Putin threatens to nuke the West. Should we be worried?

Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove

Guest

Shashank Joshi

Shashank Joshi is a military expert analyzing Putin's decisions, Russia's nuclear threat, and the UK's defense capabilities.

Episode Summary

Russia's President Putin is losing his war against Ukraine, he was roundly humiliated at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit last week and this week called up 300,000 reservists and threatened the west with nuclear retaliation. As the world convenes at the United Nations in New York, military expert Shashank Joshi joins hosts Julia Macfarlane and former Chief of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove to walk us through the decisions Putin has made and how they will play out, Russia's nuclear threat and the UK's defense capabilities.

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Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Mcfarlane: I'm Julia McFarlane, cohost of the One Decision Podcast. We're coming up on a significant milestone. It's our one year anniversary of bringing you in-depth analysis of the critical decisions shaping our world. To celebrate the occasion, cohost and former head of MI6, sir Richard Dearlove, and myself, will answer questions submitted by you, the listeners. Spies are usually pretty tight lipped, so don't miss the chance to write in. Your question might even make it onto the podcast. For more information, head over to 1decisionpodcast.com. You're listening to One Decision, the show that looks at the key decisions being made today that have global impact. This week, we're in New York. As world leaders converge here in the city for the United Nations General Assembly, all eyes are on Moscow. President Vladimir Putin yesterday announced a partial mobilization in order to support troops after the Russian armed forces have suffered a series of major setbacks in the war against Ukraine. In a television address to the nation, he said that Russia was being threatened with nuclear blackmail by the West and was using Ukrainian soldiers as proxies to attack his country. Defense minister Sergei Shoigu followed, saying that up to 300,000 reservists could be called up, people with relevant military training and experience. Should Ukraine be worried about a boost in Russian troops? How achievable is it to have a fighting force of 300,000 after all the Russian losses so far? Well, joining us to answer those questions, Shashank Joshi, the defense editor of The Economist, formerly of the Royal United Services Institute, and of course, sir Richard Dearlove, my regular cohost, the former chief of MI6.

INTERVIEW

Mcfarlane: Shashank, I want to start off with just the lay of the land and what has been happening, particularly to Putin's position before he made that announcement. A week ago, it was a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Samarkand in Uzbekistan. And what we saw was Putin being really quite roundly humiliated on the world stage. I mean, we saw every leader who he met with kept him visibly waiting ahead of their bilats. And there was this crucial face to face meeting he had with China's President Xi, which saw him being forced to go to the hotel where the Chinese delegation was staying. And he seemed also obliged to acknowledge that China had expressed questions and concerns over the war in Ukraine. And then he said a few similar things after his meeting with India. And then we actually had the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi say that I know today's era is not an era of war and I have spoken to you on the phone about this. Quite a public smackdown from Putin on many sides in that summit last week. At the same time that that was happening, Ukraine obviously conducting this lightning offensive to take back some of Russia's gains in the East, making incredible advances in the Kherson and Kharkiv regions. We saw thousands of Russian soldiers deserting their positions, abandoning their equipment. Meanwhile, the Russian government described it as a strategic regrouping that received a lot of mockery online. We'll scrutinize Putin's statement very shortly, but start us off with your analysis of the position that Putin has now found himself in, in advance of making that statement yesterday, and the wider position of the Russian forces on the map.

Joshi: Well, Julia, you've summarized his geopolitical predicament better than I could with that little tour. But I would just take a step back and reflect on the meaning of his setbacks in Kharkiv in the Northeast of Ukraine. It was, of course, a humiliation unto itself to lose several thousand square kilometers, to have your front lines collapse, but I think the real significance is that it puts his military position in Donbas, which is, of course, made up of two provinces, Luhansk Province and Donetsk Province, immediately to the south of Kharkiv, in jeopardy. The loss of the town of Izium, which was a rail hub, means that he can no longer attack the key towns of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. These are two critical towns in Donetsk Province, which means his offensive options to capture the entirety of Donetsk and, therefore, the entirety of Donbas is in some doubt. And not only that, but his existing territory, the stuff he captured at enormous cost in casualties in Russian blood over the summer in Luhansk province. And, of course, listeners who are even vaguely acquainted with the Ukraine war will be familiar with cities like Severodonetsk, which was bitterly fought over back in June. Those are now also at risk. Indeed, in the last few days as we record this, we have seen the Ukrainians push into a settlement on the edge of Luhansk, putting his position there at risk and denying him the ability to say he controls all of Luhansk. So if we reflect on the reasons for that, I'm sure you spent a lot of time on this show discussing Russian military deficiencies, but one of the big ones is a shortfall of manpower, a lack of men. It was a lack of men that meant when the Ukrainians attacked in the south in Kherson province that the Russians had to make a decision, and they reinforced the southern lines with their best troops from the VDV, the Russian airborne forces. That opened up gaps in the line, which were held by militia from Donbas and by Rosgvardia, which are Russian National Guard units in Kharkiv. And Ukraine identified those weaknesses and ruthlessly exploited them. A loss of manpower has been the central Russian problem for many months, and therefore, that brings us to this announcement, the desire to mobilize 300,000 freshmen, former reservists with former military experience, and just as importantly, I should say, as we saw in Putin's announcement yesterday, effectively a stop loss policy to force contract professionals to stay in the army beyond the end of their contract. That is all designed to plug the holes that caused these various issues on the battlefield.

Mcfarlane: Right. And Putin's decree saying that military service citizens who are in the armed forces reserve can be called up. And then that follow-up with the defense minister Sergei Shoigu, who gave a few more details that obviously sent shock waves around the world. Up to 300,000 citizens could be called up to serve. Is that an achievable number for the Russians to mobilize firstly?

Joshi: It's about 1% of their overall available reserve on paper, which is 25,000,000 or so. And to put it in perspective, every year they conscript 200,000 men as part of their annual conscription drive more than once a year. So they can handle those numbers. However, there's a huge but to this. Who is going to train these forces? They have some prior military experience, but they need refreshing. The officers and professional enlisted men that would normally do that, to not put too fine a point on it, are either dead, hospitalized, or busy doing other things on the front lines. Who is going to equip these new formations? Because Russia has lost huge amounts of kit. I checked this yesterday afternoon, and I think the figure was somewhere in the region of 1,100 proven losses, proven by images on social media, the true figure likely being higher than that. And this is purely tanks, armored vehicles, many, many more. And who is going to officer these new units? Because as we all know, a thousand men tipped onto a railway platform is a rabble. It's not an army. It's not a battalion. You need officers. You need structure. You need leadership. So they can get the bodies. Can they get these organized and in shape? I think that's the big doubt over this.

Mcfarlane: Richard, that announcement and that figure of 300,000 obviously sent shockwaves around the world and it very quickly was the top item on the agenda at the UN General Assembly here in New York. Part of Putin's speech mentioned that this is military veterans who have prior experience. Shashank points out actually, how long is it gonna take to train these people? Where are you gonna identify the leadership in order to direct an effective fighting force? The world was shocked by that announcement, but is this the Red Army of yore or is this more Russia's dad's army?

Dearlove: Well, I think one of the enduring experiences of my professional life, and Shashank will know what I'm talking about, it's very easy to announce things. It's the implementation of your announcements. It's the implementation of your decisions which count. And I think Shashank has outlined the massive problems, the massive logistical problems, the training problems, the equipment problems. I mean, I think that what we've discovered as a result of the war in Ukraine is that the Russian military at the moment is in a parlous state. I mean, for some reason, it's been allowed to run down. And I think some of the people I know, trust in terms of understanding Russia, saying one of the huge problems is corruption at the local regional level. So if you look at the military, and a lot of this material was in store, probably it wasn't properly maintained. Money that was meant to be spent on the maintenance of equipment was going adrift. I mean, simple things like the tires had rotted or the gearboxes hadn't been oiled because maybe the money that was intended to do this had been diverted into the pockets of local officialdom. I mean, something clearly is fundamentally wrong. And I think for Russia to recover itself is going to take more than Putin sitting down, mobilizing 300,000 men. I think one of the factors one must take into consideration, Shashank's comments have sort of illustrated this, is Russia has huge and formidable strength in-depth. But how do you project that strength in-depth onto the battlefield as an efficient fighting unit? And what we've discovered also is that the Russian military confronting, let's say, a NATO trained army with different equipment has come off very, very badly indeed. And they haven't yet solved that problem. And I don't see any signs of them solving it quickly. I mean, time is on the Russian side. So if they can delay the war, if they can spin it out, maybe in a year's time, things would look more favorable for the Russian militarily. But at the moment, they look pretty disastrous.

Mcfarlane: Shashank, you point out very correctly that, you know, a bunch of soldiers without the officers to lead them is a rabble. They need leaders and they need leaders who have military expertise. We've seen a lot of senior generals being killed on the front lines in Ukraine. Russia's main problem, it may be fair to say is that their military strategy has been pretty lousy. But recently they have been making some logical moves. The New York Times reported in the last few days that they've been blowing up some Ukrainian pontoon bridges in the Inhulets River, which apparently supply key routes to Ukrainian positions. Now, if the Russians make smart choices, could they reverse the Ukrainian gains recently and could they move towards a secure takeover of the Eastern regions? And if they do, will they have the capacity to defend that ground in terms of their manpower, but also the supplies, the fuel, the ammo, the tech, the food needed to support those soldiers in those positions?

Joshi: I think the short answer Julia is no. We have to bound that judgment of course, let's call it the next six to eight months, perhaps even the year ahead if I'm feeling bold. But I don't think the Russians have the offensive capacity to do that or, as you say, to hold the ground. This is partly a manpower issue. You know, you can get reservists. You can get these people in, but they're feeding them into the battle piecemeal to hold the line. They're not keeping them aside, forming dedicated offensive units, training them for months, building them up into a strike force that can then punch through Ukrainian lines. It's partly a logistical issue. The Ukrainians have been making very intelligent use of HIMARS. Of course, the American supplied rocket systems to take out Russian ammunition depots, and we have seen that manifest in a falloff in the rate of Russian artillery consumption and usage as a result of this. And I think it's also a sort of ponderousness in command and control. One of the things that made the Kharkiv offensive for the Ukrainians so effective was the ability to use surprise, the ability to gather troops, particularly light troops, reconnaissance units, lightly rapid mobile forces, really using deception, using guile, using a sort of secrecy, and using them without the Russians realizing. Although, I can tell you some of the facts of this buildup were in the open source because I saw open source analysts tracking this buildup outside of Kharkiv for a week before it happened. So it wasn't a complete secret. It was a sort of failure to use that intelligence. For all of those reasons, I think the Russians will be on the defensive. I would put a sort of 10% probability on the idea that the Russians will be able to make similar sorts of gains that the Ukrainians have made in Kharkiv in the next six months. I would be shocked if they were able to do so. I think the more realistic scenario is a collapse of the Russian flanks. We've seen a collapse of the Russian right flank in Kharkiv, and I think we could see a collapse of the Russian left flank in Kherson on the West bank of the Dnieper River where Russian means of resupply are being cut off. It doesn't mean that they won't be able to make some grinding gains in Donetsk where they've been squeezing and grinding away at Bakhmut, a city in Donetsk Province, but it'll come at substantial cost, and it's not gonna be a breakthrough. It will be a grinding attritional advance.

Mcfarlane: Fascinating, fascinating. A lot of the reaction yesterday latched on to threat of nuclear retaliation. And a lot of people going back to look at the wording of the nuclear decree that Putin signed a few months ago. Now, something else that has happened recently is that these sham referendums have been announced in some of the breakaway provinces in Eastern Ukraine. And of course, people are now asking the question, given that the nuclear decree links territory and sovereignty with the nuclear response pretty closely. So obviously the idea of any kind of sub strategic or tactical nuclear weapon would be something designed to shock Ukraine and the world into submission. Shashank, what do you make of Putin's nuclear threat? Do you think it is a serious one? And then what do we know about Russia's nuclear program anyway?

Joshi: What do we know about Putin's nukes? How many does he have? Well, nobody knows what Putin will do other than Putin himself. And we, of course, must preface all discussions with that caveat. But I will say that I think the character of these discussions is changing. In the first month of the war, the first two months, our concern was a NATO Russia conflagration, born perhaps of Russian strength, of Russian breakthroughs pushing west, and Russian attacks on NATO convoys perhaps in Europe. The discussion we're having today is very different, isn't it? It's about Russian weakness, desperation, a sense of Russian loss, and the use of nuclear weapons not to deter NATO intervention in the conflict, but as a coercive instrument to try and, as you put it, psychologically shock the Ukrainians into submission. Now we must take it seriously because desperate leaders do desperate things, and it's possible that Putin perceives loss on the battlefield in Ukraine as tantamount to or as a precursor to the loss of his regime and the instability of his regime. And we must remember that bond in the mind of an autocrat, which we may not be able to perceive from our vantage point of our nuclear doctrine and our way of looking at these things. However, I will say what's very important is that Ukraine has struck Russian territory in the course of this conflict. It struck Belgorod with helicopter attacks, with missiles. It struck Russian claimed territory in Crimea with special forces raids, with loitering munitions, and so on. That hasn't provoked a dramatic escalation despite Russian threats to do so. So we must take Russian threats, in my view, seriously, but not always entirely literally because that is, of course, the effect that mister Putin wants to have in us. He wants to instill that fear in us and to paralyze us and to make us temper Ukrainian attacks on their own soil, which I think would be a mistake. As a factual coda to that, Julia, in answer to your question, the Russians, of course, have roughly similar numbers of strategic weapons, that is intercontinental ballistic missiles and the like, as The United States. If you count deployed and nondeployed warheads, including those in reserve, we're talking well over 5,000. But if you count deployed ones, we're talking far short of that, far smaller number. But Russia, I will say, has an advantage in what we call nonstrategic nuclear weapons or what in ordinary parlance we'd call tactical nuclear weapons of shorter range, typically of lower yield, and it's those sorts of weapons that we're discussing when we talk about Russian use in Ukraine. Potentially, for example, a demonstrative strike over the Black Sea, a strike on Snake Island, or a low yield weapon against a military base, those are the kinds of weapons we're talking about. And Russia is estimated to have many thousands of those in its possession delivered by sea, by cruise missiles on land, and by air as well.

Mcfarlane: A tactical strike over the Black Sea, it seems like that could be maybe the first tangible physical step of escalation and a terrifying thought to consider. Richard, Shashank says absolutely correctly that Putin by all accounts is increasingly desperate. Now you made the prediction a few months ago on our podcast that you thought that Putin would be shuffled off to the sanatorium by the end of the year. Let's revisit that prediction. Do you still think that's gonna be the case? You've got a few months left to go?

Dearlove: Well, I think in terms of scenarios for Putin's demise, if this were to happen, I mean, of course, it's a guess. We don't know. But there's no question, I think, that Putin has some sort of illness. Now, is it terminal? Is it serious? I was actually talking to someone earlier this afternoon, and I was speculating it's Parkinson's. Well, you know, Parkinson's can last for a very long time, and you can continue to function, or it can gallop and suddenly kill you. So it's very difficult to predict. I think what I would say is amongst Putin's inner circle, there must now be serious concern. I mean, Russian leadership, and I've dealt with them, they're intelligent, incisive, clever people. We may disagree with them fundamentally at the moment, but they must realize that they have got themselves into a parlous situation by their special military operation in inverted commas. It's not happened at all as they set out, as they surmised. It was meant to bowl over the government within a ten day, two week period before the West had even thought about it. And they're in, literally, an internecine war. This is a bit like a civil war. We all know that wars of fratricide are the most deadly and uncompromising. So in a way, Putin is heading into a dead end street, and it's difficult for him to turn around. So we don't know what's gonna happen. But I would suggest that there must be serious questions being asked amongst the Russian elite. Now I'm using the term elite because I'm not saying amongst the Russian leadership as to how they're gonna get themselves out of this mess. And the Russians, it's a great nation with a great cultural tradition. They're brilliant chess players. There's all sorts of considerations that must be going on in the mind of the Russian elite, as it were, in concentric rings around the Kremlin. And there's no question that the inner ring that Putin trusts is probably pretty isolated at this point in time. So I do favor some outcome, which is the result of a very, very brittle structure, which cannot, because it doesn't have the mechanisms, handle political change. Brittle structures break at points of stress. And I'm not gonna make a detailed prediction, but I still think that Putin has a date stamp on him. I can't read the date, but I'm prepared to make a guess. So I'm not gonna completely back away from my prediction.

Joshi: Julia, can I add one point to that? I just want to say, to reflect on that inner ring, there is, I think, a hope amongst some people that the inner ring will itself turn. And I do think it is worth reflecting, as Richard says, it's very isolated. Right? If you look at the people around Putin's war cabinet, who are these people? It's a group of aging securitocrats, right, who have been in their positions for a very long time. You have Nikolai Patrushev. You have Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB. Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister. What's important to remember is out of these sort of five key individuals in the inner circle, four out of five of them have a KGB background. Three of them, including Vladimir Putin himself, come from a counterintelligence background. So it really is, I share that diagnosis of brittleness and isolation, and I think there's a real concern that this group is not necessarily getting a full picture of the war. They're not necessarily getting a full unvarnished picture of their military frailties, of their casualties, of their losses, and their future prospects. And the military, perhaps like many militaries elsewhere and not a million miles from home, sometimes tell their political leadership they can do things and achieve things that they can't, and they do conceal bad news from going up the chain.

Mcfarlane: I think that's so right. And this is a question that we've asked on this podcast before, I would like to put it to you, is given that Putin's ruling clique, as you point out, most of them are former intelligence officers, a lot of them don't have a military background. How do you think the Russian armed forces and how do you think the leaders and senior figures in the military feel about the war that they are having to fight being directed by these former intelligence officers who don't have the military chops that they do, and by all accounts are executing it pretty badly?

Joshi: Well, I think first of all, we must remember that Soviet military leaders have for a long time being kept under a tight kosh by the Siloviki and by the Securicrats. So that in itself is not new, of course. We know right back to Stalin's period, the grip of the NKVD and commissars in the Red Army, and we know going forward that military coups have not necessarily been very successful in Russia. In post Soviet Russia, they came a cropper, and that's been the case. Sergei Shoigu is perhaps in a slightly different position because unlike some previous Soviet or Russian defense ministers, his military service is rather limited. And we saw indeed an assessment from British defense intelligence a few weeks ago that said Shoigu is probably mocked among his troops for his own status in that regard. I think the more important thing here rather than kind of military chafing at the Securicrats' leadership is more sort of internecine warfare among the different groups. Because what you've had is a situation where the FSB, the main domestic security service that nonetheless has responsibility for the post Soviet space, including Ukraine, has utterly botched the intelligence surrounding the invasion, utterly botched it, and profoundly misled Putin in the course of this and led to a situation in which military planning was very circumscribed because they thought the Ukrainian state would collapse in days. Therefore, orders were not prepared. They were not sent out to troops on the front line until, in some cases, hours before the invasion. Planning was subpar. And then the military messed up in its own separate way, even having had an attempt to fix the problem and resetting its operations to Donbas back in April. But what you saw is effectively each side blaming the other, the military blaming the intelligence services and the intelligence services blaming the military. And that toxic culture is one you typically get in these kind of authoritarian regimes where you have alternative sources of power pitted against each other by the leadership.

Dearlove: Julia, can I add a comment on that? Because I think what Shashank is saying is important. And I've been of the view for a long time, and this is going back really to the Cold War. The Russian state and actually the Soviet state shaped the same characteristics of not necessarily being good to use intelligence to form policy, often very good at collecting it, but to, as it were, act on it in choosing a correct path or a correct policy, their track record is actually quite poor. And I think what's very interesting about the invasion is the point that Shashank's made about the security service, the FSB, being responsible for the intelligence assessment of how the Ukrainian people would react. And it looks to me as though the FSB, which is Patrushev's former service, and this is a guy who I had met and he's a hard nosed, difficult individual, they sort of misguided Putin with the intelligence. And I just wonder what role the military intelligence people, the GRU, have played. I mean, I'm sure now the GRU are important, but it looks to me as though they're messing up as well. So the interface between collection of intelligence and the ability to use it immediately for strategy or tactical deployments looks to me very faulty within the Russian system.

Mcfarlane: Perhaps the GRU were too busy touring European cathedrals to gather much actionable intelligence on Ukraine. Richard, so the new prime minister Liz Truss arrived in New York and one of the first things that she did was she announced that her government will match and most likely even exceed the allocation of funds that Boris Johnson gave to Ukraine, billions of pounds of support to Zelensky. What do you make of that announcement and how she's clearly trying to set out her stall as being extremely pro Ukraine and perhaps trying to settle Ukrainians' nerves at having lost such a strong ally in Boris Johnson.

Dearlove: Yeah. Well, I think Boris had become something of a totemic figure for the Ukrainians because he was so prominent right from the start of the conflict and obviously took the rather extraordinary step from a security point of view of going to Ukraine early on. And that was quite a risky thing to do given Russian targeting. So I think Liz Truss has been right from the word go very clear that there won't be any break in step, as it were, for The UK's position of a strong supporter of Ukraine. I think she straight away, before New York, she pledged a further 2,400,000,000 in funding. And it's clear that I think the government's intention is to add to that in due course. I think the problem now is, you know, the money's there, but the inventory of kit that can be given to the Ukrainians is more problematic. For example, in particular, the howitzers that the Ukrainians are using. I gather the shells are in very short supply, and the manufacturing lines can't necessarily keep up with the rate of fire. I mean, apparently, the Ukrainians are using up to between five and six thousand rounds a day, which is pretty extraordinary if you think about it. So there is a real problem of logistics and supply, and international inventories of certain weapons are running down. And I think The UK has already given a lot of its spare kit. And money now is then how do you get the right kit? So it's not straightforward. And it clearly, I think, needs to be some sort of coordination amongst individual nations. It can't really be a NATO initiative in resupplying the Ukrainians.

Mcfarlane: Sounds like we need to keep a pretty close eye on the details to come, but merely by announcing that she is setting out her position as being 100% behind the government of President Zelensky. I don't know if you happened to catch yesterday morning, Sergei Markov was discussing Putin's threat of all out nuclear war. While he said, look, Russia does not want everyone to die. He did say, yes, Putin means that he would launch nuclear strikes on London if Russia was threatened with attack. I mean, what do you make of that? And surely all of the Russian citizens of Billionaires Row in London and Knightsbridge would also probably be pretty upset with nuclear strikes on London, surely.

Dearlove: Yeah, I mean, I think Markov is known for this very sort of exaggerated, threatening position that he takes as a spokesman. I personally, I don't think I would take that particularly seriously. It's bluster. There's another commentator, you know, Popov, who is pro Putin but takes a much more reduced and more sensible position. I think the nuclear threat is serious and we have to take it seriously but I think that the threat is very much in theater and not international and what I mean by that is the danger that the Russians would use a tactical nuclear weapon within Ukraine in terms of trying to give themselves advantage in a conflict where things are going really, really badly for them. And this latest development of the supposed absorption after referendums or votes, that they would take bits of Ukraine into Russian territory. So it changes the status, and it becomes part of Russia. Yeah. I think things are going really badly for Putin. In a way, it's a sign of weakness. But I think that the local threat of deployment of a nuclear weapon is probably pretty serious. But the cost to Russia, if they were to do that, I think, is gonna be massively high, in terms of its international credibility, its relationship with countries like India and China. I mean, I tend really to think that the Russians will avoid taking that step, although, of course, they will threaten. And the whole process of deterrence is uncertainty. You're not quite sure what the other side is gonna do if they have the capability to do something really terrible, which the Russians do.

Mcfarlane: Right, you say it's bluster, but bluster has a purpose, does it not? It's intended designed to create panic and to frighten us off and to get us to want to change our position. But The UK is potentially a target in this conflict, given that we have been extremely strong backers of the Ukrainians. Is that a status that you think the government and perhaps the British public at large will be comfortable with continuing to have, or do you think that the British stomach for putting this country on the map, on the radar of Russia and getting drawn into this war is something that might cause Liz Truss problems?

Dearlove: I don't think so yet. I mean, I think the British position is sustainable, particularly if we're not directly involved with our own troops in the conflict in Ukraine. The idea of a nuclear attack on London, I mean, you're not talking about a nuclear attack on London. You're effectively talking about a global war. And bear in mind that Europe still sits under the American nuclear umbrella. And what Putin is talking about in making, or some of his spokesmen making threats about a nuclear attack on The UK is the obliteration of Moscow as well. So I mean, I think in a way that's rather silly. But it's designed to sort of whip up a certain political sector in The UK who will start to question The UK's Ukrainian policy.

Mcfarlane: And Shashank, tell us what you know about The UK's nuclear defense capabilities. I mean, is it within our capability to, if there was an incoming nuclear strike sent over from Russia, would we have the ability to defend ourselves? Could we shoot it out of the sky? What could we do in that event?

Joshi: As far as I'm aware, The United Kingdom has no effective strategic national ballistic missile defense capability of its own. But of course, NATO as an alliance does have some missile defense capability that is largely reliant on a system of radars based across alliance territory, ostensibly directed at rogue states like Iran and North Korea. But in practice, it would have some limited utility in detecting Russian launches. I say limited because, of course, the transpolar routes of Russian ICBMs are very different to the route that an Iranian missile would take, and therefore, the radars array differently. And the interception systems are largely dependent on American Aegis missile defense systems aboard their US Navy destroyers, which have the capability of intercepting things mid course, which means as they go in space. But I don't want to leave anyone under illusions. This is not a capability that you can intercept a strategic launch at scale. Even America does not have that capability, however much it pretends it does because the number of interceptors you need per missile are so great that you can overwhelm a system very easily. And, of course, in the modern age, Russia has a great number of intermediate range systems, including those launched from ships that can fly below radar horizons, give very little warning times. And so by and large, nuclear defense does not work on the basis of traditional point defense. It works on the basis of deterrence and punishment after the fact, and that's really been the case since the 1960s and The UK is in that similar predicament to most.

Mcfarlane: My last question to you, Shashank, is a military one. A few months ago, closer to the start of the invasion, we were talking about Ukrainian mud and how the Russians were going to try to advance as quickly as possible before the rising temperatures made the movement of their tanks and for other reasons difficult. Now that we are heading towards the end of the year, we are closing in on autumn. The temperature is going to get colder. Soldiers are going to be stuck outside in the freezing cold. What do you think is going to happen in the months ahead? What's the lay of the land in terms of the battles that are going to be fought between the Ukrainians and the Russians? And what do you think we should watch out for in particular?

Joshi: Well, mud does not care about your nationality. And so it's important to remember that it affects both sides. And indeed, as the Ukrainians move to an offensive phase in their campaign, pushing into Luhansk Province, as I said earlier, looking for opportunities to exploit at other weak points that may develop along the front lines, they too will be quite constrained by mud because their armored vehicles will also struggle off road. And indeed, the more you confine yourself to road, the more vulnerable you are to ambush and to being struck by pre sighted artillery. For example, artillery that has been positioned so that it can accurately target a particular stretch of road or path that is a choke point. The Ukrainians will have to factor that in, and their own offensive operations may slow down a little bit by necessity. Having said that, it's important to remember that this is their home. This is their territory. They know it. In the Russian case, you're getting people who are fighting here from the Eastern Military District in Russia. We know the Eastern Military District stretches all the way to Vladivostok. They're pretty far from home. They're under some pretty miserable conditions. And in some cases, they're trapped in some situations that are very nasty. If you look, for example, at Russian forces around Kherson City and in Kherson province to the west of the river, they can't get their resupplies very easily because the bridges are being constantly blown up by Ukrainian missiles. So I would say the Russians are gonna have the worst winter of the two sides. It's also important to remember that the Ukrainians have some extremely good precision strike capability, which is taking out Russian command posts, depots, garrisons, bases. That's going to continue. That's not going to stop over the winter months. That campaign of precise attrition of strikes, what we call strikes in-depth because they're far behind the ostensible front lines, is going to continue to exact a very fierce toll on the Russian forces. That's not going to slow down. And I think the Ukrainians will stay calm, and they'll continue doing what they're doing, which is building up their reserve brigades, getting training in our country, The United Kingdom, and weapons from a number of countries, looking forward to the spring where I think they will come out with a potential advantage to use if they can find similar opportunities to exploit as they did in Kharkiv. So the winter's going to be tough on both sides, but I think it's going to be a little bit harder on the Russians.

Dearlove: And can I add another point? I think that the Ukrainians have a significant, because they're on their own territory, intelligence advantage. So they will have sources behind and inside Russian lines, and we've already seen they have the capability to deploy special forces right into Crimea. So they will start to do more of that, which will, of course, increase Russians' feeling of vulnerability. It's gonna be a tough winter for them. Tough for the Ukrainians too, but I think the overall advantage will just lie on the Ukrainian side.

Mcfarlane: Absolutely fascinating. I think that's a great note to end on. I've learned so much from this conversation from the two of you. I'm super, super grateful for you both joining us. It was so, so interesting. That's all for this episode of One Decision. We drop new episodes every Thursday. Don't forget to subscribe so you never have to miss an episode. From me and the team, thanks for listening, and see you next time.