'Hopeless' Russian offensive capability could put Putin himself under threat | Frontline

and one of the big differences between what Ukraine can do and what the Russians can do is that Ukraine with with Western technology they can hit moving targets the Russians find it very hard to hit moving targets it sounds funny when you say it but but to actually hit a moving Target a convoy or a train that you know has got something important on it first of all you've got to spot it you've got to track it you've got to get that information back to the control center the control centers they've got to send something off to actually Target it and the Russians are hopeless at doing this they're way way behind time where's the ukrainians have learned how to do this in a matter of a few minutes the Russians take an hour or so to do it and by then of course the target has gone somewhere else so um this inability of the Russians to hit mobile targets is a real problem for them and Ukraine's ability to do it means that as the Russians respond to a breakthrough they could lose a great deal of equipment and Men before they even reach the battlefield hello and welcome to Frontline for times radio with Me Kate Chabot this time we're talking about the war in Ukraine with professor of Defense studies Michael Clarke many developments to consider and questions to ask is the Ukrainian counter-offensive already underway what difference will the new weapons like Storm Shadow missiles make and how long will Ukraine wait for the fighter jets it's so badly once Professor Michael Clarke is a former director general of rusi and is a leading figure in defense and security analysis he's a specialist advisor to the Joint Committee on National Security strategy in Parliament having previously served with both the defense and the Foreign Affairs committees he's a visiting professor at King's College London where he was the founding director of its Center for defense studies Mike welcome to Frontline really good to have you here um you've become extremely familiar to everyone for your insight into the war in Ukraine can you just start by giving us your overview of what stage you think we're at in the war I think we're probably at a third stage in the world the first stage February last year 2022 was when the Russians invaded and we wondered how long it would be before they occupied uh at least the Eastern third of the country if not the whole country and the ukrainians fought back and we thought they were they were losing magnificently they were losing slowly and magnificently and very bravely and that was phase one and that ran for a little while until about July and then I think phase two of the war was from about last July until a couple of months ago say until about February or March this year when the ukrainians were were clearly able to push the Russians back and so we saw the um offensives in the um uh kharkiv region and then in person and the ukrainians recovered two big swathes of territory as well as conducting some local counter-offensives and now we're in phase three where the ukrainians are trying to prove to us the west and to themselves that they can not only fight the Russians to a standstill they've proved they can do that and they can do that more or less anywhere in Ukraine they can fight them to a standstill but can they throw the Russians out and so we're now in phase three with this big counter-offensive which the ukrainians are launching now they're in the process of of working it through I think in the very early stages of we're seeing it um where they're trying to convince us that actually they can recover most of the territory if not all of the territory that was taken from them in February last year and maybe maybe even some of the territory that was taken from them in 2014. so I think we're at the beginning of what I would call phase three of the war and there'll be a few more phases yet before this is all done yes as you say phase three of the war the counter offenses offensive you say has begun what is the strategy do you think well we don't know where the ukrainians will choose to hit the uh the Russians we know they've got the equipment or a lot of the equipment that they will promise not as much as they want inevitably but a lot of what they were promised NATO have said they've got more than 95 percent of everything that they were promised but having the equipment there is not the same as having it ready and integrated together with armored vehicles tanks infantry artillery and and air defense and all the things that have got to go together but essentially the ukrainians are choosing now where to try to punch through Russian lines and if you look at what they've got for this offensive I mean most of us know that they've got nine new brigades new brigades uh at least three of them are fairly heavily armored and they can probably put another three to five brigades together of of brigades which we know have performed very well and have been had a little bit of rest and then there's a force behind that but if you put together say something between 12 and 16 brigades fighting brigades for uh the the actual the spearhead of this offensive any military professional in Britain or America will tell you that's only about 50 kilometers of front so you could cover about 50 kilometers and you could punch through anything across that 50 kilometers probably but the whole front is almost a thousand kilometers so which 50 kilometers would you choose to punch through and to what effect and that's the big question now which we're all waiting to see how the ukrainians play that maybe it won't be one thrust maybe it'll be two or three thrusts I'm sure that it would be uh there'll be a lot of deception uh what we've seen so far I'm sure will not be the the direction of the final offensive as it develops maybe it will be but it partly depends on what the the Russians themselves do you know there's always this phrase that the enemy always has a vote and what the ukrainians will be trying to do is to provoke the Russians into casting their vote which means committing their reserves or committing some of their reserves so as to leave gaps elsewhere and the ukrainians will then try to as it will play that game that cat and mouse game to find a way of breaking through that does some political good and as you say um this is what 960 kilometers long at the front line there are various options as you say where they can punch through do you have a theory as to where they will try well I can tell you where the Russians think they'll punch through and that is in the South they think that they will push through from zapparesia through to Melita pole and to the coast to break the land bridge and isolate Crimea which would be a center of strategically you know a very sensible thing for the ukrainians to do and the reason I know the Russians think that is because you've only got to look at their defense you look at where they've dug most of their defenses their trenches their minefields um their tank traps their Dragon's Teeth defenses you know all these can be seen by satellite photography and I've seen lots of maps now of you know we've seen Maps every few days of how the defenses are progressing and the the more time they're given the more the Russians build up defenses there in the South so they obviously feel that the the the the Ukrainian offensive is likely to push directly south from zapparesia and indeed I mean the Russians have started to evacuate civilians whether they like it or not from zapparesia itself and they've prepared for a rapid withdrawal from the Eastern Bank of the NEPA River in Kirsten in order to I think to pull back troops so they can concentrate them at a place of where they think the Breakthrough would be in the South so that's what the Russians clearly seem to anticipate of course if that's what the Russians anticipate the ukrainians will be very sensible to do something else but it may be that that ultimately the prize here for the ukrainians is not so much to take back the donbass though that would be a pretty big prize but actually to break the break through the middle of Russian lines and and literally if they could push through to the coast very quickly with all of the problems that that will pose they could actually have quite a lot of Russian troops the wrong side of the line they could they could encircle a lot of Russian troops who would be to the west of them and they could really threaten Crimea because putting Crimea under threat is probably the biggest political bargaining chip that the ukrainians can actually get because a Crimea is under threat then Putin himself is in big trouble politically as well as the Russians being in trouble militarily and how does what is happening at the moment in bahmoud fit into the bigger picture in terms of ukrainians having ground a small amount of lands there and starting to encircle the city yes I think what's happening in Black mud is very interesting as as I say I'd be surprised if this was the main this was the beginning of the main thrust but opportunities opportunity opportunity might present itself for the ukrainians to make that the main thrust and they may go for it but I think what they're really doing in back mud is trying to make sure that bakman doesn't actually fall because after all this time it was literally the 17th of May last year so to the day it is a year since the first artillery shells Russian Artillery shells fell on backmut so as of today buckmut has been under under attack for one complete calendar year and when we're this close to the offensive I think the ukrainians don't want to lose back much even though it's strategically not very important but they don't want the symbolism of losing it and although they're only hanging on now I know to the uh to the South Western corner of the city they've even lost the Northwestern corner now they're hanging on by their fingertips to the southwestern corner but they've kept the light the the road open the famous t0504 which is the the route from that tip of the back nut out down to um uh [Music] which is their Escape Routes to the South West as long as they've kept that road open then they don't have to admit that they've really lost back mud and by attacking north and south of the city now and putting the Russians Under Pressure they can take some of the pressure off having to as it will leave back mud but the back nut is all about symbolism if they can if they can just hold on until the offensive really starts they'll never have to say that they've lost it and they're therefore not give the Russians the satisfaction of having taken it and therefore not give themselves the political problem of having to explain after so many deaths why they've lost it so Batman is the I mean the ukrainians have said this themselves they said this is the Prelude that's the word they used in English translation the Prelude to the offensive is to save bakmut and it's purely symbolic um and I don't mean that in any disrespect to any the soldiers who've died there on on both sides it is purely symbolic because the pragosian the Wagner group led by pragosian decided to make it an objective and because they started a year ago to attack Batman so the ukrainians are desperate to save it if only to prevent the Russians having that that satisfaction of taking it and we've seen her present zielinski on a charm offensive this week for support and we've seen the news of the provision of the Storm Shadow long-range missiles by the UK to Ukraine with more missiles and attack drones to follow um what difference do you think that will really make to what Ukraine can do on the battlefield in principle Storm Shadow makes a big difference because storm Shadows are very accurate cruise missile it's it's accurate it's fast flies about 600 miles an hour it flies low it's quite hard to detect it's got a very small radar signature and if it's used as it seems to have been used last week in conjunction with what the Americans call the mald which is the miniature air-delivered decoy missile mald and the Maldives is it is a missile but there's no explosives in it it is literally it's a it's a decoy which can make itself look like three or four different aircraft all going in different directions or it make it so it can make itself look like three or four missiles all heading in different directions and it carries a suite of electronic countermeasures so a mold can actually cut a swathe through Russian defenses electronically through which Storm Shadow can go through and do its job now if the ukrainians got enough storm shadows and we don't know how many they've got but if they've got enough they can have a big effect a really big effect on all of the ammunition stocks and the fuel supplies that the Russians are using if the ukrainians know where they are they've now got a very good chance of being able to hit them even not just 50 miles behind the lines which is what they were able to do with the himars the the multiple launch rocket system that they got from the Americans they can now go 150 miles behind the lines which will really be a problem for the Russians and Russian commanders and in the Kremlin they're saying oh Storm Shadow doesn't make any difference believe me they're very worried about this they'll really worry about it and so the big question is for the ukrainians you know would it be nothing is actually a game changer as such but would it be a significant Advantage yes it would be if they've got enough and how many have they got don't know but as a as a guide yes well you've got hundreds literally hundreds I mean we have something between 700 and a thousand of them that's our stock if we were prepared to give them the whole stock and I personally think we should because as somebody said they know you're sitting on the shelf in Britain let them be used in something that matters to Britain I mean given the whole stock for now um if they had say six or seven hundred they would make a big big difference in actually slowing down the ability of the Russians to get to the front lines so as and when Ukrainian troops start to make a breakthrough they can prevent Russian reinforcements getting there they can stop the fuel they can stop the ammunition because even if the Russians have got these things hidden in deep rear areas at some point if they're if they're combating a breakthrough they've got to bring It Forward they've got to bring their ammunition forward on trains or trucks on roads or they've got to bring their fuel forward in pipelines or tankers they can be seen if they can be seen they making me hit and one of the big differences between what Ukraine can do and what the Russians can do is that Ukraine with the with Western technology they can hit moving targets the Russians find it very hard to hit moving targets it sounds funny when you say it but but to actually hit a moving Target a convoy or a train that you know has got something important on it first of all you've got to spot it you've got to track it you've got to get that information back to the control center the control centers they've got to send something off to actually Target it and the Russians are hopeless at doing this they're way way behind time where's the ukrainians have learned how to do this in a matter of a few minutes the Russians take an hour or so to do it and by then of course the target has gone somewhere else so um this inability of the Russians to hit mobile targets is a real problem for them and Ukraine's ability to do it means that as the Russians respond to a breakthrough they could lose a great deal of equipment and Men before they even reach the battlefield might the hope would be other nations would follow now Supply AI attackham's long-range guided missiles so desired by Ukraine well I think it makes it more likely I mean actually some of us have suspected for a while that maybe the ukrainians have already got some attackers because this is the Army tactical missile system which is a long-range ground to ground system because and unless the Ukraine's had some attackers missiles we can't really see how they could have attacked targeting Crimea that they we know they have already attacked and in particular the Kirsch bridge I don't believe the Kirsch Bridge was attacked by a truck bomb because the way the explosion worked and when America has been out the pentagon's been asked about attackums they've never confirmed nor denied officially nobody's announced that any any of these missiles have been given to Ukraine but I have long suspected that maybe a handful of them were but that's an aside really want more yeah they will need more they need more of everything and the fact that they've now got Storm Shadow and the Storm Shadow can work so well and obviously it's aircraft launch Storm Shadow which gives it more flexibility and greater range because you've got the range of the aircraft as well as the the missile itself but the attackers are very good and they're so accurate and they're very destructive and I think it's more likely now that we've crossed this threshold now of long-range missiles so I think that the threshold now of um language missiles of the attackums type is much more likely to be crossed and the ukrainians have got to keep demonstrating to the West that they they mean what they say that they will not use these systems these Western systems to attack Russia directly and I'm convinced that we can believe that because they know that if they did use any of these systems to attack Russia directly the West would stop supporting Ukraine because it would just be too dangerous and if the West stops supporting Ukraine they lose the war so it seems to me a simple sort of you know two plus two equals four if if they give us their assurances that they will only use these systems inside Ukraine we can believe those assurances because it would be criminally stupid of them to do anything else and I so I think that that you know what we've seen in this contest from the very beginning is the West keeps establishing not red lines but but thresholds that we don't want to cross and then we cross them and we cross one threshold after another after another and so the next threshold of course is fighter jets and I'm sure we're going to cross that threshold probably sooner rather than later and what the ukrainians keep saying is that you know if you'd only considered these thresholds all in one go uh six or eight months ago we'd all be in a better position than we are now but you know we are where we are so we've crossed the the long-range missile threshold and I think the ukrainians will will be given I'm guessing but they will now explicitly be given um more the the more that they will need in order to counteract Russia's response to their counter-offensive when it really gets underway since you mentioned the fighter jets we know that zielinski really wants them and it's f-16s are the most likely ones to be delivered as part of this Jets Coalition of Nations the UK will supply training how will they do that as the UK doesn't even have f-16s no there's two things the United Kingdom will probably do almost certainly do I mean one is basic pilot training for people who are not Pilots already or not military Pilots already so basic training can be conducted in all sorts of aircraft because you're just basically teaching somebody airmanship or a womanship whatever it is and then the second thought is simulation training Britain is very good at um simulated training for pilots and you can simulate F-16 training although we don't operate f-16s we operate typhoons and f-35s but you can simply put an F-16 package into the simulator and use that simulator to train for F-16 Pilots so I think we'll do two things one is basic training and then simulator training and again even simulator training in a typhoon um is depending on what you're trading for whether it's night operations or a certain sort of targeting or air ground Court cooperation um what sort of aircraft you're in doesn't matter for certain sorts of training that you might do you know basic navigation training whatever it is um but in this we should also notice the fact that um if the ukrainians want Jets soon which they do of course they need to send their qualified Pilots for conversion to the F-16 which would mean simulators and actually training on the f-16s themselves in the United States if you're training basic people you know basic entrants who are not Pilots already then that really is a longer process I mean that's 18 months or two years um to train them up to a reasonable level and that's much longer a much longer Horizon but there's a bit of big argument about well how long does it take a combat pilot now somebody who has been flying mig-20 the mig-29s or su-24s su-25s these people have already been in combat they've got more war experience than our own Pilots than most American Pilots you know put them in an F-16 they'll pick it up within a couple of months never mind this six or eight months conversion um you know these people are highly motivated they're already combat Pilots um you know the general viewers they will actually convert really quickly if you put them in real life 16s Somewhere in Arizona um and there's a big argument over that nobody's we haven't done it yet but I'm sure that that is the next stage can Ukraine in your opinion actually make the territorial gains it needs to make though without that air power Ukraine can make very significant gains I think with what it's got now which is air defense and so the most important thing in any Land Battle Is that the sky above the land battle is is not owned by the opposition so you know at least it's contested if not belongs to you and if the Russians obviously will try to conduct a big air campaign against whatever the Ukraine is doing on the ground if the ukrainians can hold them off with ground-based air defense gbad is this no G bad ground-based day defense if they can hold them off with that then that for the for the for the immediate future is good enough but the question is I mean ground-based air defense is the only if if that's all you've got you've got no fallback I mean the best sort of defense is a layered defense and so what you ideally want is aircraft um in the air missiles firing from a distance and then ground-based air defense Point defense above the units that are fighting on the ground so that any opposition has got to come through two or three layers of Defense if you relying tightly on ground-based air defense then you're really you've only got one layer and although it seems to be performing pretty well at the moment the Russians obviously have been conducting a sort of campaign to to exhaust it I mean they're throwing these Shaheed 136 Iranian drones which are really not very effective anymore they weren't very effective at the very beginning but if it takes a missile to bring each one of them down and these are the these Shahid drones only cost less than twenty thousand dollars each so you're actually exhausting the other side's supply of missiles um with a very cheap drone and so in a way the Russians don't mind how many shahids come down as long as they keep exhaust hosting Ukrainian weapon stocks and that's the problem which the ukrainians have got so ideally they need aircraft as well particularly because the Russians have developed this Glide bomb now and this Glide bomb is a bog standard bomb they've got lots of them they're very cheap and they found a way inventive as they are of putting Wings on it fins on it and a guidance system based on the glonass system which is like the GPS it's the Russian version of GPS and so if an aircraft that would normally drop this bomb it just falls from the aircraft is a gravity bomb but if it drops the bomb from high enough up then that bomb is now capable of gliding for 40 kilometers and it can land very accurately and that Glide bomb is playing Havoc at the moment with Ukrainian artillery because it's it turns out to be accurate enough and the Russians have got lots of them and once this bomb is set off it's almost impossible to bring it down because again using a very expensive missile against it you'll run out of good missiles and you can't really use your your anti-aircraft artillery against it and so the only way to combat this Glide bomb which can be launched from either inside Russian airspace or just not far over the border means that Russian aircraft don't have to take much of a chance if they can drop a bomb 40 kilometers away from where it's going to land and the only way the ukrainians say that they can combat this is aircraft to aircraft and that's one of the points that we believe that zielinski has been making in Europe this last week he's saying you know we have to be able to take on the aircraft for aircraft combat in order to stop them dropping Glide bombs from 40 and 50 kilometers away um in ways that we can't do anything about because it is playing Havoc at the moment with our Frontline forces and that's true that is demonstrably true in the dombas where Russian aircraft would just pop over the Border release a couple of Glide bombs pop back again they're completely safe and there's almost nothing ukrainians can do and these are big explosions which are accurately targeted so the Russians have got themselves a very good weapon here in this Glide bomb and it's only come onto the battlefield in the last six weeks and if we just turn our attention to the bombardment of Kiev this week we saw Russian forces launch a barrage of 18 Miss missiles on the capital all of which Ukraine says were shot down our Ukrainian forces actually becoming more successful at defending their Skies by using the equipment they've more effectively they've been given yes they are becoming more effective I mean partly because their own command and control is now very sophisticated very good but of course they're effective because they've got some of the Best Western systems so they've got these very good German systems or anti-aircraft systems and most important of all they've now got Patriot batteries and the Patriot the American system which is also operated in Poland for instance um is the best in the world Patron is the best system in the world it will bring down pretty well anything um certainly you'll bring down missiles it'll certainly bring down aircraft bring down drones the problem with Patriot is that it's so very expensive and so um you know every Patriot battery costs about a billion dollars and about 4 400 million dollars is the cost of the battery in about 600 million dollars about two-thirds of it is the cost of the wet of the missiles and so you only you only use Patriot batteries to bring down some high value targets again you it's stupid to use Patriot missiles against cheap Shahi drones you need you need them against against ballistic missiles these the Kinsale missiles or the dagger missiles which the uh the Russians these Hypersonic missiles which apparently the Russians have been throwing at Kiev and which they thought were absolutely um incapable of stopping and it looks as if Patriots in the last 48 hours have had their first victories against Russia's Hypersonic missiles as far as we can tell although of course when a missile is destroyed in mid-air it's going to fall somewhere and the debris has done a certain amount of damage but it's it's a great deal better to have a missile destroyed in mid-air 50 miles away from where it's due to land and and you know even though the Deborah itself may cause death and injury and so yes the Ukraine's doing very well but they're doing it partly because systems they've got and again the argument is that the Russians will keep on doing this they'll just throw as many cheap systems at the or cheap missiles and drones at the Ukrainian defense system as they can hoping to exhaust it at least in the short term to create some holes through which they can send some of their big missiles but I have to say um at the moment I would not have expected the ukrainians to do this well in their air defense and the last few days I've I've been very encouraging whether it's just a fluke I don't know but I guess we're going to find out in the next month whether they can keep up this very high rate of interception I mean it's been you know over 80 percent since the um the Russian offensive began the Russian offensive began last October on October the 10th to be precise and they've the Russians have launched now 16 major strikes against Ukraine and the 16th strike has been over a week long most of them were 24 hours strikes they were over one period and this 16th strike is I keep logging them and the 16th strike has been over more than a week now so it's a more consistent bombardment and the ukrainians have done really well they've done really well because their interception rates are now well over 94 95 if they can keep that up then they can they can weather the the aerial assault which Russia has launched on Ukrainian Society in general it's been suggested that the Russian air defense systems have a software and radar problem we've seen reports and footage of Russian aircraft being shot down inside Russia how significant is the risk posed by the problems of identifying Friend or Foe yeah the the iff problem identification Friend or Foe is um it's been a problem since the the beginning of air power really going back to the first world war um because there are different different aircraft do different jobs and for all sorts of organizational reasons very often a force doesn't know how many of its own aircraft are in the air because it might have transport aircraft in the air doing one job it might have um executive jets flying generals backwards and forwards it might have Fighters bombers electronic countermeasures aircraft and so on and what the Russians are not very good at doing because they've never had to do it before is is what in NATO is always known as a wax the Airborne warning and control system and a-wax is is you know we know we've seen it all the time we're an aircraft or two or three aircraft can circle around an area and they're they're almost like a an aerial control tower they can see everything that's going on and they can they can just they can organize the airspace now again I mean Russia has got that capability but they've never really exercised it and they've never had to do it in an as far as we know anyway in an alliance context and so um whereas in NATO it's it's absolutely standard that we're you know NATO is working with sometimes with five or eight or even 14 different nations all with their power as we're in northern Europe or over the Mediterranean in these great big exercises very complex I mean no no no um sort of air power in the world so far has ever been as complex and so far as successful as nato in organizing all this whereas the Russians themselves even though they've only got themselves to worry about and that don't operate in big coalitions like this because they organize themselves in stove pipes they're all in silos they seem to have made hard work of the of the problem of coordination and you know we see this at all levels I mean the Russian military Machinery we haven't seen much of we've seen a bit of the Navy but not very much in this war but certainly quite a lot of the army quite a lot of the Air Force the military Machinery is so organizationally poor that in a way it's not surprising that they've had some iff incidents or you know Blue on Blue Friendly Fire whatever you want to call it we can't be sure that they're shooting their own aircraft down by mistake or the um they're competing with each other but we can't be sure it isn't Ukrainian sabotage or somebody sabotage but certainly they've had a number of incidents which have brought down their own aircraft um and so a lot of their own drones and again if I was a Russian senior military officer I'd be looking very very hard at what's been going wrong if we pull back and look at the bigger picture some analysts are of the view that Vladimir Putin wants a Forever War all he has to do is hang on until the power supply in Ukraine run out of the weapons or the resolve to carry on How likely is that do you think to happen it's absolutely the case I'm sure that that Putin does want a Forever War it's not what he intended but he's riding a tiger now it's you know if you get onto the back of a tiger then you you've got to stay on on the tiger you've just got to stay there for the ride wherever it takes you if you get off the tiger we'll kill you so I will eat you so he's on a tiger's back and he's got no choice but to keep on and and um he's past the point of no returns you know some considerable time ago I think and I I'm sure he doesn't exactly know what he wants to happen next I mean he's hoping that lots of things may happen that the West May simply go soft on the war and decide that they can't back Ukraine any longer that's entirely plausible I think he's hoping for a a right-wing Republican victory in uh the United States at the November next year which would change the political character of Western involvement and that's again plausible I don't think it's all that likely but it is plausible and I think he's hoping for some sort of military breakthrough that would make a difference and push the ukrainians to the negotiating table where they agreed to give back to give even more of their territory than they were forced to give in in 2014 but I'm sure that like all dictators and autocrats he believes in his in his own mind he thinks he's good in a crisis usually these people are not good in a crisis but they think they are and so he believes that as the war goes on more crises will will emerge and that he because he's cunning and clever in his view because he can move more quickly than his opponents and that is true dictators could always make things happen more quickly than democracies can that he'll be able to as it will stay in control of the situation he's not sure how this will work out but he believes in himself that he'll be able to manufacture something out of this which will get him off the hook and give him the victory that he wants to make him look like Peter the Great Catherine of the great and Joseph Stalin So when you say um he's past the point of no return but he does want to push the Ukraine into the negotiating table do you think there is still a diplomatic solution to this war there is only a diplomatic solution to the war if if the Russians are thrown out of all of the territory they've taken in since 2022 I think if and in that case Putin's Invasion will have been seen to fail and he will have paid a very heavy price for that failure anything short of that I don't think would be a diplomatic solution acceptable to Ukraine and unless zelenski who after all I mean he does face elections himself next year but if zelenski's um he's very very popular at the moment but of course that can change and but if zelenski's view is the view of most of the Ukrainian government and it is certainly is at the moment they will simply fight a guerrilla War I mean even if they didn't have Western support they would do what they were intending probably to have to do in February last year was to go into Guerrilla War I mean I remember uh in the in the first days of the war seeing Maiden Square in Kiev full of students who are sitting around filling Molotov cocktails and that was astonishing to see all these young people preparing thousands and thousands of Molotov cocktails against Russian tanks that were coming their way and they will go back to doing to doing that and so the idea that Putin somehow can as it would take the gains and walk away and reset his relationship with the West on that basis he's fanciful it won't happen there's no way back for Putin absolutely no way back so is the only option then complete defeat of Vladimir Putin and removing all Russian troops from Ukraine because otherwise as some unless believe he'll be on a path to invading more Soviet country former Soviet countries do you agree with that I'm not sure Russia will be in a position to invade anybody else after this um but if the if the Russians are seen to succeed in other words Putin walks away with what is perceived by him and by the rest of the world to be a victory or a partial Victory then the West loses very very badly because the dictatorships are on the march in the world and because we've now committed ourselves to Ukraine in the way that we have over the last year the The credibility of liberal democracy is on the line not just as an ideology but as a a power center in World politics which it has been for the last more than 200 years and so in a way we have we are on a Tigers back now because um having committed ourselves to uh as we're defeating this this Putin Adventure if we fail to defeat it then the rest of the world would draw its own conclusions about the waning power of the western world and we'll feel the effect of that pretty pretty strongly and so what I would expect is that if if Putin can be thrown back not out of all of Ukraine I mean that would that would be very good if you were but I suspect that if he were thrown back out of the Ukraine at least conquered since 2022 I think the Western world would regard that as victory and would be happy with that and although Ukraine wouldn't like it if the West thought that that was probably okay then I think here would have to decide that at least for the time being that was okay and then I have a have a very dangerous proposal to make because the issue then is you know what what then for Ukraine does it live in a permanent state of warfare with Russia for the next 50 or 60 years which would be the the prospect so my very dangerous proposal is that if Russia can be thrown out of the territories it's occupied since February 22 and then what's the the remainder of Ukraine which would be 92 percent of Ukraine is brought into NATO and given the NATO guarantee that would be something that the crime would have to worry about and that would actually give some uh some reassurance to Kiev now to do that NATO would have to change its rules you know bringing in less than a whole territory bringing in a country that was officially still at war with the neighbor that's against NATO rules it would have to accept that and Kiev would have to accept that at least for the time being not all of the country were coming to Nato so you know this is a crazy idea but there is a certain logic to it that if we could throw the Russians out of this this imperialist inventure that we're now living through this nightmare that Putin has put upon us and then Ukraine most the vast majority of Ukraine minus Crimea came into NATO that would change the balance of the structure of architect or the architecture of security in Europe fundamentally and will give us a new starting point um I don't expect politicians ever to agree to this in the in the present tense but as an analyst you know you one one has to think these things through so I'm saying the unsayable here for the first I've been thinking about this and talking to some friends about it on and off but I'm saying it now to you Kate uh in public um and see what sort of reaction I get Professor Michael Clarke thank you for saying the unsayable you've been watching Frontline four times radio thanks for watching and thanks to Luis IX our producer see you next time

Channel: Times Radio

Views: 1,175,011

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Id: EUkpR9BoJnA

Length: 38min 36sec (2316 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023