Several correspondents have written to demand the imposition of a ‘no-fly zone’ over Ukraine as we did to prevent Saddam terrorizing the Kurds in Iraq.
The difference is simple: Saddam did not have Putin’s capability to press the nuclear button and vaporise us in nanoseconds.
A NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine would require us to shoot down Russian aircraft that violated it: we would be at war with Russia, with all the consequences that Putin has indicated will follow.
One of the military mysteries of the Russian invasion, thus far at least, has been the very limited use they have made of their huge superiority of their air force in both numbers and technical sophistication. Suggestions to explain this range from a shortage of precision weapons (after a prolonged campaign in Syria), to lack of training in the complex field of mounting a large-scale operation co-ordinated with ground forces. In this respect operations in Syria have been confined to single aircraft or pairs of them, which is how they are being deployed in Ukraine. They have yet to mount operations to take and maintain control of the skies.
Similarly, the use of their superior numbers in tanks and other ‘state-of-the- art’ armoured vehicles has also been unimpressive. They have been snarled-up in huge traffic jams on roads, bogged down in mud when off-road, breaking down and running out of fuel. It is tempting to conclude that they just aren’t particularly good.
In the nineteen seventies our intelligence was that we faced the USSR’s highly trained and motivated military machine and that we had no hope of halting their advance -that’s why NATO would not subscribe to the undertaking of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons: We believed that our only chance of holding the advance was to use our battlefield nuclear capability.
When the USSR disintegrated internally, the shortcomings of our intelligence was exposed: their military was nothing like as formidable as we had been led to believe.
Perhaps that is still true of the Russian Bear.
Sir Desmond Swayne TD
