a country, it would find itself the seventeenth most powerful in the world, on the basis of its yearly output.  Imagine, then, Jens Stoltenburg’s surprise at a G20 Summit in discovering that, of the Heads of the 16 states larger than his, the only other leader voted in by a murky, democratically unaccountable backroom process, was Xi Jinping. $1.3 trillion each year is more defence spending than the rest of the world[2], combined.  That’s over four times more than China (“that’ll piss Xi off, for sure”, smirks Jens), considered by many a bigger global threat to peace and security than Russia.  Even when Russia increases its defence spending in 2024 to $109 billion – still a shockingly high number - it will spend almost twelve times less on defence than NATO from an economy over twenty-two times smaller. Of course, the US alone accounts for two-thirds of all NATO, and 39% of global, defence spending.  So it’s easy to whip up resentment about European decision makers, slurping on moules frites and Pouilly-Fumé in the Grand Place and not having enough spare change to defend their eastern flank. A paltry 2% of GDP sounds an entirely reasonable and easy-to-achieve, target after all. Just look at what’s happening in Ukraine, the foreign policy herd would moo anxiously, brass alarm bells jangling at their necks.  If Putin is allowed to win in Ukraine, then he will attack NATO next! But having worked on Russia for a decade as a British diplomat, it is blindingly obvious, at least to me, that Russia would not launch a pre-emptive invasion of a superior military alliance, which outguns it in economic reserves, active military personnel, equipment and spending.  Indeed, Putin has pointed this out on several occasions. While Putin undoubtedly hates NATO, he is not completely stupid, and knows that an attack by Russia would have catastrophic consequences for him, the political system he has built, and for his country.  Put simply, it would be an act of political and literal suicide.  Even the UK’s Chief of the Defence Staff recognised this in a recent speech at Chatham House[3].   Stand down then, lads and lasses; no need to report to Captain Mainwaring at the village hall in Walmington-on-Sea. So what’s this hysteria about 2% of GDP all about then? European countries already outspend Russia on defence by almost four times (3.7 to be precise) with over one and a half times the number of active military personnel.  Dig a little deeper into NATO’s data and you’d see that meeting the 2% commitment would add a whopping 20% to their defence spending, or around $80.6bn ($71bn in real terms[4]) widening the gap to Russia still further. On average, NATO countries spend around 30% of the defence budgets on equipment.   So, for non-US NATO members, that amounts to around $120bn every single year in defence equipment production, more than Russia’s total yearly military spending. Look at which NATO members export the most defence equipment, you’d find – a desperately unsurprising fact, for which I apologise – that the US accounts for around 57% of the market.  That means Uncle Sam already cashes in $68,4 billion each year from its NATO allies.  Trump’s 2% simply means 20% more defence spending for Europe and $20bn more each year in defence sales for US firms. Ker-ching, ka-boom! Admittedly, non-US NATO members have so far donated around $61bn [5] in military equipment to Ukraine, in the two years since war broke out. On paper, that amounts to around one quarter of their total spending on military equipment.  However, some of the kit supplied, dusted off and dragged out of long-forgotten warehouses, has been old, out of date [6] and/or broken. So don’t buy into the baloney (perhaps, bratwurst?) that European countries are running out of military stocks. Even with supplies to Ukraine, they continue vastly to outspend Russia on arms manufacturing. When the head of Germany’s biggest defence contractor Rheinmetall said recently [7]that Europe will need ten years to rebuild its weapons’ stocks, what he was really saying, with the same emotional vigour as Bob Geldof in the Eighties, was “give us your money”.  The only difference was that he was choosing guns over butter. For ordinary Ukrainians, there appears no end in sight to the misery of war that has long moved off the front pages of western journals. Russia’s war aims since February 2022 have been limited, although continue to creep as Zelenskiy stubbornly holds out against a negotiated settlement.  Even the most optimistic military pundits in the west are now retrofitting their narratives to accept that Ukraine cannot score a decisive military victory on its own without direct NATO military engagement.  And we have always known (and have known since 2014, in fact) that that isn’t going to happen. So, rather than whipping everyone in Europe into a lather with fantastical predictions lifted straight from the pages of a dodgy spy thriller, it’s time we got back to searching for an end to this needless war.  Pumping ever more billions into the gluttonous mouths of the military industrial fat cats is not making us more safe. I’d suggest quite the opposite. [1] NATO - News: Defence Expenditures of NATO Countries (2014-2023), 07-Jul.-2023 [2] Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2022 (sipri.org) [3] Nato would crush weak Russia and Putin knows it, says UK defence chief | Evening Standard [4] NATO publishes data in today’s prices, and in real terms, using 2015 prices as a benchmark. [5] Total bilateral aid to Ukraine by donor & type 2024 | Statista [6] In Rush to Arm Ukraine, Weapons Are Bought but Not Delivered, or Too Broken to Use - The New York Times (nytimes.com) [7] Europe needs a decade to build up arms stocks, says defence firm boss - BBC News Ian Proud - It’s time to put an end to the hysteria about European defence spending - Brave New Europe

I recently spoke with Oksana Boyko on her World's Apart show on why the UK and Russia have such a difficult relationship. It's clear to me that there is deep-rooted enmity on both sides and that a decade of refusing to engage at a political level - i.e. since the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014 - has made matters worse. I also spoke about the UK's inevitable drift towards closer alignment with the US after Brexit. I argue that the tendency of both partners in the "special relationship" to pick sides in global conflicts, including in Gaza and in Ukraine, reduces the credibility of our statecraft and weakens efforts to find long-term solutions. Tune in to the attached video to hear more.

Lord Cameron, the eighth Foreign Secretary in nine years, was quick to visit Kyiv after his anointment.  If Britain’s diplomatic efforts were judged by our relationship with Zelensky, then we’d score A+.  We have positioned ourselves as Ukraine’s most steadfast ally.  Streets in Ukraine have been named after Boris Johnson. But is unequivocal support enough to end a war that in almost two years has killed – even by the most conservative estimates - as many people as during the ten years of the Balkans conflict? The short answer is no. While our influence in Kyiv is sky high, we have no influence in Moscow. Philip Hammond insisted that there should be no Ministerial ‘business as usual’ with Russia, a position that didn’t change under the six Foreign Secretaries that followed him. Ministerial cancellation became diplomatic.  Russia’s Ambassador Andrei Keilin enjoys scant access in Whitehall and is barked at by the likes of Laura Kuennsberg on the BBC. So, the British Ambassador has no access either and is often harassed in public by rent-a-mobs working for Russian intelligence.  On Russia’s state-owned TV, Vladimir Solovyov threatens to sink Britain under nuclear tidal waves. With government Ministers drip-fed opinions by ‘advisers’ who regard public servants as pillocks, investment in Russia expertise at the Foreign Office has been in decline for decades.  Young diplomats arrive at the Embassy and tremble inside, scared to venture out because they haven’t passed their Russian exams.  Diplomatic reports are often press cuttings regurgitated through Google translate. The accomplished Diplomat due to become British Ambassador this year was told by Liz Truss that they would not be going to Russia, as it would not be a good use of their skills. Our current man in Moscow is a cardboard cutout in a Potemkin Embassy on Smolenskaya Embankment. So, Russia has far more, well-trained diplomats (and therefore spies) in our country than we have in theirs.  Despite Bo-Jo’s bravado, the UK got a much bloodier nose from the diplomatic tit-for-tat that followed the Salisbury nerve agent attack.  I should know; I was in Moscow at the time. Britain’s biggest putative achievement - western unity on economic sanctions - has only stiffened Putin’s resolve.  Nevertheless, Westminster politicians, pundits and the armchair intelligentsia are utterly convinced our Russia strategy is working. Keep calm and cancel on. However, the political and logistical sands of western policy towards Ukraine are shifting, with fatigue, as focus drifts to other conflicts, including Gaza, and as allies struggle to meet supply targets.  At best, Ukraine will receive from western allies as much military equipment in 2024 as it received in 2023.  More likely, it will receive less. Zelensky vocally rejects suggestions that he should cut a deal. We have spent two years telling him that Britain and other western allies will send weapons ‘for as long as it takes’.  After a summer offensive that has delivered little, the line of contact in Ukraine between Russian and Ukrainian forces is unlikely to move much over the coming year. So, no one knows how long it will take. Russia seems content to maintain a high-intensity stalemate on the battlefield knowing the pressure that is putting on Ukraine’s allies.  As battlefield realities bite deeper, the obvious need for a diplomatic solution will grow. Because the Foreign Office knows Russia has the resources to keep fighting for another two years, at least.  And we can’t fill the gap if American supplies to Ukraine trail off: the UK has committed the billions we saved by cutting overseas aid in 2020 on weapons and, to quote Liam Byrne, “I’m afraid there is no money”. The only positive difference we can make is in Kyiv. In April 2022, Liz Truss – then Foreign Secretary number six - encouraged Ukraine not only to retake land taken by Russia after war broke out but, through military means, retake Crimea and the parts of the Donbass occupied by Russian separatists in 2014. This was trademark Truss, showing a point of difference in the Tory party with an idiotic policy punt that was utterly disconnected from reality.  Ukraine agreed, widened its war aims and since April of 2022 has refused to budge. David Cameron – Foreign Secretary number eight – is a different political animal and after the disaster of Brexit, is on the comeback trail. He needs proper advice from the few Russia experts left in Whitehall to see, through the waves of self-congratulation, that UK policy is failing Ukraine.  He should encourage Zelensky to put his suit back on and negotiate a ceasefire. Ian Proud was a British Diplomat from 1999 to 2023.  He served at the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014-2019 and has authorised a significant chunk of the UK sanctions imposed on Russia.