Ukraine is in its strongest position yet

An ugly sludge today rims the Black Sea. Along its beaches, the tidemark is littered with dark lumps of cruelly killed fish, seabirds, dolphins, squid and porpoises. They are the unintended victims of Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers, two of which were caught in a storm on the morning of 15 December 2024, and sank. 

Older readers may remember the Torrey Canyon super tanker, which ran aground off the Scilly Isles in March 1967. For the next 18 months the wreck spewed its contents over a wide area, including the Cornish beaches on which I built my sandcastles, and killed a range of oceanic wildlife. Their oil-splattered remains were one reason my parents switched holiday destinations to France and Spain thereafter. Last December, it was Russia’s old and poorly maintained Volgoneft 212 and Volgoneft 239, conveying thousands of tons of fuel through the Kerch Straits, that got into difficulty and broke up in 50mph winds. These and hundreds of other aging tankers are daily dodging sanctions taking oil from ports in the Baltic and Black Sea to markets in China, India and Turkey. They keep the Kremlin’s oil revenue flowing, last year estimated at $108 billion.

The Kyiv School of Economics in partnership with the European Business Association, World Bank, and Yale School of Management, estimate over 400 ships are transporting Moscow’s oil, or products made from crude such as diesel fuel and gasoline. Sovcomflot, Russia’s state-owned shipping agency, is known to control around 100, but proprietorship of the rest is deliberately murky as they are operated and crewed by opaque entities located in places like the UAE, the Seychelles, India or Vietnam. Little is known of their safety practices or insurance, in contravention of the strict requirements of the UN’s International Maritime Organisation. Some are even maintained in French and Danish shipyards because of loopholes for their non-Russian flagged status. All have one thing in common: they halt at Russian oil ports and export their products outside the jurisdictions of sanctioning G7 countries. 

This issue came to light in May 2023, when an unregistered 18-year-old shadow tanker carrying 340,000 barrels of Russian oil lost engine power and almost ran aground whilst passing through the narrow Danish Straits. Then on 26 December last year, Finnish police boarded the Eagle S, due to suspicious activity monitored on Christmas Day. On board they found “spy equipment used for monitoring NATO naval and aircraft activities”. Upon further investigation, Eagle S was found to have dragged her anchor for 60 miles to sever the EstLink 2 subsea cable supplying electricity from Finland to Estonia and four other communication links. As a result, ten nations including Sweden, Norway, Finland, the three Baltic states, Germany, Demark, Poland and the UK will participate in NATO’s latest mission, Operation Baltic Sentry, announced on 14 January, “to prevent destabilising acts, track the shadow fleet and safeguard undersea infrastructure, utilising possible boarding, impounding, and arrest.”

In Western media the year (the Eastern Orthodox New Year began only on 14 January) started on an upbeat note for Ukraine. On 9 January it was announced that the UK would send 30,000 more drones to Ukraine. However careful reading of the relevant press release reveals it is the International Drone Capability Coalition, a NATO initiative led by the UK and Latvia, and jointly funded by the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, and Sweden which is supplying this unmanned flying devilry, not London alone. The announcement, made at the US Ramstein Airbase in Germany, after the latest Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting of 57 countries, including all 32 NATO partners, is partly to express support ahead of the incoming Trump presidency. 

However, the 30,000-unit, £45 million funding was for “drone contracts placed,” not delivery, meaning they will take time to reach the battlefront. Many of these devices will be short-range tactical First Person View (FPV) types, in other words, camera-equipped and piloted by a remote operator, of the kind we have seen in endless streaming videos observing hostile positions for artillery, destroying tanks and infantry in foxholes, or even attacking larger, slower-moving Russian strike drones. Most will not return, designed to explode when reaching their targets. When faced with Kyiv’s drone expenditure averaging as many as 5,500 devices per day, this impressive sounding largesse amounts to only a week’s supply.

Such usage reflects President Zelensky announcement in early 2024 that his country would increase the output of the hobbyist Aerorozvidka drone unit and others, which developed their own militarised systems in 2022, to mass produce one million units within the year, later revised to two million, and last October to four million. He hopes that huge numbers at low cost will compensate for his lack of infantry and advanced military kit, such as anti-tank weapons, air defences and artillery ammunition. This involvement of civilians in drone warfare is a phenomenon that Britain has yet to satisfactorily address. The challenge in a democracy is that hobbyist-operators can significantly aid their military brethren, as in Ukraine, but can also attack them, as we have seen with militants and criminals around the world.

It was in the hope that quantity would trump quality that Stalin’s Soviet Union embarked on its mass output of 84,070 of all models of T-34 tanks from 1941, and later 75 million Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, assessing that vast swarms of cheap but effective and essentially disposable weapons would overwhelm even the most sophisticated of opponents. Additionally, when faced with the arithmetic of Russian and Ukrainian FPV unmanned aerial vehicles costing as little as £500 to £1,500 each, and the tanks they target, dependent on model and modifications, coming in at anything from £1.2m for an older Ukrainian T-72, £4m for a Russian T 90, British Challenger 2 or American M1 Abrams, and above £5m for a German Leopard 2, the cost-effectiveness of the two opposing weapons platforms is clearly in favour of drones. Even Iran’s much larger Shahed 131 and 136 family of unmanned combat aircraft, which cost Russia upwards of £40,000 each and daily carry out precision strikes, alongside cruise missiles and other smart munitions, are worth the investment if attacking a Ukrainian power station or US-supplied M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, priced at around £3.5 million.

Ukraine favours the same profit-loss calculation, as witnessed on 13 January in its largest drone attack yet on Russian military infrastructure when over 100 devices targeted 12 Russian regions, including Oryol, Saratov, Voronezh, Sumy and Tula, hitting oil depots, gas tanks, air bases, factories and the Bryansk chemical plant which produces gunpowder and explosives, “a key element of the Russian military industry,” according to Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Counter-Disinformation Centre. Both sides are using an estimated 100 different types of uncrewed aerial devices in Ukraine, ranging from quadcopter playthings bought online and modified to carry a mortar bomb or grenade, to larger, pricier models with wingspans of a dozen yards, and capable of reaching Moscow.

Each month, improvements in jamming systems, the technological brilliance of home-based Ukrainian designers and shortages through sanctions of drone parts like semi-conductors for the Russians, have further driven the domestic evolution of FPV aerial machines, which are launched alongside a multitude of longer-distance and more expensive attack drones. Both Ukraine and Russia build these systems themselves, acquire them from allies, or modify civilian purchases and gifts. Some larger types are flown as decoys to mislead their opponent’s air defences, act as relays for signals, transport equipment, and lay mines. Already we are in a world of disposable cardboard and 3D printed resin drones, which have little or no radar signature. 

Every threat to deploy awesome weaponry against Kyiv’s allies has aged like fine milk

As an aside, this also applies to fire-fighting, and in even a few months improved technology for fire-hose and extinguisher-bearing craft will be able to more speedily suppress wildfires of the kind that have just devastated Los Angeles. The pace of this innovation is such that had Britain procured say 100,000 quadcopters, or far fewer of Turkey’s £4 million Bayraktar TB2 military drones in 2023, which might have seemed sensible at the time, they would already be obsolete. Attacks by both sides on warehouses stocking and assembling uncrewed systems, of the kind reported on 10 January in Rostov reflect an intense intelligence war waged by both sides. Military leaders across the world are pondering how to educate their troops in drone use. Whether it’s more efficient to have a separate corps to establish best practice and doctrine, as with tanks and machine-guns during the First World War, or to fully integrate unmanned systems into their all-arms battles to begin with. There is no escaping the fact that this is the future of 21st century warfare. The uncrewed revolution has only just begun and thus every advanced military power is keen to see how the Russo-Ukraine drone war plays out.

However, it is Ukraine’s largely rural terrain that has favoured such widescale drone usage. They are less easy to operate with precision in urban spaces, being more susceptible to jamming and interception, and far more vulnerable at sea. Struggling with shortages of ammunition of all kinds and personnel, Kyiv has pounced on these uncrewed aerial machines to help bridge their combat weaknesses. Yet sophistication, not mass, will be the future of drone warfare. The key to tomorrow’s unmanned gadgets will be to design robust modular platforms, an approach already seen with modern warships, that can support interchangeable components. In other conceivable theatres, such as confrontations over Taiwan or Panama, around the Arctic Circle and Greenland, or in the maritime setting of a naval clash in the South China Sea, weather conditions and longer distances would rule out the use of less advanced civilian drones. The Second World War proved that wars on the European continent have quite different characteristics to those of the western Pacific, a lesson not lost on the US Navy and Marine Corps, for which they are hastily rewriting their doctrine.

In a possible North-South Korean clash there is the uncomfortable fact that China, which would back Kim Jong Un, currently dominates world production of non-military unmanned aerial systems. It not only controls the global hobbyist market, but also manufactures many of the necessary components, from cheap plastic parts to motors and video transmitters, needed for military ones. In its trade war with the US, China has already begun to restrict exports of components for drone building, hence Zelensky upping the scale of domestic production to four million as Ukraine gradually sheds dependency on Beijing and America, and will likely emerge from this war as a world drone power, whilst NATO nations including Britain lag far behind. 

In early 2024, Ukrainian drones started hitting Russian oil infrastructure, and this year on 11 January struck the Taneco refinery in Tatarstan, one of Russia’s largest and most advanced oil-processing facilities. These and other drone attacks against oil and gas terminals have caused not just a 20-year low in the Kremlin’s energy generation but an equally catastrophic lowering of morale via the vivid imagery of impressive Thunderbirds-type explosions billowing from storage tanks and pipelines. With Russians now suffering blackouts of the kind they have routinely inflicted on Ukrainians, Kyiv has found a way to repay in kind Moscow’s assaults on its own power grid. Whether the targets are armoured vehicles or oil, gas and electricity infrastructure, each opponent has alerted the world that unmanned aerial raids are here to stay as a low-risk, high-yield stratagem of inflicting maximum hurt, for minimal effort or loss of life.

As with Kyiv’s incursion into Russian Federation territory around Kursk, these infrastructure assaults provide President Zelensky with leverage ahead of any Trump-driven peace negotiations. You’ve got to hand it to Ukraine’s leader: from holding few decent cards in his game of poker with Mr Putin, he has now accumulated quite a few. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has been virtually annihilated, Kyiv claiming the destruction of 29 warships, including a submarine, and the remnants are afraid to scuttle out of port. Its air force is rarely seen over the combat zones, due to parts shortages and having lost a minimum of 232 aircraft, including 97 advanced fighters, though Ukraine claims destruction of 369 of all types, plus 331 helicopters. Despite Kim Jong Un’s supply of an estimated six million (often substandard) artillery shells, on land, Moscow’s forces have suffered double (if not treble, sources vary) the casualties, now including an estimated 1,000 from Kim’s North Korea, to those of Ukraine. As I write, Russia is continuing to lose 400 troops daily in the Donetsk Oblast alone. The average in May–June 2024 was 1,200 every day. 

As word spread of Russia’s negligible military medical provision and high number of suicides, the German human rights and refugee protection association PRO ASYL estimated in February 2024 that “at least 250,000 Russian conscripts had claimed asylum in other countries after war began, including Germany, France, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Serbia and Israel”. Low conscript morale was compounded by awareness that their forces had also lost around one in seven of all armoured vehicles on the planet. The bizarre announcement that the state-owned film studio Mosfilm had transferred ownership of its ancient T-55 and PT-76 tanks back to the Federation Army from whence they came further emphasises these massive vehicle casualties. Speculation is rife that the venerable T-34 might return to the bloodlands of Ukraine, as the incredibly robust 110-year-old Maxim water-cooled machine gun already has, utilising vast stocks of belted 7.62mm ammunition, manufactured in both world wars but never scrapped.

Moscow’s industrial output is sustained by defence spending, paying far above market prices for sanctioned goods

Mr Putin’s armaments industries are now concentrating on repairing older tank types as sanctions on parts and metals preclude it from manufacturing many newer models, though losses are still running at fifteen per cent ahead of all refurbishments from combat or old stock plus new production. Oliver Ruth of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) reports that whilst some microelectronics components from the west have been rerouted via loopholes using Kazakhstan and China, this has raised the prices of supplies and components, affecting the Kremlin’s ability to pay. Though Russia has found ways to circumvent western sanctions, it is essentially cut off economically from the wider international community, relying on a small cadre of sympathetic states to remain afloat. Moscow’s industrial output is now sustained by its defence spending, paying far above market prices for sanctioned goods. 

Putin’s total spend on defence in 2025 will reportedly amount to 17 trillion roubles, or eight per cent of the country’s GDP, compared with 0.7 per cent for education and 0.87 per cent for healthcare, proportions comparable with the late Soviet years. One obstacle to any negotiated peace advocated by Donald Trump and Elon Musk is of Vladimir Putin having locked himself into the unenviable situation that a decrease in military spending would cause a hike in unemployment, a drop in national output, and a severe recession. This could have a destabilising effect on his regime and his hold on power. Russian finances have not just been damaged by western sanctions, inflation, and oil-production attacks, but on 1 January Kyiv shut down the Brotherhood natural gas pipeline, built in Soviet days using forced labour, at its point of entry into Ukraine. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski asserted this was a “victory for Russia’s opponents. Moscow can no longer blackmail Eastern Europe with the threat of cutting off gas supplies”.

Under a 1991 bilateral agreement which expired at the beginning of this year, Moscow used the line to flood Europe with cheap gas, with Ukraine charging a $1 billion annual transit fee. Although the EU reduced Gazprom imports from 40 per cent of its total needs in 2021 to eight in 2024, Russia still made about $6.5 billion a year. Before the war, Siberian gas flowed westwards through four pipeline networks, Nordstream 1 and 2 under the Baltic, Yamal through Belarus and Poland, Brotherhood through Ukraine and fourthly Bluestream and Turkstream under the Black Sea.

 After the war started, both Nordstream lines were sabotaged, details of which remain mysterious; Russia cut off supplies through the Yamal route, citing disputes over a demand for payment in roubles. Now the Brotherhood pipeline to customers in Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia and Austria has also closed. Whilst Moldova remains acutely vulnerable, most European countries no longer depend on state-owned Gazprom production, having diversified their suppliers to include Norway, the United States, and Qatar. Consequently, Gazprom has just posted a deficit of $5.5bn, its first financial loss in 22 years, further limiting its ability to raise international capital. 

Russia relies on its oil and gas to fund the war in Ukraine, with revenues accounting for up to 50 per cent of its federal budget, according to The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Slovakia’s pro-Moscow Robert Fico had continued to import significant amounts of energy and has become increasingly anti-Ukrainian, due to earlier humiliations inflicted on him by Zelensky’s predecessors in 2009, slights he took personally and has not forgotten. He has now been forced to switch to suppliers in Azerbaijan, but also to import US liquefied natural gas via a new pipeline from Poland. Fico has accused Kyiv of damaging Slovakia’s interests and threatened to retaliate by cutting emergency electricity supplies to Ukraine and reducing aid for refugees. Since 2010 Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has also paid obeisance to Moscow, seemingly to protect his “illiberal democracy” against Brussels, guard its extensive investments in Russia, and protect its energy supplies, amounting to 80 per cent of natural gas and 65 per cent of oil needs.

America’s military-industrial complex is unsympathetic to Donald Trump’s plans to halt the flow of weaponry to Kyiv, given how many jobs are reliant on arms manufacture and training. By the time of Joe Biden’s departure, the USA will have sent over $65 billion to Ukraine, the last $500 million tranche of which was released on 9 January, in order to stymie its main short term strategic opponent.

 There have been no casualties, US infrastructure is intact and its sovereignty remains unchallenged. Regardless of Republican posturing, that’s a cheap win by any measure, and a holding policy that the new deal-maker-in-chief might even continue, whilst he rightly pivots America’s attention to its real long-term opponent, China, which appears to be aggressively building a new class of invasion barges which can have only one objective — Taiwan, home to over 50 per cent of the world’s microchip and semiconductor market.

The incoming president has renewed his demand that NATO allies spend five per cent of their GDP on defence, the reasons being twofold, as the ever-incisive former UK lieutenant-general Robert Fry observes. One is the manifold unfairness of America shouldering the largest share, the second being a recognition that unlike FDR in 1941-45, America cannot today defend both Europe and the Pacific, and of the two theatres it judges China the greater threat.

 Britain, too, has to make a similar choice, for there is a wide and growing gulf between what politicians expect the UK military to do and the means they provide to undertake it. 

Decades of cuts since the end of the Cold War have not been accompanied by any clear-eyed understanding of what they believe the armed forces are for. With a 1980s share of GDP on defence, the UK once deployed a robust global blue-water maritime force, and maintained a capable expeditionary army. Spending what the UK does today, it cannot really do either. On paper there is an impressive two-carrier navy; in practice, it is impossible to field a carrier group without NATO help, fewer than half the RN’s warships are operational at any one time, supply ships, personnel and morale in its support organisation, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, are at an all-time low, and critical capabilities like the amphibious assault ships Albion and Bulwark are being shed to save money. 

On land, the UK maintains a (fast diminishing) expeditionary army, still capable of quick global deployment but chiefly suited to operations against inferior opponents. Its main achievement is Operation Interflex, which since 2022 has trained over 50,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 200 F-16 pilots, assisted by small detachments from by Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Romania and Sweden.

However, if Russia or anyone else delivers large-scale conventional warfare, which appears to be back in fashion, then Britain is not materially or psychologically equipped for scaled-up conflict. 

For the UK, this is chiefly a question of money. As Esme Kirk-Wade’s searching 2024 House of Commons report noted, “the previous Conservative government committed to increase defence spending from 2.3 to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030, and whilst the Labour election manifesto pledged a path to spending the same figure, they have yet to set out a timescale”. 

However, even the current 2.3 per cent shrouds some ambiguity, for in the financial year 2014-15, the UK lobbied and received permission to change the way it reported defence expenditure to NATO, by including £2.8 billion’s worth of items not been previously itemised, including war pensions, contributions to UN peacekeeping missions, pensions for retired civilian MoD personnel, and MoD income from sales. In 2016, the Defence Committee of the House of Commons noted the Alliance’s required minimum of two per cent “would not have been fulfilled if UK accounting practices had not been modified, albeit in ways permitted by NATO”. 

Assessing defence spending since 2014, Malcolm Chalmers at RUSI notes the UK has one of the slowest military growth rates of any NATO country. Between 2014 and 2023, its defence allocation increased by 20 per cent, when the average of other European NATO members was 54 per cent.

 The UK National Audit Office, which scrutinises each MoD Defence Equipment Plan, published every year and setting out budget allocations and forecasted expenditure for a rolling ten-year period, has also assessed the last few plans as “unaffordable”. 

Granted there is always another hospital or school or road or railway or prison in need of substantial funding, I wish, though fear otherwise, that Ukraine has triggered a reality check. It is blindingly obvious that the international situation has radically changed to the UK’s detriment. Yet both political parties have missed the point that to strategic opponents like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, an immediate defence increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP is vital, both symbolically and politically. It is not an option, but an international message of resolve to friends and enemies alike, and should not be treated as a target, but as an absolute minimum. In other words, on defence spending, Donald Trump’s instincts may be correct.

And so, we pivot back to Ukraine. There seems little foundation to the gloomy headlines for the future of Kyiv at the year’s end. “Ukraine risks losing all the Russian land it seized within months,” cited Bloomberg News and repeated in the US forces newspaper Stars and Stripes on 27 December. The Economist was similarly downbeat suggesting at the end of October “Ukraine is now struggling to cling on, not to win”.

 Whilst several BBC reporters, including Defence Correspondent Jonathan Beale and Diplomatic Correspondent Paul Adams, on 30 December and 2 January respectively, dwelt on “Ukraine’s war weariness” and “Kyiv’s shaky position,” implying its inability to prevail. 

The truth is that Russia has played nearly all of its cards, and lost nearly all of its leverage from its failed invasion, leaving Ukraine in the strongest position it has ever attained. 

Every threat to deploy awesome weaponry against Kyiv’s allies has aged like fine milk: when faced with robust opposition, Moscow has consistently backed down, a lesson that some nations like Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and particularly Germany still refuse to recognise, as James Price has identified elsewhere in The Critic.

The Kremlin can no longer rely on international law or institutions to criticize the West’s actions because no one takes the claims of Vladimir Putin, his chief diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, and Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov seriously anymore. Any threats are additionally compromised by Putin, Lavrov and Peskov having large property portfolios and children still resident in the West.

Putin’s Federation holds significantly less territory than in March 2022. Before then, Moscow could play on fears of a full-scale invasion by a powerful army, a concept now busted. The Kremlin once held substantial leverage over Europe’s energy needs, but this too has dissipated and sales, particularly of gas, will not return. Elsewhere, Mr Putin once wielded influence in the Middle East and Africa through his dominating presence in Syria, since destroyed by the fall of President Assad, as I wrote recently in The Critic.

Neither can Russia use the leverage of hunger, as the Kremlin’s African allies to whom Ukraine’s food exports were destined, objected, leaving Kyiv with a healthy $24.5 billion from last year’s sales of wheat, barley, sunflower seeds, oats, eggs, poultry and sugar to 42 countries. 

This is down to President Zelensky’s heroic resistance. His Ukraine is stronger than ever, with a robust sense of state, army, and leadership. His nation has the support of many international partners and is no longer anyone’s satellite or vassal. If at any stage Kyiv had surrendered, Moscow would have gained leverage over the whole of Europe, instead of losing it. In fighting back, Ukraine has defended us all.