Sanctions are just the start of what it will take if we and our allies are to win the long-term contest
Source - Daily Telegraph - 25/02/22
It's surely only a matter of time before the disaster unfolds. The fall of Kyiv, which was almost unthinkable a month ago, looks a near certainty. The democratic world is reaping its reward from years of neglect and complacency.
The call has gone up for sanctions on Russia and, despite some distasteful exceptions, the West is implementing what it can. Russia’s banks have been shut out of the global financial system by US and British measures. A move to kick them off Swift, the financial messaging system, is being held up by German worries over Russian retaliation. Overcoming Berlin’s objections would be an important sign of unity and purpose, but the truth is that most of the damage to Russia’s banks has already been done. It is impossible for them to trade normally.
If the West and its allies are to win the contest with Russia, however, sanctions are just the start. Moscow will survive the sanctions easily in the short term, thanks to its huge resources and cash reserves. But while Vladimir Putin has signalled his intent to rebuild a Russian empire, he will not be able to do so straight away. There is time to stop him achieving his ultimate goal, even if we have been caught disastrously off guard so far. Firstly, Ukrainian fighters need support to stop Mr Putin getting comfortable in their country. This may well take the form of a long-term insurgency, requiring financing, equipment and intelligence from Nato.
Two thirds of Russia’s ground forces are currently involved in the Ukraine invasion. If the occupation proves costly, in lives and military resources, it could bog down Moscow for years and make it impossible for Russia to consolidate its gains and move onto the next target. In turn, this paves the way for Ukraine to be liberated.
It also buys time, sorely needed, for the West to shore up its defences. The last time the British army embarked upon a significant renewal of its equipment was in the 1990s, according to the former Army chief General Sir Richard Barrons – and the UK is one of Europe’s better military powers. Precision long-range missiles are essential, he says, but more broadly, it’s less about splurging billions on big-ticket hardware and more about building up forces capable of using cloud networks, artificial intelligence and ever-cheaper surveillance tools. This will take at least a couple of years.
All of this is essential to avoid the nightmare scenario, which is that Mr Putin swallows Ukraine with ease and then decides to take a bite directly out of the territory of a Nato member state. At present, due to our totally inadequate preparations, the alliance would be left with a terrible choice between doing nothing and escalating into an all-out war between nuclear powers.
To avoid this possibility, the West needs to start re-arming itself now and deploy sufficiently intimidating forces to the borders of Nato that Mr Putin thinks twice about messing with them. The 7,000 troops Joe Biden sent out this week are a nice symbol, but little more.
Defence is only part of the equation, however. Europe’s Achilles’ heel is its dependence on Russia for gas and other resources, which gives Moscow the power to inflate prices on a whim, as it has this winter, and to terrify European governments. Talk of sanctioning these gas exports is completely unrealistic. Russia fills 30-40 per cent of Europe’s gas demand and it supplied gas throughout the Cold War. Without it, Europe freezes.
It doesn’t have to be that way, however. If the West gets its act together, it can mitigate the problem, first for our gas supply and then for other critical resources like palladium.
In gas markets, there are three levers to pull. The first is to remove the barriers to increasing domestic production. Britain has shown it can be done – despite being heavily depleted, North Sea production has increased significantly since 2012, when the government sat down with industry to make it happen. But financing to explore and develop new prospects is now impossible to come by, thanks to a thicket of planning and legal restrictions driven by a total neglect of energy security in favour of net zero. Across Europe, the situation is similar, especially in Italy, Greece and the Netherlands, all of which have under-exploited gas prospects. We don’t have to junk net zero to make this work either. We just need to displace Russian imports.
Still, realistically, even in a best-case scenario, Europe’s own gas isn’t going to make a big enough dent in Gazprom’s supremacy. Pulling the next lever means getting suppliers, who are big enough, to ramp up their exports. Effectively, this means the US and Qatar. The US has to grapple with its own green lobby and industry incentives to make that happen. But Europe could likely lure Qatar into supplying more gas if it guaranteed long-term contracts to justify the upfront investment needed.
This leaves the third lever: reducing Europe’s need for gas. The most obvious way to do that is through energy efficiency measures (if only Insulate Britain had picked the Russian Embassy as their target, they might have won public support) and increasing the use of renewables and nuclear. Britain’s renewables supply is currently near its limit given its unreliability, but most of Europe is far below that level. Wind and solar power are cheap and not difficult to install.
Meanwhile, the huge gap left by wind-downs of European nuclear power programmes is just waiting to be filled by a government or alliance of governments willing to finance and bet big on it. As a start, it is madness to keep shutting down plants whose life could be reasonably extended, as is happening here and on the Continent.
The West has dozens of factors in its favour. It has the technology, the capital and the raw power to defeat Mr Putin’s imperialist ambitions. But we have left ourselves vulnerable in the most basic ways, allowing weakness and dependency to erode all of Nato’s natural advantages. Sanctions are all well and good, but if we don’t address the deeper rot undermining our security, Ukraine will only be the first in a series of devastating surrenders.
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