War with Russia

This is fiction, but it is fact-based, entirely plausible, and very closely modeled on what I know, based on my position as a very senior military insider at the highest and best-informed level. Why write it as a future, fact-based fiction rather than a polemic? The answer is simple. I have contributed to at least three think tank papers, including one highly respected US think tank, in the last six months highlighting the threat from Russia. But who reads think tank papers but other think tankers? My aim has been to explain the very real danger we face to the general reader with no particular interest in defense and to make it accessible. At every stage I have shown how the political and military decisions we are currently making, and have already made, are now propelling us into a future war with Russia. However, this is a war that could yet be avoided, if we act right now.

That is why this story needs to be told before it is too late. Because, in Trotsky’s chilling words, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Of one thing I am absolutely certain: the President in the Kremlin knows all this and, even as you read these words, his admirals and generals are also war-gaming these very scenarios. And they have every intention of winning the war.

General Sir Richard Shirreff

Laverstoke, Hampshire

August 2016

Prologue

IT IS MAY 2017.

A new US president was inaugurated in January and immediately reversed President Obama’s “hands-off” approach to Russia. The first new foreign policy decision was to arm Ukraine with the counter-battery radars, drones, electronic warfare equipment and secure communications, armoured HUMVEEs, and medical equipment it so desperately needed if it was to defend itself against the Russian separatists, supported by Russian regular forces. But equipment is rarely enough and, on the advice of the generals, US military personnel were also deployed to train the Ukrainian army in how to operate this highly sophisticated equipment.

This allows the President to tell the world that the US is in Ukraine only in the role of “trainers” and not as combatants; an obfuscation that the American president believes will deter the Russians and their proxies without over-inflaming existing tensions.

However, the absence of US soldiers on the ground to protect the trainers leaves them vulnerable to attack. The compromise solution is to provide US fighter air cover, although the generals warn that there is little a fighter aircraft, however sophisticated, can do to protect a few men on the ground from 20,000 feet. Only too aware that the American people in general, and the House of Representatives and the Senate in particular, will not countenance US “fighting” soldiers stationed in Ukraine, the President tells the generals to stop complaining and make it work. Anyway, the 2014 Minsk peace accord is still holding and not even the most hawkish US general is suggesting that Russia is about to attack.

The equipment and the trainers are sent, their mission specific: get the equipment installed and working, get the Ukrainians trained and then get out as quickly as possible.

In the UK, the new Prime Minister is distracted by the consequences of the UK electorate’s vote to leave the EU in the June 2016 referendum. In an attempt to enhance their “special relationship” with the United States, the UK timidly sent a small team of medics and supply officers to help train the Ukrainian army in 2015. However, far from sending a signal of strength and resolution, these efforts appear weak and the force a potential hostage to fortune. Just as bad, this move reinforces the Russian narrative of NATO trainers being Ukraine’s “foreign legion,” an insult that plays particularly well with nationalist forces at home.

In Ukraine, despite the political ambiguity of the 2014 Minsk ceasefire, major fighting has ceased and the war settled down to a semi-frozen conflict, with both sides— Ukrainian Army and “Russian Separatists,” although supported by Russian regular forces— occupying entrenched positions. Behind Ukrainian government lines a form of normality has emerged, which allows US trainers to work with the Ukrainian army under near peacetime conditions.

Unaccountably, the strident Kremlin propaganda of two years ago, portraying the deployment of trainers as evidence of the NATO threat to Russia, has recently gone quiet, helped no doubt by increasingly close cooperation between Russia, America, France, and Britain over air strikes in Syria. This absence of vitriol and threats gives the US president further confidence to send more US equipment and trainers, although still without proper “boots on the ground” protection in case it is deemed “provocative.”