Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Hello and welcome to the Battleground Ukraine's Big Interview with me, Saul David, and Patrick Bishop. Today we're talking to the military analyst and author Frank Ledwidge. Frank is a former barrister and military intelligence officer whose books include Losing Small Wars, Aerial Warfare, and Rebel Law.
He lectures on combat ethics to the Advanced Command and Staff Course at the UK Staff College at Shrivenham. Frank, welcome to the podcast. Thanks. Great to be here, Saul. Now, you recently accompanied a high-level delegation to Ukraine that included a former British general, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, the former head, that is, and, as you put it in your message to us, other UK, US, and European political and think tank types.
Can you tell me what this was all about, the purpose of the delegation, who you met and where you went? Yes, there were about 20 of us from across Europe and the US. From the US, we've got people like Jan Brzezinski, Ivo Dalda. We had a former president of Croatia, Kalinda Graba, and various other similar types. And Yodhang are unlike myself.
and the other folk you mentioned. And the Ukrainians do quite a... This was organised by a think tank called Globsec, which...
which is, it's not very well known here. I've just come back from their flagship conference where I was accompanied, if you like, by Macron and van der Leyen and such. It's an absolutely vital and by far the most important think tank in Central and Eastern Europe. Much bigger, I think, than anything we've got here, but not terribly well known. So they have an office in Kiev.
led by the excellent Yulia Osmolovskaya, who convened this trip. Now, the Ukrainians do this quite a bit. You occasionally see journalists and other types, I guess, like ourselves going on these trips.
And you get introductions to senior officials and the obvious info messages put out. But it's really informative. What you get is you don't just get the line. You really get, I have the impression we were given a fairly blunt and honest assessment of where the Ukrainians see things. So we saw folks such as the Deputy Minister of Defence, a couple of very senior ministers, Head of Intelligence Services,
senior military officers, and various other people, in my case, that I knew. I spent a couple of months last year in Ukraine, so that was a nice opportunity to link up with those again. And so the upshot was a real insight into how things are now and how things have moved on over the last year or so.
And at the end, myself and a couple of the team had the privilege of visiting a couple of installations, but notably one of the prisoner of war camps that the Ukrainians run, which was absolutely fascinating. You say how things have moved on, Frank, over the last decade.
14, 15 months. Can you give us some idea of what direction they are seeing things as going in? Presumably, there was quite a lot of talk about the upcoming military operation that we keep going on about. Can you give us any idea of how they see things playing out?
Yeah, this, needless to say, came up a lot. So this was just coming up on four weeks ago now. And even then, there was a sense of immediacy, which I don't know if it's fading now, but conversations that last week, again, by this sort of Globsec forum, we had one of the ministers of defence saying it was imminent, I can say it's in days.
And this was the message we got a month ago. And one had the impression that they were really waiting for conditions to be right, that sort of confluence of logistics, operational preparedness. And I think something which is sometimes mentioned, I think you guys have mentioned it, the weather as well.
because as well as I'll bet an idea of the importance of having good ground upon which to advance. So I got the impression both three or four weeks ago and last week, over the last week, that shaping has started. But the overall message really was, look, we don't see this as one bound. With one bound, we're free and it'll all be over by Christmas. And if you've received that impression, they say, to paraphrase,
then that's not how we see it. We see this as a series of campaigns and operations. Obviously, we'd like it over by the end of the year, but we don't necessarily see it that way. You aren't to expect decision this year. And what we're looking for, and I asked one, actually, Deputy Defence Minister Litvinenko, who said, I asked him, well, what would be the one message that you would have, actually, in a forum like this? And he said, the one message I would have is sustainability.
We see this as the start of a longer process and we need your help not only now, but going forward because he didn't say this, but I'm glossing and you know full well the details. You know, we just haven't got anything like the amount of kit that we're going to need to pursue this going forward. And of course, to maintain our security going in the medium term.
Frank, you mentioned prisoners of war. We've discussed this issue on the podcast a number of times. We've had many questions from listeners for obvious reasons. Can you give us a little bit of an insight into the way the Ukrainians are treating their Russian prisoners of war and possibly a little bit of how much contrast there is between the way the Russians are treating Ukrainians?
Yes, it might be worthwhile just giving just a 30 seconds background. Last year I was in Ukraine for a couple of months on a UK government project, one of the functions of which is to help the Ukrainians set up and maintain security.
something called the National Information Bureau. Now, for people like me, you'll often hear phrases like, well, I learned as much from them as they learned from me. That's entirely inaccurate. In this case, I learned everything from them and was able to contribute very little in terms of advice, because I don't think we have much upon which to advise the Ukrainians in setting up their prisoner of war system. Now, just again, by way of explanation, I think, I think there's one thing that's going to
get you in contemporary warfare in the ethical information space. It's treatment of detainees and prisons of war. And we've seen that, of course, ourselves in over the last 20 years of our misbegotten wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. And I think it was maybe General Petraeus who said that the greatest strategic defeat we had in Iraq was
was Abu Ghraib. It doesn't really matter who said that. It's certainly the case. And of course, for us, we have Bahamusa, Blackman and his killing of a detainee. Putting aside the rights and wrongs of all those, that's what's going to affect the impression, I think, the image you have throughout the world. And therefore, it's strategically essential that you get this right. And the Ukrainians appreciated that right from the start.
They began building the prisoner of war mechanism, if you like, right at the start. They brought in NGOs to run the information system, which allows and is mandated by the Geneva Conventions.
to transfer information between Russia, the Red Cross, Ukraine, and back the other way. And on the Ukrainian side, they built this in about a month. They're still developing it. They still need a lot of help in terms of financial support and infrastructural support. But in terms of personnel and the kind of work they do, it's absolutely exemplary.
So that's at the sort of far end of the prisoner of war process where the prisoners have been taken, passed forward, and now their relatives need to be informed so that communications can be developed. And that cuts both ways because the National Information Bureau, what that has to do, of whatever nation it is, is pass on information, of course, to relatives.
So in the Ukrainian case, information about to the extent they had it, Ukrainian prisoners in Russian detention on the Russian side, to the extent they do it the other way around. So it's a complex, extremely difficult, it's a system that's really difficult to build up, but they worked absolutely brilliantly to get this together with outstanding people. So that's one element of it. But of course, nearer the front, you have where the prisoners are taken,
You really do need to ensure that treatment is compliant with the Geneva Conventions and indeed laws and customs of war from the start. And as we've seen, whilst there's certainly some credible allegations of Ukrainian abuses, they pale into insignificance compared with how the Russians treat their detainees.
So let me give you an example. Last July, July, I think most Ukrainians will tell you, July the 26th, the Russians blew up a facility in a place called Olenivka, which I think has been mentioned on this podcast before, where at least 50 prisoners of war were killed. A credible allegation is that
They wired the building with explosives deliberately to kill these people who were prisoners from Mariupol. And on that day, there was also a report came out, I think later that day, and you will remember this, of a Russian soldier, if you can call him that, castrating and murdering a Ukrainian prisoner, a non-competent soldier. And
And I was in the Prisoner of War Coordination Centre, which I'll come to in a moment, on the day that both of these elements of news had been reported. You can imagine, you know, if you're a mother coming in to find out how your son is just because you've been told by Ukrainian authorities he's been taken prisoner. And on that day, you've heard these atrocities or seen these atrocities happen. The job of the counsellors there is not easy.
So they've constructed this absolutely superb system of not only dealing with prisoners themselves, but handling the information flow backwards and forwards to relatives. And of course, also trying to deal with the psychological elements. And all of this is under the umbrella of something called the Prisoner of War Coordination Centre, which runs the whole system once you're in it. Tell us about what you actually saw in the camp then, Frank. Right.
Right. So on an afternoon's visit to one of the Ukrainian facilities in Western Ukraine, I think it's near Lviv, it's been reported in the US-UN reports. And I've seen a lot of prisons in the past. You know, I was a barrister for some years and criminal barristers get to see a lot of that here.
But I'd also spent many years in Eastern Europe, in the Balkans, in detention facilities, monitoring and what have you. So what one saw was a well run... Look, we were there for two and a half hours. It was an organized visit. So there are limits, the detail you can get hold of there. And we didn't speak to anyone and really prepared for that. It was more of a more in the nature of a sort of observation visit, I guess.
But what appeared to be there was a well-run, professionally run, that's really important, it was run by professional prison officers. We call it an open prison, but it's a prison where there was plenty of facilities for sport, and we saw people playing football. There was a lot going on in terms of daily work that prisoners are sometimes required to do. Conditions looked good to me, but again, you know, there are limits to what we could and didn't see. But the overall impression really was one of professionalism, quiet professionalism.
And yeah, it was a very, very positive experience, I think. And of course, one thing I haven't mentioned is that the Russians and Ukrainians very regularly engage in prisoner exchanges. So I would imagine that the prisoners I saw will soon be going back and exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners.
And these exchanges happen quite regularly and mediated by the Red Cross. But to answer your question directly, Patrick, yeah, the pressure was really, really very positive, particularly with the staff who clearly knew what they were doing, that it was their job and they seemed to do it rather well. And I would also add one thing, by the way, the UN reports on that prison, whilst they mentioned one or two issues late last year, particularly concerning clothing issues,
were generally positive. And I think mirror pretty much what I've just said. As a former military intelligence officer, Frank, you might have been interested, amused, impressed, I don't know, be interested to hear your take on this about the I Want to Live campaign that at least we've been told or we're led to believe has been set up by Ukrainian military intelligence. And this, of course, is encouraging.
Russian soldiers to save their lives by handing themselves in to the Ukrainians and not continuing the fight. And this seems to have been pretty successful. Did you hear anything about this when you were over there? I heard about it, much as you did.
And they're very proud of it. And you occasionally hear stories about people being convinced to come over. And it's, I guess, I mean, it's just a testimony to the skills, really, and creativity of the Ukrainians as a whole, but more specifically, the military intelligence department, the GUR. And by the way, just on this, I did have the privilege of visiting one of their headquarters and meeting a very senior officer there. And
twice it was point this is the gur the equivalent of far superior equivalent to the russian gru and uh it was regularly pointed out to me that uh our symbol is an owl and why is our symbol an owl and the answer is the owl is the only thing that eats bats and what's the symbol of the gru a bat so you occasionally see these owls around but um yeah it was um all of this is is part of the um
GUR's really creative approach to operations, epitomized, of course, a year or so ago by the destruction of operational level of the Moskva. And the very senior officer I saw at the headquarters had as his sort of talk piece in his office, a huge model of the Moskva. It's the first thing you see when you went in. Well, there was lots of really fascinating information, detail and opinion there from Frank. Do join us in the second half to hear what he says next.
Welcome back to Battleground Ukraine's big interview. Today, we're talking to the military analyst and author Frank Ledwidge, and this is what he told us. Frank, what do you make of this sort of change of tack, if you like, with these cross-border raids? You've got shelling along the border, you've got drone attacks on Moscow, etc. What do you read into that? How do you interpret that? Same as you, I think, Patrick, in that it seems to me to be part of shaping for the first phase of this counter-offensive campaign. Interestingly, I was talking to a Russian journalist
just yesterday on the plane back from this Globset conference in Bratislava. Really interesting young man.
who gave some context to these, particularly to the cross-border raid into Belgorod last week. And clearly, from my perspective and from anybody's, this is sponsored by, whilst they haven't admitted it, I think there's an implicit understanding this was what they were doing, sponsored by GUR or one of their offshoots. But I think there's a bit of a danger in this, and there's two aspects to this. The first is presentational. So
These are regarded by many people, these Legion of Liberty, and I can't remember the name of the other one, as off-the-wall nutters, as fascists and ne'er-do-wells by, I think it's fair to say, both sides.
And there's a presentational danger in using them as your proxy. But all that notwithstanding, what it did was demonstrate, didn't it, the fragility of what passes for Russia's defences in that region. If a bunch of thugs in Humvees can penetrate
30 or 40 kilometers into your state territory, you clearly have a problem in defending your borders and with no clarity on how they're expelled either. So there's a message there. And as for the drone attacks, I've got a perhaps different view from many on this. And if this is Ukraine who's doing it, it seems to me that it is. The danger is the day that one of these drones smashes into a flat,
and kills a little girl, as Russian drones regularly do, only yesterday, I think, then that won't read well and would not feed well into their narrative. These are risky operations with a clear reward, but very definite risk. What do you think?
I'm with you on that, Frank. I think that it is a high risk strategy. And as I said in today's podcast, you know, what happens when a block of flats gets hit and a hospital is entirely possible, which could completely, not completely change, but certainly reset the narrative and perhaps take
Ukraine off the high ground, at least temporarily, more of the high ground. Yeah. Can we come back to the high ground in a second? I just want to make a quick observation that relates to the fact that there's another incursion, I think began yesterday, yesterday evening, and is ongoing at the moment. And again, some of the latest reports, unverified, it's true, are suggesting that Russia is panicking slightly by moving two tank brigades, armored brigades, I'm not
quite sure where this information is coming from. But anyway, that's the suggestion from Ukraine to combat this incursion. So it is having a real operational value, or it seems to be, if that's true. So that's the counterpoint. But I absolutely take your point and Patrick's. Frank, it doesn't look good, really, the optics of some of these incursions. But can we talk more widely about the morality of this war? Because I think it is something that you have particular expertise on.
with your interesting military and legal background and the fact that you lecture in combat ethics to the advanced command and staff course at Shrivenham. So can we just ask you about the sort of morality of war? I know it's a difficult thing for people to get their heads around, but I think it's
quite clear that on the one hand, you've got Russian forces really behaving without any kind of moral or legal framework, and the Ukrainians seemingly doing the opposite. Is that a fair characterisation, Frank? Yes, in a word, I think that's right. And there are good reasons that US historians will appreciate that command. It's no coincidence, or it's clear that if you have soldiery out of control, as we've had occasionally,
then you have a personal responsibility of the individuals. There is also, as everyone knows, a command element to this, a very strong command element. And we do see that, I think, here in our own experience, lamentably,
with respect to the Blackman case, for example, or indeed any of the Western substantiated allegations of Western atrocities, which I mentioned before. Difficulty is, of course, holding those people to account. It's one thing convicting Sergeant Blackman. It's another one looking at the circumstances that were created
that allowed or put him in a situation where he felt he had to do that in that one case. Same applies, by the way, to the Ben Robert Smith case that came out, judgment for which came out yesterday. We hear a lot about personal responsibility of those involved, such as him, but less about the command responsibility of those who, I would suggest, may have known what was going on or at least understood that it might be. Same applies to our own special forces, which are
now under investigation by Mr Justice Haddon Cave. But back to the point. So it's clear in the Russian case that the atrocities that have been ascribed rightly to them have been caused or allowed by command as part of a far greater operational approach. Whereas the Ukrainians have not committed such atrocities for the reason, I think, that they appreciate that whilst ethics are
aren't going to win you a conflict, they can lose it very quickly. As we saw, we've got the scars on our back for that. That's my friend, Colonel Oliver Lee, who resigned from the Royal Marines because the Blackman case told me, he said, we've got the scars from our back from these atrocities or these crimes. And if you multiply that up by about a thousand in the Russian case,
you can see the damage that it's doing to their strategic story. It's a massive topic, but yeah, I'm a bit of an advocate actually for command responsibility at all levels. It's very easy to, it is genuinely very easy or comparatively easy to convict a corporal or a sergeant of a war crime, less so a colonel or a general.
Frank, I don't know if you know that I wrote the story of the or the history of the Salon and Mutiny in the Second World War. And there's a there's a great quote in that book, which really sums up what you're saying. I think it's Monty, but it might be General Adam, who was Adjutant General at the time. And he said that when soldiers died.
get out of hand like this, and they refuse their duty. It's because an officer's failed in his. He directly put the responsibility further up the chain of command, as you were doing. And it's interesting. So you need to set the example from the very top. We're talking about the top of the Russian and Ukrainian army, and then it needs to filter all the way down. Yeah, I mean, you know better than I do that, you know, in that case, and all
Almost all others. There's no special virtue in British or Americans or Germans or Russians or Ukrainians. As Ben Ferencz, the legendary prosecutor at Nuremberg who died just earlier this year said when challenged about dealing with monsters, he said, these men aren't monsters. He was talking actually about people you and I might consider to be monsters who are the Einsatzgruppen commanders. These were men who believed that they were doing the right thing.
And went on in that vein. And that's a man who knew what he talked about. And the only control over those impulses, over individual impulses, can only be exercised by an ethical framework that's coherent and accepted, but also that's enforced. And there's an understanding, I think, and this is what I say to the guys at Shrivenham, that it's very easy and possible to step outside that framework.
But as long as you have the moral compass to step back onto track, you're likely to be okay. But that moral compass has to exist in the first place. Now, it's set by command. It's set by understanding in the British case that the king now, in his commission to all officers and warrant officers, requires you to comply and enforce the laws and customs of war. So it's an order from your sovereign, aside from any ethical rules.
imperative outlined in the Geneva Conventions or simply the laws and customs of war because people can get out of hand and
Whilst they should be held to account, so should those who allow or commission them to do so. And in the Russian case, there are plenty of examples of that. There are so many examples of where the narrative that you think you're following suddenly switches course. I'm thinking of the Horodors-Yuglan massacres in June 1944, where this was an enormous justified outrage, the killing of 600 innocents. And it turned out that among the perpetrators were a lot of
Frenchmen had been from Alsace had been pressed into the SS Das Reich division, which does make the point that there was no such thing as intrinsic virtue in a soldier. I think that is well worth making. To switch subjects, if you don't mind, Frank, did you form any
idea of the degree of solidarity there is inside the leadership, the political and military leadership in Ukraine, about the direction of the war. We were speculating in this morning's podcast that
Perhaps there's a bit of divergence developing there between, to put it very simply and crudely, a sort of hardline, harderline faction, perhaps led by Kirill Budanov, just basing this on the kind of rhetoric that's coming out from people around him.
and perhaps a more kind of nuanced, more kind of, you know, a message that's friendlier, nicer sounding to Western ears coming from the very top from President Zelensky. Did you get any, it's very hard even for a journalist in place to get a real feel for the power dynamics of the leadership. Did you pick anything up? Not generally, but I would say about Budanov, if you read Ukrainian press nowadays, he's very prominent. My feeling is he's being
perhaps being built up for some sort of political role of trying to, let's say, his acolytes are trying to do that, medium to long term. And he, of course, you'll know a bit about his background. He's a very distinguished background as a special forces operator in the 2014, 15, 16 period as a commander of any swashbuckling raids into Crimea. So he's got a, he has that, I think in certain quarters, extremely popular. And I guess that's the sort of irregular, I won't go beyond, this is as far as I know, but
I guess in any military organization, you have the regulars and the irregulars. And he's definitely one of the irregulars, if you see what I mean. Whereas Zalazny and Sirski, who themselves, I think, have different approaches, are very much Green Army. And we'll see how...
that shows out when, as the Ukrainians would say, the victory comes. That's all I can say, really. I don't know any more than that. Talking of the victory, Frank, it's fascinating what you were saying about the Ukrainians' own assessment that they could be in it for a while. It's not going to be one offensive. It's going to be repeated operations that are finally going to crack this open. But
Let's assume that at some stage we do get close to a negotiated peace or a peace that is forced on the Russians. Are we clearly in a place where the spilling of so much innocent Ukrainian blood has made it almost impossible politically for the Ukrainian leadership to accept anything less than the complete recovery of all their territory, including Crimea, do you think? Fantastic question, Saul. It is incredible, almost incredible, literally unbelievable,
the degree to which there is ferocious anger in even the most apparently peace-loving Ukrainians. So I'll give you an example and then answer your question. So I was having coffee in Kiev last year, someone does, and talking to a friend of mine who was quite prominent in a peace, let's say a peacemaking NGO with loads of experience down in Donetsk and Luhansk in the U.S.,
14 to the last eight years, nine years. And she's a very calm and pleasant person, highly intelligent and guarded, I would say. But we fell to talking about history and actually the Volhynia massacres as it happens. And she switched, it's so striking, she switched to saying, you know one thing she said, Frank, we'll never forgive them as long as I live, any of them.
We'll hate them always, my generation, for what they did to us. There will be no forgiveness from us. Now, you could imagine that from a soldier or perhaps someone like ourselves, but this was literally the last person I would ever imagine hearing that kind of talk from. I've heard it since.
And I think overall in Ukraine, you know, almost everybody by now, literally, I think everybody has lost somebody or knows somebody who's been lost. So back in the Afghan wars, you know, in the military, if you're in an infantry battalion, you know somebody who's been killed, you know them personally, or you were trained with them or what have you, or indeed in the army as a whole, I think it's fair to say.
In Ukraine, everybody will know somebody. They were at school with someone in the same tower block, someone down the corridor, a friend, a cousin, a brother. And I think all of these are individuals. And so the government has promised everybody, you're fighting for the return of all of your homeland, and we will regain it all. And that's still the rhetoric, and I understand it's rightly so.
which will make it, as you hint there, extremely difficult, I think, politically, if there's anything less than that on offer. That's a political reality that I think isn't ignored, but it has to be understood. It'll be extremely politically difficult for any government in Ukraine to settle for anything less than the recovery of every square foot of legal Ukrainian territory. That would be what I would say, which makes the discussions in the chancellories of Europe and North America about Ukraine
compromising on Crimea are somewhat academic at the moment, let's say.
Well, there was so much to talk about there, wasn't there, Saul? I'll kick off with the central point, I think, really, which is the way that the counteroffensive was described to him by people who ought to know as a series of operations, not as one big, as he said, with one bound, Ukraine is free, but a number of different operations that may last till the end of the year.
And the key element in them all being sustainability. They've got what they launched, they've got to be able to keep going, essentially. And that, of course, is very dependent on Western support. Yeah, it was fascinating here about this think tank that he's been involved with, that he went out with, GlobSec, and the kind of access that he had, Patrick. I mean, this is why he's able to give us such extraordinary insight into what
going on there. And, you know, the whole ethical aspect of it, he lectures in combat ethics. He's a former military intelligence officer himself. And therefore, to hear him talking about the
determination of the Ukrainians from the word go to fight an ethical war, not just for reasons of, you know, of being good to the Russians per se, but because if you can't win a conflict with ethics, you can certainly lose it with bad ethics. And Frank himself has written about the ethical drawbacks or missteps that the British army has got involved in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And this is absolutely something he knows about.
Yeah, and then citing what David Petraeus, the US general, said about the Abu Ghraib torture center in Iraq, he described that as the greatest strategic defeat of the war. You were talking about the optics, Saul. They are vitally important in this conflict, aren't they? He was also referencing the
A fascinating story of the Australian VC, Ben Robert Smith, who sued a newspaper for allegations that he'd been involved in atrocities in Afghanistan. And he's just lost his case. And that's highlighted, you know, that the Western forces are by no means have clean hands in these wars. And that does huge damage to their country.
claim to be fighting any kind of just war. He agreed with you, Patrick, interestingly, that these operations using Russian partisans to invade bits of Russia, you know, could be double edged. They could actually come back to hurt the Ukrainians because it's not a good look, particularly if civilians get killed in these operations. And one's ongoing as we speak at the moment, and it looks like civilian buildings have been hit. So,
He might be right in one sense and you might be right in one sense. But the other side of the coin is how much disruption this is doing to the Russian military. And as I mentioned to Frank during our chats, it looks like the Russians are actually moving some of their forces to counteract these invasions. So, you know, it can have an operational value as well as potentially a PR disadvantage.
Yeah, he also spoke very forcefully, didn't he, about the way that Ukrainian public opinion is holding up. He spoke about the ferocious anger that he heard from a peaceable woman friend of his, saying that at the end of this war, there'll be no forgiveness. My generation will go on hating the Russians. So this...
Apparent determination to keep hold of the moral high ground as much as that's possible goes hand in hand with this absolute determination not to forgive and forget.
Yeah, it's chilling and disturbing, but also understandable, unfortunately. All of this, of course, as Frank confirmed, is going to make it harder to get any kind of negotiated settlement. It's either you get all of Ukrainian territory back or the public will not forgive you. In other words, it's becoming politically almost impossible to hold any other position than that. And that, of course, is almost certainly going to prolong the war.
Well, that's enough from us from The Big Interview. Do join us on Friday when we'll be having another in-depth look into all the week's events. Goodbye.