As the Ukraine war passes its thousandth day of hostilities with alarming escalations in missile deployment and the rhetoric of changed nuclear doctrine, UK Column hosts an expert debate between three retired senior military officers on the state of the battlefield and the prospects for a just peace.
Maj-Gen Gagan Deep Bakshi (a previous UK Column guest), formerly of the Indian Directorate of General Military Operations, takes a position sympathetic to the Russian war aims, while Lt-Col Glen Grant, a Senior Fellow of the UK-based Institute for Statecraft and a resident of Latvia, is a pronounced advocate of the Ukrainian military effort. Maj-Gen Clive ("Chip") Chapman CB BA, the last Chief of Staff of the Army in Northern Ireland and a former Head of Counter-Terrorism and UK Operations at the Ministry of Defence, takes a more dispassionate stance, though emphatically rejecting at the end of the discussion the proposition by GD Bakshi that a just peace could have been obtained in spring 2022 had it not been for British pressure on the Ukrainian authorities.
All three participants have notable counter-terrorism experience (in Jammu and Kashmir and in Northern Ireland respectively) and have, after active service, pursued broad interests in the study and training of warfare, its strategy and its history. UK Column viewers will be particularly interested to hear Glen Grant, who is involved with the Integrity Initiative, set out the reasons for his conviction that Britain and the West have been at war with Russia for over twenty years and that not resisting Russian expansionism would mean the demise of Europe as we know it. Grant, whose specialism in the Army was artillery, is the most senior British military figure to have travelled and taught as extensively in Eastern Europe as he has.
The debate consists of three rounds of long responses from each participant, covering current battlefield analysis, the prospects of short-term (even nuclear) escalation and finally the means and ethics of conflict resolution. While all three men are in substantial agreement early on that Ukraine is slowly losing the war and that it is unlikely that either side would wish to deploy nuclear weapons for the foreseeable future, disagreement becomes vehement as discussion turns to the justness of the war and the degree to which Ukraine is economically and psychologically capable of continuing the fight.