General Sir Patrick Sanders is clearly a man who believes in going out with a bang rather than a whimper.
The recently retired chief of the general staff yesterday issued a blood-curdling warning to Britain’s defence establishment in which he argued that the West has only until the end of the decade to rearm sufficiently to ward off a Russian attack on Nato soil which would trigger a World War III-style conflict.
The ex-head of the British Army also claimed that ‘the new axis powers’ of Russia, China and Iran represented a greater threat to the free world than Hitler and the Nazis did in 1939 as ‘they are more interdependent and more aligned than the original Axis powers were’.
Devastation caused by yesterday’s Russian missile strike on Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv, which specialises in treating child cancer victims
Adolf Hitler. Are those who say Putin is a 21st century version of the Fuhrer just scaremongering?
Not all the top brass speak in such apocalyptic terms, of course. Britain’s defence chief Admiral Sir Tony Radakin last month chose the 80th anniversary of D-Day – a time for sobering reflection on the horrors of war – to reassure the nation.
He claimed the likelihood of Britain finding itself embroiled in another huge conflict, this time with Russia, was small. ‘Putin does not want a war with Nato,’ Radakin declared. ‘Putin does not want a nuclear war.’
He must hope he is right – although I am far from certain he is. Are those who portray Vladimir Putin as a 21st century Hitler just scaremongering? Or is the threat of Russia attacking, say, Poland or the Baltic states, triggering an all-out conflict with Nato that could easily go nuclear, an eventuality the risks of which we would be foolish to downplay?
As if to highlight this danger, China and Belarus started joint military exercises a few miles from the Polish border just as the latest Nato summit kicked off in Washington DC.
On the day after Russia launched a sickening attack on a children’s hospital in Kyiv, our new Foreign and Defence Secretaries, David Lammy and John Healey, co-authored a newspaper article to say that they would use the summit to urge other countries to increase their defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP.
They can talk the talk but can they walk the walk? While Rishi Sunak committed the Tories to reaching that figure by 2030 during the election campaign, Labour will still only pledge to accelerate spending to 2.5 per cent ‘as soon as possible’.
With President Joe Biden in crisis and the Nato-sceptic Donald Trump looking ever more likely to make a return to the White House, it has never been more important for Nato to announce a timeline for its member countries to reach the new target.
For Ukraine is only one of three key flashpoints that threaten the world order as we know it. China remains a constant threat to Taiwan and the Israeli conflict in Gaza could well escalate into a wider regional war.
Nevertheless, Russia’s war in Ukraine is the clear and present danger. As someone who spent three decades covering conflicts around the world as a foreign correspondent before becoming a military historian, I’m firmly of the view that – backed into a corner – Putin is capable of anything.
The Kremlin has long been peddling the narrative that a showdown with Nato is inevitable and an attack on Poland in response to some trumped-up provocation could rally the nation behind him.
Young patients are cradled after yesterday’s missile strike in Ukraine
Vladimir Putin wants to leave his mark on history as a restorer of Russian might
US intelligence already believes that there is a real prospect of Putin ordering the use of battlefield nuclear munitions if the situation in Ukraine significantly worsens. And I, for one, am convinced that, given the prospect of defeat and disgrace, Putin is quite capable of going out in a Hitlerian Götterdämmerung – a catastrophic act of mass destruction.
Ever since the start of the war, state propaganda has been preparing the Russian people for it going nuclear. Only last month, a military analyst boasted on Russia-1, the main state-owned TV channel, that ‘in just 10 or 15 minutes’ 30 to 40 Russian nukes could ‘make the state of Poland and the Polish people disappear’.
We may comfort ourselves with the thought that missile launch protocols do not allow a leader acting alone to start a nuclear war and that wiser heads further down the chain of command would refuse to carry out such an order.
But who knows? The inner workings of the Kremlin remain remarkably opaque even to our security services.
Optimists such as Sir Tony Radakin are convinced that Russia will eventually lose in Ukraine. The war has placed a huge strain on Russia’s economy and its standing in Europe and America, such as it was, has hit rock bottom. If peace were to be declared tomorrow, it would take Moscow decades to repair the reputational damage and restore normal relations with the West.
And then there are the half a million casualties the armed forces have suffered since the invasion began. Russians take a masochistic pride in their ability to suffer but even they have limits.
Public disquiet can only grow as the recruiting sergeants turn to big cities like Moscow and St Petersburg in search of fresh cannon fodder.
So logic may appear, ostensibly, to be on Radakin’s side. But, as he must surely know by now, Putin does not operate on reason alone. After 24 years in power, he is not interested – if he ever was – in mundane considerations of what is best for his people.
His overwhelming concern is to leave his mark on history as a restorer of Russian might, an achievement that would grant him a place in school textbooks alongside Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin.
General Sir Patrick Sanders, the recently retired chief of the general staff, is clearly a man who believes in going out with a bang rather than a whimper
History tells us that it is always wise to take dictators at their word and not discount their wilder utterances as fantasies.
No one can predict with certainty the outcome of the current conflict but Radakin is probably right when he says that in the long term Russia is likely to lose. This is a war of attrition. The Kremlin’s switch to a war economy and its ability, for the time being at least, to replace losses of men and material are worrying for the West.
But the financial and human costs are colossal and, in time, will translate into political problems for Putin. Even in a society fed on lies, certain truths are impossible to hide.
Putin believed that democracies cannot march in step for long and that the rough consensus that Europe and the US has sustained since the Ukraine war began must sooner or later fall apart. Time, he believed, was on his side.
Only this week, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, leader of the world’s biggest democracy and traditionally a friend of the West, greeted Putin with a hug when he arrived in Russia for a two-day state visit – much to the irritation of Ukraine’s President Zelensky, who branded the gesture a ‘huge disappointment’.
This episode aside, Putin’s calculation is now looking shaky. The West has kept its nerve and, in an attritional struggle of economies and resources, massively outmatches Russia. Nato attitudes are hardening, as evidenced by the decision to allow Ukraine to use foreign-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia proper.
But a tilt of the scales in Kyiv’s favour could well make the world a more dangerous place. Ukrainian success would dash Putin’s dream of historical immortality as well as dealing a probably fatal blow to his leadership.
Admiral Radakin no doubt meant well with his comforting words. But as a historian, I prefer the analysis of General Sanders.
The world has become a very dangerous place and ‘a whole nation effort’ is needed to protect ourselves, starting with a massive investment in our armed forces.
We can only hope our fellow Nato members see the urgency, too.
Patrick Bishop is a military historian and the co-host of the Battleground podcast.
