Frontline special - security writer and Times columnist Edward Lucas
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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 with me, Philip Ingram. Now today we're privileged to be talking to Edward Lucas. Now Edward is a writer and consultant specialising in European and transatlantic security, if I've got it right. Your expertise also includes energy, cyber security, espionage, we have a connection there, information warfare, Russian and foreign security policy. You're a former editor at The Economist and a senior fellow at the Centre for European Policy Analysis.

And Edward, you're an old friend of Frontline. Welcome back. Nice to be here. So today or tomorrow, depending on where you get your figures from, is likely to be the day when Russia is approaching or gets over its milestone of one million casualties. That's either dead or severely wounded.

after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And I was reading a piece yesterday which suggested that those that are severely wounded, the majority of them are going to die within a few days anyway because of the poor medical care. The symbolism of one million is not lost on those of us who've been in conflict and those of us who live in free and open societies.

That's only the Russian casualties. The Ukrainian casualties are on top of that. Do you think that one million milestone will be lost on Vladimir Putin? Sadly, I don't think he's particularly keeping count and he wouldn't mind if it was another 100 or 200 or 300 or 400,000 higher. As you'll know, Philip, from your time in the army,

the most precious thing for us is our soldiers' lives. That's just not the way that the Russian army, the Soviet army or since 1991 the Russian army again, treats people. There's a Russian slang word for soldiers which is logs and I think that's quite revealing.

And so it's just a different mentality. And although the human cost is horrible, the financial benefits to the bereaved families are quite substantial. And there's an awful lot of people in Russia. And I think that the danger we have in the West is of wishful thinking, where we think we would find this intolerable. Therefore, Putin must find it intolerable. Therefore, he's going to change course.

I think actually from Putin's point of view, the war, although it hasn't gone as expected, has worked quite well. He's shown that nuclear blackmail works. He's largely split the Atlantic alliance. He's shown that we get tired, bored and scared quicker than we said we were going to.

And he is on the front foot, militarily, diplomatically and in other senses as well. Well, in other senses, I think we'll talk about Donald Trump a little bit more in a second. But one of the things that Donald Trump's been saying when he talks about ceasefires and peace agreements and everything else is he talks about the casualties. What do you think he's likely to say or do whenever this one million figures announced happens?

And, you know, whilst Western intelligence has at times disagreed with the and these numbers have come from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, I should have said. But Western intelligence has sometimes disagreed with Ukrainian Ministry of Defense assessments. But actually, over recent months, in fact, over the past year or so, increasingly, it's come together and supported the numbers that are coming out there. The number is huge. What do you think Trump's going to say?

Of course, there's another deadline, which is not reaching the one million. It's Trump's 14 days. And he said within 14 days, he wanted Putin to come to the table with some serious questions.

for peace. And that has happened. And I think what we really see is that Trump is either unwilling or incapable of putting actual pressure on Putin. He's quite capable of saying he wants the fighting to stop. He comes out with these slightly sort of pathetic remarks about how the bloodshed is terrible and he's a president who wants peace and so on.

But you only really get peace when there is a political geometry behind a conflict that means that both sides stop fighting. And for Russia, that would mean that Russia would have to think that the conflict's going seriously in the wrong direction and they better stop fighting before it gets any worse. That can only come really.

through Ukrainian pressure on the battlefield and massive economic and other pressure in the rest of the world. Both of those rely on the United States. And in both cases, the United States is not doing it. So I'm afraid that we are in a very difficult position now with Trump. And he's, I think, exposed now his position.

to intervene and we have to pick up the consequences. Do you think Trump's preparing to walk away? Do you think it's falling into the all too difficult bracket for him and he's going to go, I've got other things to deal with? Ukraine, you're on your own, Europe sort of might? I think that Trump's attention span is quite short and we've seen a dizzying array of foreign policy priorities from the Gaza Riviera through to Greenland via Panama, France,

Canada, and many other things. And there'll probably be more to come. The Ukraine, I think, is not a huge priority for him. He promised to get it fixed quickly. That hasn't worked. He's willing to blame both sides in a sort of rather petulant way. But I do think that there's an underlying priority for him, which he wants to make friends with Putin.

And he's going to do that over the heads of the Ukrainians and over the heads of the Europeans. And that's one of the very few consistent points

in his foreign policy. And that's very worrying. Well, if you look at the Russian economy and you compare it to the European economy, where he doesn't want to be friends with the EU, and you look at other economies, why do you think it is Trump is fixated on making friends with Putin and doing business deals? It doesn't seem logical if you just look at the straight numbers on paper. You're absolutely right. The Russian economy is about the size of Italy.

And what it produces in the form of energy is actually pretty much a competitor to the United States rather than a complement. It's not as if Russia was the source of fantastic high-tech goodies that would help make the American economy competitive, only they could get rid of sanctions, not a bit of it. The relaxing sanctions would increase Russian oil production and that would not be good.

I think great for the American oil and gas industry, among other things. But anyway, that's beside the point. Trump has this idea, sort of what I call fantasy Russia. He loves the idea of a really strong leader who locks up his opponents, who has really seriously big palaces, not like that pokey little White House.

and who attract sort of worldwide respect, particularly having come from a position where the country was flat on its back. So Putin has, in Trump's eyes, made Russia great again, rather as Trump would like to make America great again. And there's a kind of naive enthusiasm there, which is immune to facts. Actually, the key thing for the United States is to make friends with Europe or to repair its relationship with Europe because the United States and Europe together

is a billion people and you can add in some other allies and you quite quickly get up to one and a half or even two billion. And that is a serious counterweight to China. And if you were looking at this in a sort of from a geostrategic or geoeconomic point of view, you would say, let the rich democracies stick together tightly and they can dictate

pretty good negotiating terms to the rest of the world. But that's not the way Trump sees it. Trump sees his allies as rivals and his enemies as potential friends. And that is a very difficult position for us. Well, they do say keep your friends close and keep your enemies closer. But, you know, it seems as if what you're saying is it's all down to an envy that Putin can continue to rule like a dictator for as long as he wants. That would be quite worrying if Trump had the same ideas.

Yes, I think there's a strange tension between the sort of fantasy Russia that lives in President Trump's head and the bleakly realistic view of the West, which is in Putin's head. And although Putin is in some ways quite uninformed about things and has a sort of conspiratorial view of the world, he does see Russia.

pretty clearly I think where the West's weaknesses are and he sees a pretty clear way of exploiting them and he's pretty systematic about doing it and so we are you know on the one side you have this sort of Disneyfied version of geopolitics in the White House on the other hand you have an extremely bleak and pragmatic one in the shrewd brain of brains of the Kremlin

Now, getting back into Ukraine, you know, every time we think Ukraine's on the back foot and, you know,

Global commentators seem to focus on the movement of the front line. The Russians have advanced 10 metres, therefore they must be winning. But actually, we look at what Ukraine's doing with Operation Spider's Web, that very audacious drone attack against Russian strategic bomber airfields. Then there was another one that didn't quite get the same headlines, which used drones to attack a...

coming out of grain trucks on a train that was carrying lots of military equipment that destroyed about a regiment's worth of equipment. Then we saw the Kirch Bridge being attacked again. And we're getting daily reports of Ukraine successfully attacking Russian defense industries and elsewhere. They seem to have backed off a little bit from the oil refineries that they were successfully attacking.

Do you think this is making a big difference? And do you think it's this operational level of war that is going to dictate the outcome at the end of the day? I think it makes a big difference. I'd be careful about saying it makes a decisive difference. I think that Russia...

as we said at the beginning, takes a different attitude to casualties, whether they're human or physical. It's a very big place. There's massive redundancy and you lose a railway bridge here and a regiment's worth of equipment there and an oil refinery somewhere else. And these are losses that to a Western country would be devastating, would have people thinking, why are we doing this? And we need to rethink. And in Russia, it's just sucked up, I'm afraid.

I think that the key variable in this is not the way the front line moves. It's the quantity and quality of Ukrainian air defences. And here we have an extremely worrying and significant move that Trump is apparently diverting

vital components that the Ukrainians need for their air defences to other destinations. He's actually mocked the Ukrainians publicly for their request to buy, not for donations, to buy Patriots. And so we have a serious problem looming in the Ukrainian ability to defend their cities from these Russian attacks, which are growing.

The Russians are producing very large numbers of drones which can swamp or saturate Ukrainian air defenses, leaving the way clear for the smaller number they have. There's also significant numbers of ballistic missiles and drones.

That is a strategic vulnerability for Ukraine. And it's going to be very difficult, although not impossible, very difficult for the Europeans to fill the gap left by the United States. Talking to Europeans and filling that gap, you had Mark Rutter, the NATO Secretary General in London yesterday, made a very robust statement.

speech talking about how the new nato target for um member countries would be five percent of gdp spent on defense split three and a half percent directly on defense and one and a half percent on other stuff not really defined um

This leaves the UK in a difficult position where the Strategic Defence Review has got an aspiration to get to 3% sometime maybe in the next parliament if the conditions are right. And Rachel Reeves today is putting out her spending review and likely to be giving billions more to defence.

Do you think that the UK's leading role in NATO and its bridge to the US and US's expected leadership from the UK is in jeopardy if we stick to 3% and don't go to at least a public statement of three and a half with an aim to get to five? I think that the UK's leading role in NATO exists mainly in our own heads and not in the heads of our allies. Unfortunately, we've

have systematically failed to deliver to NATO what we've promised over a period of many years. And although we have some extremely impressive niche capabilities, we have some very good senior officers, we have fantastic special forces, we have the nuclear deterrent and some other high-end, high-tech things. The

disappointment in NATO over the last 10-15 years towards Britain is palpable. We've promised to field a warfighting division. We can't. We are struggling to maintain 1,000 troops in Estonia. Our role in the Joint Expeditionary Force, which is not exactly NATO but includes our most important NATO allies, is again conspicuous by its absence and we're supposed to lead that.

So I think it's going to require very serious recapitalization of our armed forces and some tough choices on priorities to regain that role in NATO, which we aspire to and to some extent may even believe we still have. I think also the huge question marks over the role of the United States in NATO means that

If we are supposed to be the Trump whisperers who can deliver Trump and American combat power in Europe, well, we're going to need to prove we can do that because what we hear at the moment in Europe is a vast sucking sound.

of the Americans dismantling and degrading their capabilities. They're not going to leave Europe, but the willingness to fight for Europe and the perception in Russian minds that Americans are going to fight for Europe is diminishing. And so that also affects British prestige. And conversely, I think countries like France are becoming much more important. Yeah.

Well, mind you, having been in many NATO force generation meetings in the past, looking at different operations, the UK is in a difficult position at the moment, but there aren't any other European countries that can match or meet up to the commitments that they've put into NATO as well. Germany is in a shocking position. France is good, but tends to keep things very national. The Italians punch above their weight and they're not even hitting 2% of GDP at the moment.

If you look at the number of brigades in Europe, the majority of combat-ready brigades are in Ukraine because they're Ukrainian. Of the remaining 80-odd, roughly half would be American, and of the remaining 40 or so, quite a lot are not really combat-ready. And of the ones that are, I think eight are in Finland and two are in Estonia.

So you can scrape together bits and pieces from other European countries. But we claim to be really good at this, and we're not. I mean, I don't think anyone's going to hold the... If the Luxembourgs or the Belgians aren't able to contribute very substantially, well, they never claimed they could. But what is so painful about Britain is this vast mismatch between our storied history and rather bombastic claims to be the reference army and to have...

to be a sort of full spectrum military power, when actually everybody knows we don't have the spare parts. We have crippling manpower shortages. Our ammunition stockpiles are very thin. And most of all, perhaps most importantly, we lack the enablers to do that job. And of course, the counterweight to that is if we're not really pulling our weight in Europe, it makes it an even bigger bet that we're relying on our allies to defend us.

And so the lack of air defences in this country should be a national emergency. We're assuming in the event of Russian missile strikes on this country, that all the countries in between will be expending their resources to shoot down cruise missiles and Russian jets and do all the other things that are necessary, meaning the fact we have one or two seaworthy ships with perhaps

a day or so's worth of the Aster air defence system to defend ourselves. That won't matter because we've got the Allies. But actually, that's an increasingly thinly stretched assumption, I would say. Your politics is changing across Europe as well. And we're seeing conflicts...

We saw Viktor Orban almost do a flip-flop and turn around and say that the only way to deal with Putin is through strength. We're hearing encouraging noises from the new German Chancellor Merz, but France is in a difficult position because Macron has got an unstable government and arguably France has always been unstable and the rest of European countries.

Mainland European nations are just keeping their heads down a lot. What's your view on where Europe's going with regard to defence and in particular its ability to continue to support Ukraine if America withdraws? Well, I think that the key thing is to keep the money going to Ukraine because we have this slightly outdated idea that Ukraine is a military supplicant.

Actually, it's not. The Ukrainian military industrial complex is fantastically good at innovation and increasingly good at production and is not running at full power because it doesn't have the money. So the most important thing for Europeans to do is to keep writing checks, obviously, with some scrutiny and oversight.

Actually, I would say place orders in Ukraine with Ukrainian military companies, which gives them a revenue stream. And maybe say, you know, we'll pay for 100 and you get 50 and we get 50. But the balance of expertise and sort of production capability has shifted very sharply in the course of the war. I think that the idea of being sort of one Europe is important.

a bit misleading. You have huge variations in terms of size of countries and in terms of threat awareness and capability.

But I think that there's a kind of large, stable, rich lump of basically well-run, politically stable, economic, political and increasingly military power in Northern Europe. And I'm sure that all our viewers and listeners here, absolute experts, I'm not sure any of them would be able to tell us the countries that make up the coalitions in the Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Latvian and Lithuanian parliaments.

As a matter of fact, I do know, and I can tell you there's some pretty rapey parties in some of these countries, but it doesn't really matter. Those countries are basically stable. And even Poland, which is highly politically polarized, there's a strong consensus on that. So it's not really the same problem you've got as in, say, in France, where you have quite serious tensions between the government and President Macron.

Also worth remembering, the Nordic Eight, the five Nordics and the three Baltics, plus Poland, those nine countries, have a bigger GDP than Russia. And Russia, with its GDP, has to do everything. They just have to defend themselves, throw in maybe the Dutch or the Brits, and you've got a kind of superpower there.

And the key point about this is that we are not in difficulty because we have Russian bombs falling on our cities or tanks trapping down our streets or our decision makers being kidnapped and taken off to the gulag.

That's the experience that these European countries had when they were trying to resist Russia. Our problem is purely about decision making power, about our willingness to take risks, make sacrifices, stick to deadlines, make a decision and implement it. And the only thing that's stopping us doing that is ourselves. So we should be both cross about the plight we're in and pretty nervous because we left it very late.

But fundamentally, we can do this. Those North European countries plus Britain are plenty able, as the Americans say, to cook with what they've got in the kitchen. Well, yes. And down to political decision making, you look at

doing comparisons. It's always difficult with defence budgets to do comparisons, but your UK defence budget is larger than Poland's. Yes, we've got a nuclear deterrent that's expensive, but we have got no tracked artillery pieces at all. We gave our last batteries worth of AS-90 to Ukraine. Poland has just bought a thousand of them.

And Poland has just bought a thousand tanks. Now they're butting up against the threat and you need to generate land combat power and they don't need to power project across the rest of the world. But we're converting 143 Challenger 2 to Challenger 3.

And our budget's bigger. Are there lessons that we can learn from the likes of the Poles, the Nordic countries and all the rest of it to work out how we can more better procure kit for ourselves to make ourselves more secure, to make Europe more secure, to make NATO more secure and to be able to support the Ukrainians? And of course, you talked to the Ukrainian Defence Industrial Base.

The Germans are exploiting that by German companies going in and setting up factories inside Ukraine, recognizing the innovation and the potential that's there and how that can then be turned around to support German national interests.

We don't seem to be doing the same. Yes, well, I think it's quite interesting. I think we've just cancelled a drone program which costs some vast amount of money and produce no usable drones at all. And I think there's two sort of broad questions here. One is, are we buying the right stuff? And the second is, are we buying it in the right way?

And I suspect the answer to those, both of those in Britain is no. I'm not sure, given what we know from Ukraine, that going for lots of heavy armour is necessarily the war of the future. And I think that the Strategic Defence Review has quite rightly pointed the need to be, you know, to sort of try and future-proof the stuff we're buying, not get tied into what may prove to be legacy systems.

The thing I'm working on particularly is defence procurement finance, because we have an extremely slow and difficult process where it takes ages to place the orders. And so the result of this splurge that we have at the moment is not...

a lot more bang for the buck or a lot more bang and a lot more buck. It's a lot more buck and not much bang. Instead, you've got the share price of the defence contractors goes shooting up, as do the prices and the lead times. Now, I'm obviously delighted for Britain's prosperity, if BAE Systems or Babcock or whoever is raking it in. But actually, that's not the point of the defence budget. It's not the point of Germany's defence budget to send Rheumatil's share price doubling or tripling.

So what we need is to, and this is what I'm personally working on, is a defence bank.

which will apply basic banking principles of project finance to defence orders, lumping them together. First thing, so you have several countries trying to buy the same thing, you place one order and get a better deal. Also posing conditionality, so interoperability, easily available spare parts, no artificial obsolescence, open data architecture, all the things that soldiers love and defence contractors hate.

and the bank will be able to say to the contractors, sorry, we know you don't like this, but we are a $250 billion bank, so please don't get in our way. Also, a liability transfer clause in the contract, so that before the contract is signed, but at the point at which it's a binding agreement, the defence contractor can start investing in extra capacity.

because if you wait until every I is dotted and every T is crossed, you're wasting many more months. And then finally, providing loan finance for defence tech, because one of the great paradoxes is that the most innovative companies we have are the ones that can't get the finance because they're using equity capital, which is very expensive, whereas in any other industry, they'd be borrowing from banks.

So I think that there's a lot of unblocking the plumbing we can do on the finance side, which will speed things up a lot. Coming back to NATO and UK and defence, does Putin see us as weak and do you think he's going to test us? And

Do you think we're actually at war with Russia in what we describe as this grey zone, the cyber, the information operations, the physical attacks that are going in through sabotage and other things across Europe? Well, if it's not war, it feels pretty much like it. And we are in a state of intense conflict with both kinetic and non-kinetic elements.

with a very wide variance in the response. So I've just been in Vilnius and I have to say I feel safer in Vilnius than I do in London. I don't think in Vilnius you have these sort of mysterious energy system and transport system and other retail system collapses and attacks that seem to be almost daily feature of life in this country.

I think that Russia is testing us all the time. And so far, the result of their test is that some countries stand up to them very well and other countries don't. And I think that I was there for Secretary General Rutter's speech at Chatham House on Monday.

And although I applaud his idea to increase our air defences by fivefold and to spend a lot of money on defence, where I would question him was when he said, we've got five years. I don't think we've got five years. I think we've got five months left.

And why was Gabrielis Landsbergis, the former Lithuanian foreign minister, said, why would Putin wait till we're ready? It's clear that Europe's on a trajectory that within 10 years, give or take a couple of years, Europe will be an enormous lump of political and military and economic power. And Russia will be a much smaller one, even in its alliance with China.

Russia will be on the back foot. So why would Putin wait till we're ready? I think it's much more likely that he tries to test Article 5 quite soon and does so in a way where perceptions vary and the country's concerned or country concerned will say, wow, we've just been hit. We want Article 5.

And the Americans will say, we don't want a Euro-Europe, or don't escalate. And a lot of European countries will say, well, hang on, can't we find some way out of this? And the military response to this attack, say it's in the Baltics, would be to turn Kaliningrad into Mariupol. Absolutely flatten Kaliningrad from the get-go to show no air defence systems, no naval, no nothing there. And I don't think European countries have got the appetite for that. Most of the Lithuanians would do it. Poles might want to do it. I can't see the Germans wanting to do it.

And that is the weak spot. It's in our decision making. And I think that Putin is going to poke his screwdriver in there pretty hard and start wiggling. So with Putin poking his screwdriver and we'll see what the wiggles do. Edward, thank you for talking to us from frontline. That has been absolutely fascinating. And I look forward to chatting again. Thanks so much, Philip.

Did you know that foreign investors are quietly funding lawsuits in American courts through a practice called third-party litigation funding? Shadowy overseas funders are paying to sue American companies in our courts, and they don't pay a dime in U.S. taxes if there is an award or settlement. They profit tax-free from our legal system, while U.S. companies are tied up in court and American families pay the price to the tune of $5,000 a year.

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