Barry Turner

By Barry Turner Columnist

Legend has it that Lenin once said “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.”

Although this quote is apocryphal and no one has ever been able to find it in any of Lenin’s writings, it is as pertinent today as it was when US intelligence officer Major George Racy Jordan ‘quoted’ him in a 1955 article in the “The Commonwealth: Official Journal of the Commonwealth Club of California”. Jordan was a fierce anti-communist writing as the Cold War was just starting to get rather warm. Whether this was said by Lenin or just imagined by Major Jordan, we will probably never confirm, but it is starkly accurate today in so many ways.

As we are all so acutely aware now on the 24th February this year Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal attack on a peaceful neighbour, starting war again in Europe for the fist time since the Yugoslav civil war between 1991 and 1995. The war commenced with powerful missile strikes on several Ukrainian cities inflicting many casualties and massive damage to infrastructure and housing. What is not so widely known however is that those missiles work so well because they are full of sophisticated electronic guidance systems made not in Russia but in the democratic capitalist market economies of the West.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed bringing into being many new independent states. Russia and Ukraine being but two of them, right from the outset. The former Soviet states attracted political and economic advisors from the ‘winning’ side in the Cold War. The United States and Western Europe flooded those countries with our experts in turning the former communist empire into democratic market economies fit to join the civilised world. The talk at the time was of the superiority of the democratic, market economies having prevailed at what US political scientist Francis Fukuyama called “The End of History”.

Fukuyama’s premise was that political and economic history was an evolutionary process and that the Western way of life was almost predetermined to prevail. The End of History marked a major turning point. We now might conclude that that sentiment was hopelessly optimistic, even naïve in the face of what history had told us already. The sunlit-uplands of democracy, peace, love and understanding did not last long at all. Some might argue it was still-born. No sooner had the Soviet Union collapsed but war broke out in its neighbourhood in the disintegrating former communist state of Yugoslavia.

The democratic market economies in the new states emerging from Soviet control never really happened either. All of the former Soviet Republics descended rapidly into oligarchies and eventually to Kleptocracies, including Ukraine. We quite rightly support the valiant people of Ukraine in their fight against an imperialist aggressor but we should not forget that the same corruption that brought about the regime in Moscow was alive and kicking in Kyiv and Kharkiv too. Kleptocracy, oligarchy and illicit finance are the biggest threat to peace and security in the world and we in the West heve facilitated and enabled it.

Western bankers, lawyers and advisors continued to offer advice, finance and legal support long after the rose tinted view of a democratic market economy had faded from view in the former Soviet states. Right up to the imposition of the biggest package of sanctions in history Westerners happily cosied-up to the people we now call war criminals and murderers. Some of the advisors, particularly the lawyers who facilitated Russian oligarchs bringing legal actions in the West to silence the press and media, still shamefully justify it with the absurd statements “they have a right to be represented”.  It is notable that such a ‘right’ is determined by the depth of the clients pocket rather than the merit of their case. It is doubtful that the recent libel action by Roman Abramovich against Catherine Belton and her publishers was carried out on legal aid rates.

Now to the most amazing reflection on ‘Lenin’s observation’. Those missiles hitting Ukrainian apartment blocks are full of electronics and avionics built in the west. The SSC-8 is a Russian ground-launched cruise missile with a range of 2,500 km. It has a US made computer aboard to facilitate its ability to operate its control systems at very low altitude and high speed. Thanks to American hardware it is incredibly accurate. The computer and the rails that connect it to the computer housing as super heat resistant as would be necessary in such a weapon. The Svir and Refleks guided 300-mm rocket, the principal weapon of the Russian precision artillery for the Tornado-S multiple launch rocket system uses a US-made fibre-optic gyroscope for its inertial navigation.

The Russian TOR-M2 air-defence system, one of the most potent short-ranged air-defence systems in the world relies on a British-designed oscillator in the computer controlling the platform’s radar. The UK has a long tradition of supplying weapons that get used against us and our allies and friendly countries. The MIG 15 fighters that were the scourge of the skies in the Korean War were powered by a Rolls Royce designed Nene jet engine that was sold to the Soviet Union. The Argentine Navy was the proud owner of Type 42 warships designed and built in the UK and sold to a fascist dictator.

The US, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, South Korea and Japan have all had a thriving trade selling weapon components to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Parts of those missiles that hit Ukrainian targets have been examined by the Royal United Services Institute in the UK, sure enough they are full of kit designed and built in the West. What is even more astonishing is that the flow of components continued right up to the attack on Ukraine, long after Russia adopted its highly aggressive and threatening stance against the West.

Whether Comrade Lenin made that prediction or not, we can see that the prediction itself is absolutely correct and there is no wonder it has stood the test of time among all Soviet/Russian predictions.

Barry Turner is a Senior Lecturer in War Reporting and Human Rights and a member of the Royal United Services Institute.

By Barry Turner Columnist

We are five days in and so far the overwhelmingly large forces of Vladimir Putin’s Russia have failed to consolidate their hold over the Ukraine. The last several years have seen Putin constantly harping on about the superiority of Russia’s forces over those of NATO, let alone of a largely peaceful and much smaller neighbour, so what is going wrong?   

It is correct that the last couple of decades have seen the Russian Federation shift from a largely World War 2 style mass conscript army to one more resembling those that Putin regards as the enemy.  Nevertheless, the modernisation seems to be lacking somewhere. There are some very interesting theories circulating in the military and security circles.

Russia, in its attempt to change from a largely mass conscript army to a professional high-tech outfit has largely failed due to internal competition. In particular logistics are poor and transport has been sacrificed in order to focus on high-tech kit. This was evident in the satellite images in the weeks running up to the invasion. Lots of sharp-end weaponry but proportionately surprisingly few transport vehicles.

As in many armed forces, inter-service rivalry diverts resources one way or the other, giving advantage to some at the expense of disadvantage often to many. The Russian military has some impressive hardware that its president loves to brag about. Huge amounts of funding have in recent years been diverted to developing hypersonic missiles, but this largely vanity project is of no use in urban warfare of the type they are now engaged in.   

In 2015 the EU conducted a detailed survey of the Russian military capability and concluded it could fight short wars but not protracted ones. It had virtually no equipment or strategy to maintain a sustained invasion of the type that had been envisioned in the Cold War when mass tank armies were suggested to be paused for an attack through the Fulda Gap in Germany. It still does not have sufficient troops or logistical support to occupy the whole of a country the size of Ukraine.

It is clear that the Russian military had suggested to the President Putin that the attack on Ukraine would bring about rapid capitulation by Zelensky’s government, probably in time to destabilise the West’s imposition of severe sanctions. That, it is now clear has failed. While Russian troops are now in the process of surrounding Kyiv, they have no clear strategy for taking the city by force. Taking a major city is incredibly difficult without causing mass destruction and high casualties, including casualties to one’s own forces.

Of all people, the Russian Military know this from their history. In the Battle for Berlin at the very end of World War 2 close to 90,000 Soviet soldiers were killed and 280,000 wounded taking the city. Soviet tanks were devastated by single infantry soldiers with little more than crude bazooka type weapons. Ukrainian soldiers have anti-tanks weapons of far more sophistication and they know their way around the streets.

Tanks are particularly vulnerable in urban areas as has been frequently demonstrated since World War 2. The Ukrainians have lots of highly effective anti-tank weapons and even a Molotov cocktail can disable a tank in street fighting. During the Gulf War insurgents disabled a US Abrams tank, supposedly the best armoured fighting vehicle in the world, with an overcoat shoved down the barrel.

So far the Russians have avoided mass casualties among the civilian population and their own forces. Putin’s intention was to turn the people of Ukraine into a puppet state so killing very large numbers of them couldn’t be countenanced. At home in Russia very high casualties among the Ukrainian civilian population would cause mass unrest, as will very high casualties among the Russian armed forces.

The biggest indicator yet of the invasion’s failings are the absurd threats of putting the nuclear forces on ‘alert’. This posturing fools no one, since both NATO and Russian nuclear forces are always on ‘alert’. The Russian president knows very well that an attack with nuclear weapons on a NATO target would end in total destruction for the Russian state and more frighteningly for the majority of the Russian population. NATO has 22 ballistic missile submarines in total — if the French Force de dissuasion is included and 18 if not. Any one of them is capable of delivering at least 80 independently targeted warheads and there can be as many as six or seven on station at any one time.

So, nuclear threats are if anything a little pathetic. The Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) is still with us and neither side could possibly hope to ‘win’ a nuclear war. Threatening one is an act of desperation not one of bravado.

It is now possible that Russia will lose this war, or at the very least not win it. With every day that passes Putin’s hope that the Ukraine would quickly capitulate against ‘overwhelming’ forces diminishes. The West needs to consider in more detail what the consequences of that might be. While it is very unlikely to be World War 3 a dramatic reshaping of the geo-political and economic world is now inevitable.

On a final note, Mr Putin has lamented the dissolution of the Soviet Union as one of the greatest tragedies in human history. He seems to have forgotten why that dissolution happened.  NATO won the Cold War, not with bombs and bullets but with the invincible force of economics.

Barry Turner is a Senior Lecturer in War Reporting and Human Rights and a member of the Royal United Services Institute.