Frontline special - Military analyst and former NATO planner, Philip Ingram
24:31 Share

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients.

Sophie Bambridge grows quality potatoes for McDonald's Iconic Fries in Norfolk. I think McDonald's are one of the biggest supporters of British farming. They have a real commitment to British potatoes. The Sustainable Fries Fund is a collaborative investment by McCain and McDonald's.

to help us understand and try different growing techniques for potatoes so that we can understand what we can do to help reduce our impact on the environment but still produce a good quality potato. It helps enable us to try things without having the risk and cost of potentially it going wrong. The support from McCain and McDonald's is really useful to us. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's Plan for Change on the McDonald's website.

Where'd you get those shoes? Easy. They're from DSW because DSW has the exact right shoes for whatever you're into right now. You know, like the sneakers that make office hours feel like happy hour, the boots that turn grocery aisles into runways and all the styles that show off the many sides of you from daydreamer to multitasker and everything in between because you do it all in really great shoes.

Find a shoe for every you at your DSW store or DSW.com.

Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Alex Dibble and I executive produce the podcast. The World in 10 is partnered with Frontline, the interview series from Times Radio, available on YouTube, with expert analysis of the world's conflicts. At the weekend, we bring you Frontline interviews in full. Here's one from this week. I hope you find it interesting.

Hello and welcome to Frontline for Times Radio. I'm James Hansen and today we're talking about the latest on the war in Ukraine and I'm delighted to be joined again by a regular guest here on Frontline, former Colonel Philip Ingram, MBE, former NATO planner and military intelligence officer. Philip, it's always a pleasure. Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year to you. Welcome back to Frontline. Let's look ahead to 2025. There is this sense that this will be a pivotal year for the war in Ukraine. Some people even speculate it could be the year we have a ceasefire

in Ukraine. What are your expectations for the year ahead? It's going to be a very complex year and everyone is basing their assessments on Donald Trump saying that he's going to stop the war within 24 hours of him being sworn in. So by the 21st of January, we should have our ceasefire. The reality is no, I think it's completely different.

And we're seeing at the moment Donald Trump's team trying to set the conditions with both the Russians, Ukrainians and elsewhere and see what wiggle room they've got. And we're seeing playback coming from Vladimir Putin and from President Zelensky. So we're getting an idea of where negotiations may be and what some of the issues that might be there. But I think they're hugely more complex than Trump's team have realised yet.

And again, I think part of what he was doing in his campaigning was...

aiming his comments at his domestic audience and then going, once I'm elected, once I'm in, well, I'm president. So if it changes, it changes. We'll come back to what Trump may do regarding Ukraine in a moment. But just on how Putin ended 2024, you know, you can make the argument the past 12 months have been good for Putin in the sense that, you know, he got through his re-election, quote unquote, in Ukraine.

in the spring. And Russia has been making incremental territorial gains in the east of Ukraine. But particularly over the course of December, first of all, we saw the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, his ally there. Then we saw the assassination of General Kirillov, one of his key allies in Moscow, not far at all from the Kremlin.

And then we've also seen questions about Russia around, for example, the downing of the Azerbaijan Airlines flights on Christmas Day and a lot of scrutiny on Russia there. Is Putin in a far weaker position as we enter January than he was when he entered December?

He is after the dunning of the airliner. But I think in December he was in a very weak position. And the trouble is, from a commentator's perspective, a lot of people assess the success or otherwise in the conflict on how much the front line has moved.

And 2024 was an interesting year. He managed to blunt the Ukrainian counteroffensive that had started in 2023. He managed to push forward in the east and was pushing the Ukrainians back at a time when politically or geopolitically, the Americans were withholding $60 billion worth of potential aid and the Ukrainians were suffering and, you know,

Putin got some momentum. Then all of a sudden the Ukrainians managed to, and this is just frontline stuff, get some of the momentum back again and get the initiative back whenever they had their invasion into the Kursk region. But then that hasn't really gone anywhere and they haven't exploited that. But we're looking at things from a tactical perspective.

This conflict isn't going to be solved on who wins from the tactical side of things. That will set some of the conditions, but it's going to be resolved on who wins at the operational level in military planning terms and then at the strategic level. The strategic level is when the international community comes together and we get the negotiations and we get the pressure. Trump putting the pressure on Putin and Zelensky at the moment is that strategic level pressure.

But at the operational level, Russia's ability and Ukraine's ability to continue to prosecute operations and to inform and influence what's going on at that strategic level is down to the impact on economics, the impact on personnel, the impact on your defence industrial base and everything else. And if we look at Russia from an economic perspective,

it is beginning to fall apart. It's hurting Russia enormously. And that's because Zelensky, the Ukrainians have been attacking Russian oil infrastructure, their gas infrastructure, their railway lines, their defence manufacturing capability, airfields inside Russia. They've been taking the fight into Russia. Kursk helped with that. But the Russian, the manpower cost of,

for the Russians over 2024. UK Defence Intelligence has agreed with Ukraine and put the loss of manpower for every day over 2024, loss of Russian manpower in the 1,400 to 1,600 personnel

a day bracket, that's unsustainable. And we can see that with Putin having to bring in North Korean troops, increases recruiting in Africa, increase trying to get some recruiting from Yemen, and then defense industrial base ammunition from North Korea. He's still relying on Iran to provide capability.

This does not bode well for Putin's position to continue to prosecute his tactical battle, and he's losing at the operational level. And we know for years Putin has essentially outsourced economic policy to the governor of the central bank in Russia, who by all accounts is increasingly raising concerns about the long-term cost of this war. So the economics will be fascinating in the year ahead.

We have also seen in recent weeks Finland, for example, calling out Russia, trying to disrupt some of the underwater sea cables in the Baltic Sea, which is all part of Putin, I suppose, trying to lay the groundwork for what may be negotiations and try and bend the political climate in his favour by trying to wearing down...

public appetite in Europe for supporting Ukraine. Yeah, and the interesting thing is with the cables, he's used, in one case, Chinese registered shipping. And therefore, there's this link between Putin and Xi Jinping and trying to get this

this axis of evil, as we keep describing it, between Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. And then economically bringing in the wider BRICS community who are trying to rival the EU and the United States' dominance in economics around the world. It's fascinating to see how that's playing out. Everyone's trying to position themselves. Putin is trying to position himself politically

but from a threat perspective. He's using this attack on our under-seeking infrastructure

as a threat to the West to say, you know, I can really disrupt your lives in a way that you haven't seen beforehand. Of course, we had the, you know, back in '22, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline issue. Still haven't definitively said who was responsible behind that. We have the Ukrainians just turn off the gas transit through, of Russian gas going through Ukraine out into the rest of Europe, which will hurt a number of different countries that are on the place.

Interestingly, and this doesn't come out in the commentary, Ukraine will lose tens of millions of dollars in transit fees because they were making money out of it. It does hurt Ukraine, yeah. So it'll hurt Ukraine a little bit, but it'll hurt Russia even more. And it's this economic impact on Russia's ability to prosecute the war. When Donald Trump gets in, I think...

The biggest tool that he will have to influence and get both sides to the negotiating table will be an economic one. If he can get the global oil price to drop dramatically, that will cause a run on the Russian ruble and the Russian economy. And we may find that the head of the Russian Central Bank and others take up window cleaning jobs. We're having this conversation at the start of January. Obviously, Trump is inaugurated in about three weeks' time.

I suppose the thing you've got to say about Trump is part of his playbook is to be unpredictable. You know, he senses an opportunity in both the Kremlin and Kiev, having no real sense of definitively what he's going to do. Yes, he's made these comments in the past, which I think far too much has been made of the whole weekend war in 24 hours. As you said, he can't.

But we don't know what he's really going to do. We can speculate, but we don't fundamentally know what approach he's going to take. But see, I don't think he knows exactly what he's going to take. And therefore what he's doing is, I remember during the first Gulf War, General Rupert Smith commanded the British forces. And he was talking about intelligence and if there's difficulty in catching it. He said it's like watching, it's like having a still mill pond. And if there's no ripples on it and you can't see anything...

Take a rock, throw it in and watch the ripples.

So Donald Trump's team have been throwing rocks into the mill ponds in Vladimir Putin's mill pond and into President Zelensky's mill pond and into the NATO mill pond and elsewhere and watching the ripples. That will inform where they're going to go from a policy perspective. And the reactions out of different people have been interesting. The pebble that was thrown into Putin's mill pond was a phone call allegedly between Trump and Putin, which Putin's team has denied happening.

And Peskov came out and said it didn't happen. That's Putin's spokesperson. Why would they deny that that phone call took place? Because surely that would be a routine phone call. A potential routine phone call. And given the speculation that Trump and Putin were close and could negotiate something, the only reason why the denial would happen is Putin didn't get out of it what he was expecting to get out of it.

And that then turns into the reaction that happened afterwards, where immediately in Russian national television, they broadcast naked pictures of Melania Trump for a period of time. That's good old Russian intelligence officers threatening behaviour. And Putin's a good old-fashioned Russian intelligence officer. High risk, though. I mean, not many people would take kindly to...

to that and Donald Trump, you would have thought, who doesn't want to appear to be cowed, doesn't want to appear to be Putin's poodle, which is an allegation that has been levelled at him in the past. You know, it is interesting whether Putin is wise enough to realise or more to the point whether he can swallow his pride and realise that if he's going to get a deal out of this that he's comfortable with,

he's got to be prepared almost in Donald Trump's eyes to be the loser in the deal because Trump prides himself on the art of the deal, on getting a good deal, and whether Putin, you know, provided he can sell it internally as some kind of victory for Russia...

he's got to be prepared to allow Donald Trump to sell it to the American people as a victory for Trump and some kind of defeat for Russia. Yeah, very much so. And the good old Russian threat was saying, if this is what I'm willing to release, what else have I got that I might put out about you in a public domain? So it's positioning yourselves. Zelensky in positioning himself came in with his plan for victory, the compromises, and we saw the bit that he put out where he suggested potentially gullibility

temporarily giving up some of the territory that Russia's captured to take that back through political and diplomatic negotiations at some stage in the future, provided Ukraine is given NATO membership and the security guarantees that go along with that.

I think history has shown that if Ukraine tried to rely on other written security guarantees from America, from Russia, from the United Kingdom and other countries, it's not necessarily a very reliable thing. So we've got, on one hand, Putin going,

I disagree with what you've said. I'm not going to give anything. And in fact, Putin, we know, will want more. He wants the whole of the Donbass. We've got Zelensky turning around saying, I'll negotiate. Here's my points. I think Zelensky is playing Trump properly and Putin is being typical Putin. Where Trump's going to go, it's going to be interesting. I think he may come down and help Zelensky in a way that we were not expecting.

We were having this conversation on yesterday's episode of Frontline with the defence journalist Robert Fox about, you know, whether Trump could be persuaded, if he can be convinced that the deal, as it were, that America has currently with Ukraine becomes more favourable to the US, and particularly with regards to Europe and its own funding of its defence. Because, you know, you can understand Donald Trump's point that he would say, look...

In the grand scheme of things, the US doesn't stand to gain that much whether Ukraine stands or falls because it's a faraway country of which they know little, to use that phrase. Whereas for Europe, it is far more existential. If Ukraine falls, well, where next? You can understand. And yet, in terms of who is bankrolling military aid for Ukraine, it is largely America currently, and not just in terms of Ukraine, but Europe's defence really ever since the end of the Second World War, you could argue. If there was a shift in that...

that if Trump could be persuaded that the Europeans for example were going to take their defence commitments more seriously increase their military aid to Ukraine increase their own defence budget could Trump still provide military aid to Ukraine but maybe a lower percentage and sell that to the American people as look I've got us a better deal there's so much in that that's very complex indeed but there's an easy one word answer yes

Now, unpicking the complexity, you know, Trump will not just see Ukraine as a country that's in Europe that's got no impact on the United States and all the rest of it because, you know, Ukraine is one of the breadbaskets of the world and if...

The Ukraine economy and its farming capability goes completely then. A lot of the poorer countries around in Africa and elsewhere will start to suffer even more economically. That'll have an impact on the U.S.'s global security policies and potentially take up more U.S. capability, not necessarily military capability, but capability in trying to deal with it and more U.S. tax dollars. The war in Ukraine is actually good for U.S.

because this $60 billion and each of the big billion-dollar packages is not providing a big check to Zelensky to go into his bank account to buy, as is coming out in Russian disinformation, more Rolls Royces to come into the place. It's being spent in U.S. defense industrial base funds

manufacturing the rockets, the missiles, the shells, the ammunition, the vehicles. And that value of kit is being sent to Ukraine. And therefore, it's creating jobs inside the United States, it's creating jobs in supporting industries, the defence industries and service industries, it's putting more money into workers' pockets, it's creating more tax income going into the US Treasury. It's the same in the UK defence industry, the German defence industry and elsewhere. So,

And the final bit that's coming into this, I think that'll inform Trump's decision-making, is we have three major conflicts brewing around the world. We've got Russia-Ukraine conflict,

We've got the Middle East, and that is by no means anywhere near coming to stability. And the potential impact of that growing and growing as it has done through 2024, if that grows further in 2025, the impact that that would have on global oil supplies, global trade and everything else, it would directly impact the United States. That's a big one. And then we've got Southeast Asia. We've got growing tensions across Southeast Asia.

The United States has pivoted to Southeast Asia and the Pacific in particular a lot because they can see the longer term implication of that on the United States, the United States economy. And Trump doesn't have a good relationship or didn't have beforehand with Xi Jinping. I think it's right and proper that Trump's coming in and going, hang on, you know, EU, most of you are members of NATO. You are quite a valuable power block that's there.

You take greater responsibility for looking after what's going on in Europe. That's your back door. We'll continue to support, but we'll then focus on Southeast Asia and let's both of us come together and try and help sort the Middle East out. And that's sharing things out in an equitable way. And Trump is a businessman. He'll approach things from a business perspective. And we're already seeing...

comments coming out of NATO and out of certain member countries relating to that sort of thing being discussed in the background. The new sec-gen of NATO turned around and talked about 3% or 5% GDP as a new NATO goal. And that came out in the press. That will only have happened if someone's been trying to influence them.

because there are a lot of NATO members who are not even paying their 2% at the moment. Yes. I mean, Mark Russo is really interesting on this, but of course Mark Russo is only one voice in this and you also need the leaders of the big European countries, France, Germany and the UK to follow suit. And we can't ignore the political realities of those countries. Germany have elections coming up in a month or so's time. We know there has been the rise of, for example, parties like the AFD who are very sceptical about support for Ukraine and some parties on the far left as well.

In France, they've got a parliamentary deadlock that shows no sign of going anywhere. Paralyzed politics in France. Exactly. And then in the UK, OK, Keir Starmer's Labour government would say they're very strongly supportive of Kiev, but I think it's worth noting that Keir Starmer hasn't been to Kiev since he was elected Prime Minister. That seems a little bit strange. OK, that's only of symbolic importance, but sometimes that does say something. And there is a sense among some people in Ukraine that actually the Labour government...

isn't instinctively as committed to the defence of Ukraine as its Conservative predecessor was? Well, from a UK perspective, Conservative predecessor turned around and made bold political decisions, even if other alliance members were against those political decisions. So, for example, the deployment of main battle tanks. We only gave Ukraine 15 main battle tanks.

That's not the point. Those 15 million battle tanks aren't going to make a huge tactical difference. It broke the impasse where countries didn't want to give million battle tanks because they thought there would be escalation. UK has always led in that. I would have thought with the Storm Shadow Scalp Missile issue, the long-range missiles and giving Ukraine authorisation to use those, if it had been the previous Conservative government...

And in particular, I'd say if it was Boris Johnson that was doing it, because he took bold steps. He'd have turned around and said, yes, use it, just go ahead, and would have broken that political impasse. Keir Starmer seems much more reticent. And the other thing that worries me slightly is we're hearing the defence review, but we're hearing that the defence review has been told to find a path to 2.5% of GDP. Yes.

A path doesn't mean... doesn't give a date for 2.5%. And actually, if Trump's going to come in and put pressure on for 3% or 5%, then that's going to throw all the assumptions of the Defence Review out. And I've heard...

It's anecdotally from people involved in the review that the first draft of it has been sent back to look at it again because it was recommending too much. And UK Defence is in such an appalling position. And this isn't down to the current government. The last government did nothing to invest in defence. But those senior defence leaders have said,

their forces to be completely hollowed out. They don't seem to have a vision. And unless that's corrected in the defence review, and I'm not getting the indication that it's going to be, then we're not hiding to nothing. And that's just going to upset our relationship, political relationship with Trump. Yeah.

Do you think there's a chance, Philip, that Ukraine may not be, in the grand scheme of things, that high on Donald Trump's agenda? You know, he will have domestic concerns. He'll want to sort out the situation on the border. He'll want to take a number of economic measures, including possibly passing fresh tax cuts. And then internationally, he may be more concerned about the situation in the Middle East. Mm-hmm.

And also keeping an eye on the trade relationship with China and potential threats to Taiwan. And of course, Ukraine is incredibly important. We all agree on that. But in Donald Trump's mind, do you think it may be lower down than sometimes we fully appreciate? That's a very difficult one. I think Donald Trump will want to try and kick any...

final finality off into the long grass because it is not good whatever solution he comes up with. So if he forces Ukraine by not providing further military support and Europe and the rest of NATO doesn't step up to provide that delta that would be created, then, you

Putin would see it as a victory if he can keep any territory. Now, if Putin sees it as a victory if he can keep any territory, then Xi Jinping, who is putting a lot of pressure on Taiwan and across the Paracel and Spratly Islands and the South and East China Seas, he's going to look at Taiwan and go, actually, next year, or sorry, not next year, this year is year three of Putin's special military operation.

Xi Jinping's going to go, well, actually, if I only have to get the wrath of the international community for three years, and actually I've got greater economic power than Russia and Ukraine, so I can probably get that down to 18 months if I physically take Taiwan.

he'd do it. And I think he's sitting waiting for that. And therefore, if he sees the potential for victory, we then get a Southeast Asian pivot, we're then all in trouble because there's a real danger that all of them are just going to merge together. You made a great point earlier about the fact that actually the money that is being spent on military aid for Ukraine is being spent in the US. And that has a positive impact on the US economy.

But why is it that many Republicans, people like J.D. Vance, people like Donald Trump Jr., clearly don't see it that way and see it as a cost for the American people? Because we've got politics by soundbite, quite simply. And the soundbites that were being put out around support to Ukraine were...

during the election. So it aimed at an internal audience. And if you look at some of the more substantive comments that came in, you put J.D. Vance to one side, where people were saying, were criticising US support of Ukraine. Actually, when you get into the detail of what they're criticising, they're criticising US support of Ukraine because there was no plan from the Democrats for how this was going to then end Ukraine.

And therefore, it was an implied criticism of the Democrats' policy and Joe Biden's policy with regard to Ukraine. When Trump's team comes in, they can turn around and say, oh, we've got our policy right. We know how we're going to end this. And therefore, we haven't broken any election promises by continuing our support. We've now got a plan and we criticise them for the plan. You get so many...

politicians in the United States, a very small percentage of the American population have got passports and know where other countries are around the world. And I would suspect very few Americans could actually pinpoint Ukraine on a map. And therefore, when you get comments coming out of them about US taxpayers' dollars being spent in these foreign countries, they don't quite understand how it's being paid.

Just finally, Philip, how do you rate the chances of there being some kind of ceasefire agreement in Ukraine this year? I think there's potential for a ceasefire, a short-term ceasefire in Ukraine.

But I'll put that at about 50-50, because as soon as there is a ceasefire, the Russians are going to use that time to try and lick their wounds and rebuild a capability as fast as they possibly can. And if they're allowed to do that, they'll just come back again whenever the ceasefire falls apart. Zelensky will try and do the same, and they'll just enhance each other's... Each will enhance their own defences. That then means that when it restarts, because it will restart, it's going to be even more bloody for both sides.

Philip Ingram, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us again on Frontline. Thank you. Thank you for watching today's episode of Frontline. For early access to our videos, member-only Q&As and live streams, then sign up for a membership via the link in the description. And for the latest news and breaking stories, listen to Times Radio and follow us at thetimes.com. We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from.

McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Mike Allwood is a dairy farmer from Cheshire who supplies organic milk to McDonald's in the UK for its teas, coffees and porridge through Arla.

We're involved in a network which has been set up by Arla to look at the possibilities for farming regeneratively. One of the things we're doing here is moving our cattle and giving them a fresh piece of grass every day to help regenerate the soil. We're very lucky that we've had a long-term relationship with McDonald's and I think often people don't realise how seriously McDonald's take their relationships with farmers.

Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website.

Where'd you get those shoes? Easy. They're from DSW because DSW has the exact right shoes for whatever you're into right now. You know, like the sneakers that make office hours feel like happy hour, the boots that turn grocery aisles into runways and all the styles that show off the many sides of you from daydreamer to multitasker and everything in between because you do it all in really great shoes.

Find a shoe for every you at your DSW store or DSW.com.