Putin's hypersonic missiles are his trump card against the West |
What does Putin do next? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take a deeper look at the future for the Russian leader. • Putin is getting more desperate. It won’t end well• Furious Putin is trapped in a gilded cage. Only death will free him• Putin and Xi’s bromance could fall apart – and it’s all down to Trump• I’m an Eastern European – I know what Putin plans for my country• Putin has made a vast strategic error. This relationship shows us why• Putin’s fortress Russia has one weakness: The enemy within
What does Putin do next? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take a deeper look at the future for the Russian leader.
• Putin is getting more desperate. It won’t end well• Furious Putin is trapped in a gilded cage. Only death will free him• Putin and Xi’s bromance could fall apart – and it’s all down to Trump• I’m an Eastern European – I know what Putin plans for my country• Putin has made a vast strategic error. This relationship shows us why• Putin’s fortress Russia has one weakness: The enemy within
Before the Chechen war of 1994, Russia’s defence minister reportedly boasted that he could take Grozny, the capital, “in two hours with a single airborne regiment.” The Kremlin was looking forward to “a small victorious war” – instead, Chechen rebels forced the Russian Army into a humiliating withdrawal after two years of bitter fighting.
Russia’s president today, Vladimir Putin, also hoped for a small victorious war when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine exactly four years ago today. The Kremlin apparently expected the whole thing to be over in two weeks, but Russian conscripts are still being wounded or dying every week, not in their hundreds but in their thousands.
Western peacemakers have repeatedly tried to give Putin a chance to salvage something he could credibly tell his people is a victory. But despite being 73 years of age – and with constant rumours about his health – he seems in no hurry to settle. The latest round of Russia-Ukraine peace talks ended in Geneva last week with Zelensky accusing the Russians of using delaying tactics.
Sheer weight of numbers is on Putin’s side. Russia has three-and-a-half times the population of Ukraine. And Ukraine is running out of young men to send to the front.
If Putin does eventually defeat Ukraine, what’s next? A German army general, Major General Wolf-Jürgen Stahl, believes the Russian leader is preparing to wage war against Nato in Europe. Putin, he said last week, was on a “mission” against the West. “We are going to experience things we cannot even imagine right now… there is no question of whether he will use military means. If he gets the opportunity, he will use them.”
Stahl is head of the Federal Academy for Security Policy, Germany’s national defence college. It’s his job to think about a Russian invasion. But Russia had a clapped-out, broken-down, hollowed-out army, even before it was ground down in Ukraine. There was evidence of that at the start of the campaign when a Russian paratrooper named Pavel Filatyev published his diary. There were no beds in his barracks, he wrote, and often no power or water; wild dogs roamed the base. There was not enough food: just stale bread and ‘soup’ that was raw potatoes in water. He went into battle without a flak jacket; it had been sold by corrupt officers. His rifle was rusty.
Nato’s collective defence spending is ten times that of Russia ($1.4 trillion to $146 billion). Russia hides some of its defence spending and its costs are far lower, but Nato’s armies have kit that works reliably and the officers have not sold vital equipment on the black market. The idea that Russia could actually invade Western Europe is absurd. We do not face another Munich. This is not 1939.
But the bear still has teeth. Russia is ahead of Nato in advanced missile technology, especially hypersonic missiles. Hypersonic means flying at five times the speed of sound, but speed alone isn’t why these missiles are especially dangerous. They can manoeuvre in flight in a way that makes them extremely difficult to intercept.
These missiles are launched on a rocket and then glide unpredictably through the upper atmosphere, making it harder to track than a traditional ballistic missile, which follows a largely forseeable arc. Nato’s missile interceptors are good at stopping these kinds of attack. But a manoeuvring hypersonic missile could evade them and compress the decision time for political and military leaders into a tiny window.
That may change the balance of terror between Russia and Nato. Their deployment could be used as part of a campaign of psychological warfare, helping Russia to intimidate and pick off individual Nato nations. It is therefore important that Britain and its Nato allies create a new, more capable system of missile defence, like Israel’s.
The other way in which Russia could threaten and undermine Nato countries’ security is through hybrid – or unconventional – warfare. This encompasses the hacking and leaking of secrets, industrial espionage, undermining elections, and internet propaganda – the use of so-called Provokatsiya: a hoax or stunt designed to confuse or compromise an opponent.
Dr Bob Seely, author of The New Total War about Russia’s military tactics, said he expected to increasingly see forms of “grey zone”, non-attributable actions against the West. This would be combined with disinformation operations and the development of political alliances such as those with pro-Russian parties in Hungary, and Slovakia.
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He said: “Putin wants three things; to recreate Russia as an anti-Western state, destroy a genuinely independent Ukraine and break Nato. He will use a mix of military and non-military tactics, methods and tools to achieve his aims. He’s done the first, he hasn’t yet succeeded on the second and he is planning the third.”
President Putin is not going to send tanks rolling into Germany or France, but it’s easier to imagine he might follow a campaign of hybrid warfare by deploying the little green men, who Michael Clarke wrote about for this paper, into somewhere like Estonia, which has a large Russian minority. Britain keeps a battalion of soldiers in Estonia. They are one element of Nato’s tripwire in the Baltic states, ensuring that collective security is more than a paper commitment. But the deployment also ties our fate to a country where President Putin believes he has a vital national interest. This is fraught with danger for Britain – especially with a gambler in the Kremlin.
Putin watchers believe he is above all an opportunist, a brilliant tactician, less of a strategist. It is therefore hard to know what his plan might be: he and his advisors have given very little away. There is a parallel with President Trump’s decision making. The Kremlin and the White House are both cults of personality. Everything depends on the man at the top, and the man at the top may be making things up as he goes along. Such an opponent – or ally – is hard to predict.