𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Experts have warned that the UK is complacent about the prospect of a Russian attack and ill-equipped to repel it. Commodore (Ret’d) Steve Prest, a RUSI Associate Fellow, said that the risk of a war against Russia is the greatest it has been since the height of the Cold War, and, “in many ways, certainly a confrontation” with Moscow is already taking place. Attacks on the UK mainland is an “entirely plausible situation”, he added, if Britain gets “caught up in a NATO conflict”.

The former Royal Navy man fears that Britons are not fully cognisant of the possibility of war, akin to the attitude of the Government and public before the COVID-19 pandemic. He mentioned Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and African countries. “War has found them and it’s pretty awful,” Commodore Prest said, “and we do have this sort of complacency, I think, and I’d include myself in this, that it could never happen here. Not in our leafy suburbs, or whatever. But the reality is it could.”

The expert said the UK needs to “have a really hard think about our integrated missile defence”. A recent Sky documentary — Wargame — depicted a Russian attack on London and emphasised Britain’s limited capabilities. Russian drones could also “start finding their way, not into military facilities, but into our civil society in mainland UK”, Commodore Prest suggested. He asked: “And what would we do about it? What could we do about it?”

The UK needs a “layered integrated air and missile defence system, which defends our highest vulnerability and highest priority targets or central targets from external attack with a sophisticated commander control system that can allocate and make real-time decisions”, the expert said. But he highlighted that it would not be possible to install a system “that shoots down everything that might possibly be locked at the UK at any time in the next 30 years”. “This isn’t the Avengers,” Commodore Prest added. “You know, there’s a degree of realism one has to apply.”

Britain should, however, should “have done and be doing more than we are”, he says. Improvements will “take a significant degree of investment”, he added, “and there are models out there which would allow us to move more quickly”. It comes as the Chancellor was yesterday accused of putting politics ahead of the nation’s security in his Budget. John Healey did not outline how Britain would spend 3% of its GDP on defence.

Former soldier and Conservative veterans minister, Tobias Ellwood, said conventional warfare is no longer prevalent and Russia would seek to do damage from afar. “We saw that with the cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover, the mapping of undersea cables,” he added. “These are all the things that are very likely to happen in the next few years. So this is why we must really need to understand how conflict is changing. This idea that Russia’s going to attack by landing their forces on a Scottish island or off Dover — that’s not the way warfare is today.”

Drones could be launched off a Russian shadow fleet trawler, Mr Ellwood suggested. Undersea cables could also be clipped, and there could be another large-scale cyber attack. The veteran is also concerned about the possibility the UK’s gas supplies could be disrupted. “We just have nine days’ gas supplies,” he cautioned. “These are the sort of clever things that, I’m afraid, Russia and other countries are getting very good at,” Mr Ellwood said, “and we are very, very open and very, very, very prone to be disrupted from.”

He added: “It’s espionage activities. It’s the massive disinformation campaign, which already exists. It’s assassinations, this is what they do well in Russia, when somebody goes against the system, swims against the tide.

“And so the Russian mindset is very, very simple, and they will target Britain, our homeland directly, to sow societal discord, to disrupt our economy, and to challenge our politics, to get us arguing with each other. That’s what they want. It’s not about securing any land, any territory, in the old traditional sense. That’s not what modern warfare is about.”