Ukraine: dragging on

By Richard North - June 8, 2023

It is difficult to add much to my piece on Ukraine yesterday, despite a busy day scanning the media coverage and other sources for fresh news.

For instance, while there have undoubtedly been developments, it is still not clear whether the Ukrainians have actually started their counter-offensive. The situation remains confused, with the bulk of coverage focusing on the Kakhovka dam breach.

Earlier in the day, yesterday, the Guardian was running a piece citing a senior Ukrainian official saying that the counter-offensive definitely had not yet been launched.

That is more or less confirmed by Reuters which had Kiev claiming that its troops have advanced up to 1,100 metres near Bakhmut in the past 24 hours, while denying that a broad counter-offensive has begun, stressing that the assaults profiled were “localised”.

It is the Russians who seem to be insisting that the counter-offensive has started, a notion that seems to be finding favour with the Telegraph. That paper is reporting that Ukraine is making a “large counter-offensive push”, with attacks along three fronts. The timeline for this activity has it starting yesterday, although the fighting seems to have been reported elsewhere days earlier.

Nevertheless, we are also advised that the Ukrainians have a “strict communications blackout” on counter-offensive activities, which is a sensible stance.

Keeping the armchair warriors fed must be very low down their list of priorities, although they are keen to tells us how many Russian assaults they have beaten back.

The new security consciousness probably explains the news desert out there, with only one of the national newspapers (print editions) offering a front-page story on Ukraine, and that’s only iNews with a picture flash, advertising its page 6 story on the flooding.

Even across the Atlantic, the papers seem to be struggling to find something new to write, with the New York Times devoting a long piece to “Nazi symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines”, which it says, “highlight thorny issues of history”.

The piece draws attention to the use of patches bearing Nazi emblems, such as the Totenkopf – the emblem of the notorious 3rd SS Panzer Division – a symbol known as the “Black Sun”, and the so-called “Galizien patch”, the unit emblem adopted by the Waffen SS Galizian Division formed in 1943, which mainly recruited Ukrainian personnel.

The NYT complains that the use of these patches risks fuelling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate. Oddly though, the paper misses a trick, not remarking on the use by Ukrainians of the Balkenkreuz daubed on armoured vehicles as a recognition symbol – the very same used on Nazi vehicles during the invasion of Poland in 1939.

With so little strictly new to report about, the papers are all over the place, with much space being devoted to a tedious court case in London. The Times, however, does have a report on a matter not entirely unrelated to the situation in Ukraine, headed “British Army ‘too weak to fight’ in European war”.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken the slightest interest in our armed forces, but the newspaper has chosen to highlight the evidence of Simon Anglim, a military historian at King’s College London, delivered to the defence select committee as part of its inquiry on the UK’s armed forces readiness.

To be fair, when British forces were committed to suppressing the insurgency in Iraq in the early part of this century and then battling with the Taleban in Afghanistan, it became an article of faith that our army was unlikely ever again to be engaged in battles of mass manoeuvre and needed to configure its expeditionary forces to fight a succession of “small wars”.

From this emerged a planning assumption that we would not have to equip to fight a major war and, as Anglim observes, “We’re not ready to fight one now”. But, he says, “the days of mass tank battles on the European continent are emphatically not over”.

Anglim thus informed MPs that: “Mass of forces and firepower still matter. All the information management and cyber whizz-bangs in the world are completely irrelevant if you can’t have your forces controlling the ground that you need to control”.

He thus questions the decision to reduce the number of main battle tanks from 227 to 148 and to shrink the size of the army to 73,000 soldiers, pointing out that the British Army could field only one “understrength” division made up of two brigades – compared with Poland’s capacity to deploy four divisions and Turkey’s ability to muster five.

This has particular relevance as a number of newspapers – such as the Independent – are reporting that Nato countries could send troops to Ukraine in a “coalition of the willing”.

This comes from Anders Rasmussen, former secretary general of Nato, who warns that “If Nato cannot agree on a clear path forward for Ukraine, there is a clear possibility that some countries individually might take action”. Poland in particular, is mentioned.

“I think the Poles would seriously consider going in and assemble a coalition of the willing” if Ukraine doesn’t get anything at the Nato annual summit in Vilnius,” he says, cautioning that, “We shouldn’t underestimate the Polish feelings, the Poles feel that for too long western Europe did not listen to their warnings against the true Russian mentality”.

If the Polish government – and perhaps some others – lose patience and decide overtly to send troops to assist Ukraine, one can quite see a scenario where the UK is put under enormous pressure to deploy its own armed forces to the battle zone, directly to confront the Russians.

And while some of our kit may be better than the stuff the Russians are fielding, we should be heeding Stalin’s words when he observed that “Quantity has a quality all its own”.

Anglim, in his evidence to the select committee, asserted that the recent £11 billion increase in defence spending was not enough. Ministers, he said, should commit 3 percent of GDP if they wanted the British armed forces to be ready to fight in Europe later this decade.

That might just about coincide with the delivery of F-16s to Ukraine, whence Putin – if he is still around – will probably be less willing to distinguish between Ukraine and its Nato allies.

Inexorably, therefore, we may be dragged into this war as an active player alongside the Poles, with an army which has more generals than guns, and more horses than tanks and an airforce with more commodores than jets.

We have more reasons than enough to hope that the Ukrainian counter-offensive comes soon and is successful.