Military Matters: Episode 9

**Charles** (0:25)
Welcome back to Military Matters. It's episode nine, believe it or not. Brian has joined me again, about which I'm very pleased, and there's gonna be a lot to get through today. We're going to start with drones, which we feel are the issue du jour. So I'm going to quote from an outraged BBC article about what's been going on, in particular between Ukraine and Russia. And I think this will lead into a very interesting conversation. So, Brian, I'm gonna quote to you.
The Russian embassy in the UK earlier accused Britain of deliberately opting for an escalation of the Ukraine crisis, saying the deeper its involvement in the conflict, the higher the price it will pay. Now that's been written, not just by the BBC, but by all media and interpreted by government as an outrageous position for the Russians to take. How do you regard it?

**Brian** (1:21)
Well, if we look at how the war in Ukraine has progressed, the reality is that the Russians have, in my opinion, effectively beaten Ukraine. The only reason that Ukraine is still able to fight is due to the support that's been pushed in by the UK and the Europe and the US.
And increasingly, that support has been to provide Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated and long-range drone technology. So all of the talk about Western long-range missile systems, Storm Shadow, for example, they came to nothing because the quantity of the missiles was too few.
And the Russians countered, overwhelmingly countered those missiles with their air defense systems. So the next trick from the West was to assist the Ukrainians to boost their drone capability, and in particular to produce long-range drones that were capable of hitting at distance inside Russia. So the initial forays were attacks largely aimed at fuel installations, and there were clearly some relatively small hits on Russian oil refineries.
But as time has gone on, we're now seeing Ukraine launching hundreds, in fact, thousands of drones in one raid was reported. And those were targeted overwhelmingly on a spread of infrastructure, supposedly military infrastructure inside Russia. And the reality is that the number of hits was very few, and that reflects on the efficiency of the Russian air defence. But nevertheless, the West technology, and in particular drone support from UK, has been to increase the distance which Ukraine can hit inside Russia, and also to increase the payloads. And we've now got the press in UK openly boasting that it is UK designed supplied drones that are now being used to attack inside Russia. So there must come a point at which the Russians say, we are now being openly attacked by the United Kingdom, and we've got to respond to that. Now, how they're going to respond to it is where it gets interesting because they're easily capable of launching missile systems to take out an individual factory in UK. But of course, that's an attack on mainland UK with all the possible repercussions. So what will they do? I don't know, but does a statement that we now regard ourselves as being attacked directly by the UK, is this a reasonable statement to make? I think it is.

**Charles** (4:37)
I think so. I mean, there are so many elements to talk about. And the first word I supposed to come back to is escalation, because that was what the Russians have leveled at, specifically, in fact, the United Kingdom. But I think from what you've just described, there's no doubt that there is an escalation.
And to look into exactly how that's being facilitated, I think is, is totally critical because it's not just that the United Kingdom is said to be supporting Ukraine. I mean, there is an absolutely defined point that one can look at, which is the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham's, handing of the licensing or the license to produce this technology to Ukraine. So specifically, we're talking about the BAE Systems Stone Cloak, which in actual fact is not a drone, but is a signal jamming capability that enables drones to apparently be more destructive than they would previously have been. Therefore, what that has facilitated is directly attributable to the United Kingdom's decision-making processes and indeed, defence, military, industrial complex. So there's absolutely no getting away from that, and exactly to your point, this surely has to constitute even more direct link between the activities of the United Kingdom and the conflict, or specifically, the targeting of Russian infrastructure, Russian military capabilities, but I'm afraid to say also Russian civilians.

**Brian** (6:19)
That's certainly true, and I will say that the reports that I'm seeing, that I've been seeing over recent weeks is showing a significant increase in the number of Russian civilian casualties as a result of Ukrainian attacks, particularly on the Crimea Peninsula, but also with regard to some of the attacks inside Russia. There's no doubt that this has happened.