Like Ukraine, Britain is unprepared for Putin’s hybrid warfare

Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine is growing, and as Owen Matthews writes in this week’s Spectator, there is a looming threat of war breaking out between the two countries. But the Kerch Strait confrontation also poses a question for Britain: how well equipped are we to deal with this new style of warfare invented by Putin and being adapted by China, North Korea and Iran?

In the run up to the Great War, Britain’s foreign secretary, Edward Grey, offered a memorable comment on the changing nature of conflict: “Instead of a few hundreds of thousands of men meeting each other in war, millions would now meet, and modern weapons would multiply manifold the power of destruction,” Grey wrote. His point was that this would be war fought on mass rather than manoeuvre – and it’s equally true today.

Even the Russia-Ukraine war has an impact in Britain: if you are one of the many private pension holders in UK whose funds were invested in EN+, controlled by oligarch Oleg Deripaska, you will have been hurt by sanctions on him causing a huge share price drop.