UDSS Co-Chairman General Sir Richard Barrons: "Ukraine War Could Last For 'Decades'

General Sir Richard Barrons spoke to RFE/RL's Georgian Service about the constraints on both sides of Russia's war on Ukraine, the importance of industrial transformation in a drawn-out conflict, and offered a bleak forecast for the course of the war.

RFE/RL: What have we learned after one year of warfare in Ukraine? And where are we now?

Richard Barrons: There are some lessons at a very high level, particularly for Europe. And the first of those is that we haven't somehow grown out of fighting in a way that some people wanted to believe at the end of the Cold War in 1990. And we're being reminded by the war in Ukraine that war is part of the human existence.

And even if you would prefer it was not so, there is no guaranteed immunity from it. And as [Prussian] General von Clausewitz says, "You may not choose war, but war can choose you." And when it occurs, it is the same brutal, feral, dangerous, usually disappointing business it has been for millennia. And yet, at least once a generation, we feel the need to reacquaint ourselves with that thought.

And the second thing it has reminded us [of] is that big wars -- and the war in Ukraine is a big war -- are fought, won, and lost by civilians, as the war becomes not something that is just conducted by the professional, regular armed forces in the way Western armies principally took part in Iraq and Afghanistan and Balkan interventions in the 1990s.

These big wars, where the survival of the state is at stake, which is the case in Ukraine, are fought by citizens who are mobilized and industry that is mobilized. And you can see that actually now, on both sides, in this war in Ukraine, that it's being fought by Ukrainian citizens who a year ago, in many cases less than a year ago, were teachers, nurses, mechanics, whatever; and increasingly, on the Russian side, the manpower is being mobilized from civil society. So again, people who were not professional soldiers.

RFE/RL: And if the tactics of the private Wagner mercenary group are employed, people who were not professional soldiers, but professional criminals.

Barrons: Yes. And that is a feature that is important to the Russian effort -- that there is a mixture of the Russian armed forces, increasingly mobilized civilians, and the Wagner Group, which has this extraordinary role in this war of a private enterprise mobilizing prisoners and mercenaries to fight alongside the Russian armed forces. And indeed, now they are locked in a competition about who is succeeding and who is failing, and actually who is to blame for failing. And you don't see that on the Ukrainian side.

And I think the third thing we're being reacquainted with is there is no logical rule that says these wars either have to be definitively successful for one or other party, or quick. And what we're essentially seeing playing out in Ukraine is not just a big war but a long war where, despite the aspirations of both sides and despite everyone's preference for this to be done and over, the dynamics of it suggest, first of all, a long fight because neither side has won, neither side has lost, neither side is anywhere close to giving up.

So, there's a lot of fighting to come at the cost of terrible destruction. But the most likely outcome is one of exhaustion and stalemate followed by profound disagreement for as long as you can imagine. And we may be staring at an outcome where you can't count [on] the war as being over for decades.

RFE/RL: That's an even bleaker prediction than the earlier one of yours, when you said that this war might last until 2025. And if, indeed, we need to be bracing ourselves for such a long war, let me ask you whose side is time on strategically?

Barrons: The question of who prevails is one of choice. From the Western perspective, it has always been absolutely clear that Ukraine can be supported to achieve an outcome that Ukraine is content with, provided the West mobilizes a relatively small fraction of its money and its industry.

Because Ukraine wins, or prevails, or at least it doesn't lose, so long as it is connected to money, at about $6 billion a month, and [the] Western defense industry to supply the weapons and ammunition and other equipment and stores that Ukraine needs to equip a mobilized society with. And if the West continues to choose to provide that support -- and let's be absolutely clear, that support is a very small fraction of the economic power of the West, so it is a matter of choice -- yes, there's a cost. But it's a very small percentage of the economic wealth of the West. If the West does that and Ukraine retains the will to fight, it can keep fighting.

From the Russian perspective, well, Russia is mobilizing its society more and more and reenergizing its defense industry, which employs around 2 million people. So, it's a very big enterprise. And Russia believes that it has the money, the will, and the social control, and the industry to outlast the West's will to continue.

And no one really knows the outcome of that. The one thing that would be a game changer now, in all sorts of ways, given that both sides are short of equipment, because of losses, and both sides are very short of ammunition, particularly artillery ammunition, because of the rate of use and the time it will take to ramp up production -- so a lag of a year or two is going to apply to both the way the West supports Ukraine and the way Russia drives up its own industry.

The one thing that would change things in the short term would be China and/or India connecting the Russian Armed Forces to their stocks of ammunition -- the things that already exist. Because that would energize the Russian military with ammunition that the West simply can't match in the time that we're talking about. And that is wholly dangerous, because were that to occur, it takes you to a much higher prospect of the West having to engage in the fighting, because reenergized Russian forces start to break through in a way that would be very disconcerting.

And it also, of course, cements this idea that the war in Ukraine, which is a war between Russia and Ukraine, is actually a proxy conflict between liberal democracy in the West and autocratic capitalism, led by Russia and China but actually led by China, increasingly followed by Russia. And were that to be become amplified in Ukraine, then I don't see any way in which that makes our world safer, better, or more prosperous.

RFE/RL: There are two ifs there: You said, "if the West is willing to" continue its support, and in Russia's case, "if China or India are willing to contribute." How big are those ifs?

Barrons: I think right now for the West, the "if" is a very small one. Because one of the cardinal features of U.S.-led, Western policy around the war has been that the West remain united. And that has played out, I think, way better than many people expected.

The test for the West now is about sustaining the cost of a new industrial policy which builds ammunition and weapons; and more than that, the cost of sustaining the energy subsidies that have come with the energy price shock from the war, which dwarfs the cost of military aid. And I think this is going to be calibrated by two things.

One is I think there will be increasingly a transition from the burden of this war, which is currently very heavily falling to the U.S. I think it's likely more of that burden will fall on Europe, partly because of the uncertainty around U.S. politics, and partly because of the economic disparity -- that the U.S. is paying a very high percentage of the effort…. And I certainly think the cost of reconstruction, when the shooting stops, will fall more to Europe than to anybody else.

But to come back to the point I made: If you look at the economic power of Europe, the cost of the war in Ukraine is very, very modest. It's just that it's coming at a time when people are worried about the cost-of-living crisis and all the other things at the margins of their lives.

So, I think the "if" for Europe is quite small, provided Europe's political leaders stay the course. And one of the interesting things of this war is that it's causing political leaders, like the leaders of Germany, France, and the U.K., to elevate their sights from where they habitually are, which are politicians focused on the next election and the margin that takes it there and the politicians who, whether they like it or not, are essentially wartime leaders. They have to think at the level of statesmen who ask their societies to do things that their societies don't necessarily want to do or aren't attracted to. And this is a really interesting test….

The "if" from the Russian side, I think, is different for two reasons. One is that Russia is a monolithic state where there really isn't any sign of a significant challenge to President [Vladimir] Putin and his regime despite the clear strategic- and tactical-level blundering that has gone around this war, despite the shock to the Russian economy.

The fact is that many, many Russians still support the objectives of this war -- they support the narrative that President Putin subscribes to -- and there's no point us wailing at this, if you're sitting in the West.

The fact is there are two irreconcilable narratives about this war in Ukraine and both sides subscribe strongly to the narrative that has been set out for them. So, I don't see there's a challenge, really, to President Putin. And President Putin believes that Russia and Russians can manage far greater hardship than Western Europeans are inclined to, so they will "out-tough" it and they can direct more economic effort to energize the Russian defense industry….

When the "if" extends to China and India, I think what we have seen is very little interest from India, but also very little interest from India on siding with the West. A lot of its military equipment comes from Russia; they have longstanding ties with Russia. India is resolutely nonaligned and does not feel the need to take sides in this war; it is benefiting from a flow of cheaper energy from Russia. So, India has kept out of it and shows no sign of that changing and, you know, India is very good at defining what India's interests are.

From a China perspective, I think the position still remains the case that China sees no advantage in this war deepening to the point where the West identifies China as siding with Russia in fighting it, because of the enormous consequences that would have for Chinese economic interests; for the way that it would amplify the war from a regional conflict to a global confrontation; and I think China -- which, of course, is driven by China's interests -- doesn't see any value in how war in Ukraine could become something that deeply damaged China's economic, political, and military interests in the war.

Now that doesn't mean that China hasn't tried to do small things. China has supplied some technology to Russia. It probably thought it wouldn't be detected; it was detected. And it's one of the features of this war that it's pretty transparent, in terms of what goes on. That is not the same as China unlocking its stock of ammunition and providing it to Russia, which would be a definitive sign of China engaging in this conflict on terms which the West would find deeply confrontational. And I just don't see that China thinks now or will think in the future that that is a good thing for China, even if it would be a good thing for Russia.

RFE/RL: How has the Russian offensive fared? Because there was much fanfare, much dread at its start, and we were expecting so much.

Barrons: The Russian offensive, which has played out in 2023, and looks like it's running out of steam now, has been a surprise for its continuing lack of, essentially, professional competence. And the first thing that didn't happen was: There was no surprise; there was no Russian maneuver from somewhere else on the border with Ukraine to do what would be a classic military maneuver of trying to take your enemy from behind or in the flank. And what we have seen is just more frontal battering -- so there was no surprise involved in this.

Read the full interview on Radio Free Europe's website here.