Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss

Author:Liz Truss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781684515622
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2024-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The World at War

My phone rang beside my bed at 3:30 a.m. on a Thursday in late February 2022. It was Nick Catsaras, my private secretary. He told me the event we had all been dreading had come to pass. Vladimir Putin had mounted a full-scale assault on Kyiv. For months we had known this was likely to happen, and it had been growing more certain by the day. Yet to hear it confirmed was terrible. A ground war in Europe for the first time in decades. It shattered all the illusions we had about European security.

Russian forces had been conducting exercises near the border with Ukraine since the spring of 2021, and there had been a further buildup of tanks and troops in the autumn. The United States and the United Kingdom were privy to very specific intelligence that Putin was planning to invade Ukraine more or less immediately after the Beijing Winter Olympics were over—and those games had been formally closed the previous Sunday.

We had spent the autumn and winter doing all we could to deter an invasion and to persuade the Russian regime that it would be a strategic mistake. The problem was that what looks irrational to Western politicians can look logical to a dictator. The UK was a galvanizing force in the G7. We were the first European country to send weapons to Ukraine and led on calls for tough sanctions. We called for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany to be canceled. We warned the Russians that Ukraine would fight and we spelled out the consequences for the Russian people.

The UK had already been training up the Ukrainian army since 2015, and Boris, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, and I were determined to help as much as possible. This involved wading through a lot of Whitehall treacle. The machine was risk-averse and cautious. We knew we were racing against time to get the weapons over before Russia attacked.

A lot of the Foreign Office apparatus that focused on Russia had been disbanded after the end of the Cold War. This included the Information Unit, which had countered Soviet propaganda. Russia specialists had been relocated to other growing interests like the Middle East and Asia. Many resources had also been sucked into international development. We immediately redeployed people and reestablished the Information Unit, which had an important role in countering Russian disinformation.

Together with the United States, we deliberately released intelligence to smoke out the Russians and expose their tactics. We needed to convince international doubters what they were up to. This was something of a risky tactic, given the inglorious history of published intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. We knew that Russia was planning all manner of “false flag” operations to give themselves a pretext for the invasion and muddy the picture. By announcing in advance that we knew exactly what they intended, we were able to expose those tactics and prevent their disinformation campaign from getting off the ground.

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