Over promoted ex-student lightweight Wes Streeting is back on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph this morning claiming that “we” have to be ready for war with Russia in “1000 days”. A 1000 has an epochal ring to it. As in “1000 year Reich”. Or “1001 cleans a big, big carpet”. But, doing the sums, that means that he is envisaging a war with the Russian Federation by roughly this time in 2029.
This is despite acknowledgement, on the quiet, by senior NATO figures that there is no actual threat of a Russian invasion of the rest of Europe. Russia has neither the intention nor the capacity to do so.
An attack on the rest of Europe would mean that they would have to fight through existing militaries that are more than twice their size. And occupy countries, with hostile populations more than five times the size of their own, and sustain that with an economy that is about the same size as Italy’s.
How credible does that look?
The retired Rear Admirals and the like who pop up on Radio 4 with lurid warnings of Russian troops marching down the street, with or without snow on their boots, are bullshitting – and they know it. So do the journalists who interview them. But none of them pops the bubble of this fantasy; because fake nightmares don’t have to be true to be motivating.
The argument from the same people that hybrid warfare is already going on tends to play up common or garden routine cyber attacks and political influence interventions from the Russian end while ignoring the fact that UK made missiles are actually hitting Russian territory. Imagine if that were the other way round.
Even if you buy the line- from NATO countries that have been responsible for launching or sustaining devastating wars to maintain their global dominance, the attack on Iran just the latest – that Russia is irrationally aggressive, unlike them, or that President Putin, as cautious and calculated a leader as any and more than most, is a reckless gambler, like Hitler, or perhaps Donald Trump, consider one other thing.
It has taken the Russian armed forces 56 months to occupy 20% of Ukraine on its 1991 borders. And that is mostly the 20% of Ukraine that rebelled against the overthrow of a President they had voted for in 2014 and sought incorporation into the Russian Federation. In the case of Crimea, UN polls from 2008-10 indicated substantial majority support for this course even before the Maidan movement redefined Ukraine as Ukrainian nationalist, downgrading the status of the third of then citizens who were/are primarily Russian speaking. During 2014 50 -55,000 people joined the Donbass militia to resist the attempts of the new regime in Kyiv to retake control of them by military force. So, its fair to say that, in these areas, Russia has substantial support.
This is not the case in Western Ukraine, so occupying it would not be viable. Even the most sophisticated and powerful military cannot hold a land where the population is hostile. As the US and UK found out in Iraq. And the IDF can only control the parts of Gaza that it has occupied by expelling the Palestinian population into a tiny rump of an already tiny enclave. That sort of thing is only possible with relatively small populations in small areas.
But, even ignoring all that, and imagine that Russia goes on the offensive and, even though outnumbered 2 to 1 and outgunned 3 to 1, made the same sort of progress they have made in eastern Ukraine since February 2022; now holding about 44,000 square miles. At that rate it would take them another 22 and a half years to make it to the Western Ukrainian border; and to keep going across the full million square mile area of the European NATO countries up to the French border and the English Channel, would take another 112 years. So, they’d arrive at some time in Summer 2160.
When you consider that most of the territory now occupied by Russia was taken in the first few weeks, while other large swathes also taken early, particularly around Kyiv, were abandoned almost as quickly, it underlines the point that consolidated occupation has had to rest on significant enough local support to sustain it. Viable in Donbass. Not around Kyiv. So, advancing at the average rate since those first few weeks would be even slower, possibly taking as long as 500 years to make it to the channel!
This is, of course, absurd.
More plausible, and more dangerous, is the threat of European NATO countries, having doubled their military expenditure in the next decade, preparing to launch a war themselves – which would be “defensive” in the same way that supporting US air strikes on Iran, or Saudi air strikes on Yemen, is “defensive”.
Streeting, trivial figure though he is, is contributing to psyching us up for a possible apocalypse.
