Recent Letter and Speech on the War in Ukraine.

Lord Robert Skidelsky

Note: I’m posting two items today. The first is a letter I co-signed with others, which was submitted to The Guardian on the 15th of November. This was in response to an article on the same day by Pjotr Sauer and Shaun Walker attacking Russia’s anglophobia. Our letter has been overtaken by the latest twist in the saga, but it made one point which remains as relevant as before, which is that British officials should start talking to Russian officials instead of ostracising them. There has been no communication between Britain and Russia at the official level for over 4 years. This is not the way of diplomacy. The Guardian declined to publish this correction to their own biased account.

The second item is a speech I gave in Brussels on November 28th. It incorporates some bits and pieces of mine from earlier postings, with which you may be familiar and tries to bring them into a coherent relationship. There were some Ukrainians in the audience who were offended by my treatment, but I emphasised that my message was pro-Ukrainian rather than otherwise.

Unpublished Guardian Letter:

Sir,

It hardly needs a double-page spread to explain to your readers why the UK has become Russia’s “villain of choice” (Guardian, 17 November 2025).

Since the start of Russia’s so-called “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, the UK has led the bellicose wing of the anti-Russian coalition, claiming that Russia is a mortal threat to our country, that if not defeated Putin will go “on and on”, and that we must “do what it takes” to bring Russia to its knees. More recently, the UK has been pushing for a ceasefire condition – the deployment of British and NATO forces in Ukraine – which it knows the Russians would not accept, and which cuts across President Trump’s efforts to end the bloodshed. Russia has simply responded to the UK’s Russophobia with a dose of Anglophobia of its own.

You report that the government is trying to open “discreet lines of communication” with the Kremlin. While Jonathan Powell is to be congratulated on his (overdue) effort to reopen contact (see FT, 12 November), it will take more than one telephone call to restore links after years of ostracism.

Since February 2022, Russian Embassy staff in London, including the Ambassador, have been banned from entering Parliament, depriving MPs and Peers of the chance to question Russian officials on Russia’s war aims and the public of learning about them. Denying access to Russian diplomats in London simply leads to reciprocal action in Moscow, leaving our Ambassador there unable to engage with Russian politicians. Diplomacy involves a willingness to talk. Lifting the ban on Russian diplomats in London would be a first step to restoring professional diplomatic channels between the two countries.

Signatories:

Sir Anthony Brenton
Brigitte Granville
Richard Owen
Ian Proud
Geoff Roberts
Prof. Richard Sakwa

Brussels Speech: Should Europe rearm?

Speech given at European Citizens’ Conference for Peace in Ukraine, 27 November 2025

Also an interview at the same event:

Interview with Patrik Baab at the European Citizens Conference for Peace in Ukraine

My speech is in four parts. The first looks at the doctrine of self-defence. Second, I question the arguments currently being advanced for European rearmament. Third, I outline the two narratives which frame the current conflict between the political West and Russia. Finally, I recall President Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex. Some parts of my argument will be hard for Ukrainians in the audience to accept. But I beg them to listen to what I have to say, so that they may begin to believe that some good may yet come out of their tragedy.

I. The Self-Defence Doctrine

It’s one thing to be ready to defend yourself, another to conjure up threats as an excuse for rearmament. I don’t know how familiar you are with George Orwell’s 1984. In this dystopia, the rule of Big Brother is justified by the existence of permanent war between Oceana and its two rivals, Eurasia and East Asia. The war atmosphere is heightened by incidents of bombing, reports of espionage, battles, reverses, victories. But the wars are fakes designed to promote national solidarity and identify traitors.

We are drifting into this situation today. We are conjuring up a war against Russia in order to justify increased military spending, disruption of normal economic life, and restriction of liberties. The danger is that such an imaginary war will, with our present repertoire of destructive weapons, lead to a real war which will produce something far worse than Big Brother.

I am not a pacifist, some war preparations are justified. Article 51 of UN Charter: states ‘Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations’.

The UN Charter is the accepted legal ground for self defence against armed aggression. It is based on the moral right to self-defence embodied in the just war tradition. The UN wording justifies self-defence ‘against an armed attack’. A pre-emptive strike might be justified if the attack is plausibly imminent—for example, if you see another country’s troops massing on your frontier.

But can the doctrine of self-defence be rightfully invoked, not because you have been attacked or fear imminent attack, but because you suspect that a country may be preparing to attack you in the future? Is it right to treat another country as potentially hostile if they have a political system contrary to yours?

This has become the basic justification of Europe’s rearmament against Russia. The western doctrine of international relations is founded on the principle of the malignity of autocracy. Russia is an autocracy and therefore it is by definition hostile to democracies. You can’t trust despots, they are bound to lie. Moreover, autocrats, being less legitimate than democratic leaders, have a continuous incentive to shore up their rule by conjuring up and waging war against ‘enemies’.

In short, autocracy is the warlike, democracy the peaceful form of the state. Putin as well as Xi Jinping are autocrats; their political genes make them prone to foreign aggression.

This being so, regime change becomes the barely acknowledged goal of war: war to bring peace. ‘The spread of our values makes us more secure’ declared Tony Blair in Chicago in 1999. To be sure he urged prudence in making war. But when moral outrage is in the ascendant, voices of prudence tend to be drowned out.

Putin has already shown clear signs of aggression by attacking independent Ukraine. So, the argument goes, if he is not defeated there, he will ‘go on and on’ to attack other border states and eventually other European countries, in one way or another. This is what autocrats do.

So European policy is now twofold: continue to give Ukraine ‘all that it takes’; and rearm to meet the longer threat. Ukraine was the first line of defence of European democracy. Since this line is unlikely to hold, emphasis has switched to rearmament to deter the wider Russian threat to Europe.

I believe the policy of rearmament is the result of a profoundly wrong and dangerous interpretation of events. Its barely hidden purpose is to revive Europe’s stagnant economies through a policy of military Keynesianism. Its pursuit threatens to plunge Europe into a devastating war.

II. Europe’s Rearmament

On March 5 2025, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled her Re-Arm Europe Plan, which aims to boost EU defense spending by €800 billion over four years. On June 5, NATO defence ministers agreed to double their members’ annual defence spending from an average of roughly 2.5 percent of GDP to 5 percent by 2032. The peace dividend from the end of the Cold War is to be reversed, with the European members of Nato set to spend a higher percentage of their national incomes on defence than even in the last decade of the Cold War. This reflects the fact that it was the United States which historically financed 70% of Nato’s military spending: increased European commitment reflects decreased US commitment.

Britain’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR)—published on June 5—clearly states the rationale for rearmament. “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a strategic inflection point” irrefutably demonstrating the threat of “state-on-state war” returning to Europe. The UK and its allies are under “daily attack, from [Russia], with aggressive acts of espionage, cyber-attacks, and information manipulation causing harm to society and the economy. Russia has demonstrated its willingness to use military force, inflict harm on civilians and threaten the use of nuclear weapons to achieve its goals.” So Britain must rearm to deter future Russian aggression. To be credible, this requires that Britain and its allies be ready “fight and win” a war against Russia. As Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, put it: ‘The British had better rearm or learn to speak Russian’.

Rearmament must include not just conventional arms but development of a resilient ‘home defence’ to guard against espionage, political interference, sabotage, assassination and poisoning, electoral interference, disinformation, propaganda, and intellectual property theft.

This means investment not just in conventional armed forces but also in the technologies of warfare: in “dynamic networks of crewed, uncrewed, and autonomous assets and data flows.” Since Russia has intentionally blurred the line between nuclear, conventional, and “sub-state” threats, an integrated British response should combine both conventional and hybrid forms of war preparation. Great stress is placed on the need for a resilient “home defense,” a “whole society” war readiness. As the SDR puts it: “UK must be better prepared for high intensity, protracted war.” Its war-making (and hence deterrence) capacity must now permeate every aspect of society.

To keep the nation in a state of constant alert requires, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer frankly admitted, a “radical shift in mindset,” a “transformation of culture,” the “eradication” of “unacceptable” behavior—one that accepts defence and security as “the organizing principle of government.” The government should increase cadet enrollment in schools, spread understanding of the armed forces among young people, start “public outreach events across the UK, explaining the role the wider society must play in the UK’s security and resilience”—seemingly modest objectives until one realises that they are part of the project for readying the “whole nation” for war.

The argument for rearmament is a classic example of how starting from a false premise, remorseless political logic can end in madness. The false premise is that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the first step to make Russia “a dominant military power in all of Europe”. Evidence that Britain is already under attack is provided by “the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations … cyber-attacks and influence operations … sensors … around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables”. Deny the premise and the argument for a “whole society” mobilisation against Russia collapses.

What is disappointing is that precisely the same premise now underlies the principal left-wing alternative to the Strategic Defence Review. An example is the recent debate between Lord Robertson, author of the Strategic Defence Review, and Mary Kaldor, presenting her paper From Nuclear Deterrence to Democratic Resilience. The virtue of Kaldor’s presentation is that it explicitly rejects the logic of the arms race. But both sides agreed that Europe faces an overriding Russian threat which must determine the organisation of our societies. They differ only in the method of mobilisation.

Rather than the SDR prescription of large-scale military rearmament, the Kaldor paper proposes something called “democratic resilience”—a civil form of deterrence aimed at making European societies politically immune to “authoritarian” influence. Europe should, they say, keep arming Ukraine and reinforcing its eastern flank, but its main task is to build a population permanently on guard against hybrid attacks: disinformation, sabotage, corruption, the “weaponisation” of migration, and extremist politics at home.

In practice, this amounts to a programme for the political mobilisation of society. Whereas the SDR proposes a militarised state, the Left proposes a militarised democracy—a managed civic ecosystem whose purpose is to resist “hybrid threats” and to immunise democracy against internal and external enemies.

Yet the report never explains how this democratic resilience is to be created. Nor does it acknowledge that many objectionable Russian actions are responses to Western intrusions: everything is interpreted as unilateral aggression.

Sanctions are offered as proof of action—Europe has deprived Russia of hundreds of billions of dollars—but there is little evidence they deter aggression. What they do is rule out diplomacy.

Thus, far from offering an escape from the logic of militarisation, the doctrine of “democratic resilience” simply repackages it. It replaces nuclear deterrence with a permanent political mobilisation—and risks sustaining, as in the Cold War, an imaginary war indefinitely.

Do the authors of these documents have any grasp of the implication of the words they use? Have they stopped to consider the Orwellian implications of gearing up the nation for perpetual war? Both documents rightly draw attention to the increased and often subterranean threats of harm opened by rapidly accelerating technological innovation. But I draw an opposite conclusion. The multiplication of technological threats provides a compelling argument not for an AI arms race but for global cooperation to limit the destructive effects of technology. It is the joint responsibility of leaders of all the great powers to act as adults and not as children playing around with their lethal toys.

III. Escape from Warlike Narratives

The philosopher Wittgenstein wrote: ‘One thinks that one is tracing the outline of a thing’s nature and one is merely tracing round the frame through which one looks at it’. Peace in Ukraine, and elsewhere in the world, requires a conscious attempt to escape from the frames through which we are accustomed to present reality. I briefly want to consider two of these: the West’s and especially Britain’s Russophobia, and Russia’s Westernphobia. I’m not calling for these to be changed into their opposites, merely for us to understand that they exist and to find a way to negotiate through them.

In 1836 the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill claimed that Britain was smitten with the “epidemic disease of Russophobia,” an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defense spending.

Mill’s observation raises the question: How justified have been the recurrent fears of Russian expansion and to what extent has Russophobia been used to justify rearmament programs? Russia in the 19th century was an expansionist power, largely at the expense of the decaying Ottoman Empire. The British interpreted this as a threat to their Indian empire; hence the Crimean War of 1854–5. But this was not because it was an autocracy; Russian expansion was part of the imperialism then common to Europe and the USA. And even then Russia chiefly sought to improve defensive positions rather than far flung conquests, unlike Britain whose empire spanned a quarter of the globe.

The British and Americans saw the Cold War as an ideological battle between democracy and totalitarianism, whereas the Soviets, with the experience of two invasions from Germany, were mainly interested in establishing buffers in Eastern Europe against what Stalin believed would be an inevitable American-led assault. The United States was encouraged by Latvian, Ukrainian, and Polish lobbies in Washington to believe that Soviet insistence on making Eastern Europe a sphere of influence was only a prelude to the attempt to subjugate all of Europe. The Soviet threat was used to justify continuing investment in the nuclear arms race.

The recurring western conviction that Russia was inherently expansionist owed less to any concrete Russian project than to the liberal democratic belief that autocracies were expansionist and aggressive by nature. In short, the roots of the rivalry were ideological, not geopolitical, with clashes of interest (which did exist) being interpreted in civilizational terms.

Exactly the same faulty reasoning is employed today to justify Europe’s rearmament. The idea of buffer zones, spheres of influence, may be repugnant to our “rules-based international order” (though the US has never repudiated the Monroe Doctrine), but they do not portend dangerously expansionist aims. It is right to be suspicious of Putin’s intentions without falling for the idea that he will never stop.

To conclude: Russophobia is best understood as a recurrent syndrome triggered by the convergence of ideology, security friction, and domestic incentives—not a rational response to objective threats. Its history illuminates the appeal to democracies of moral rhetoric, the instrumental use of fear, and the ultimate capacity of hard-nosed diplomacy to reset relations. (For a survey of western Russophobia see Thomas Fazi’s substack.)

On the other side, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had less to do with any objective threat posed by Ukraine or the West either to Russian security or to Ukraine’s Russian population than to Russia’s perpetual fear of attack from the west. In the Russian language, Ukraine means ‘at the edge’: the frontier of Russian defence against foreign enemies, which puts sufficient distance between Russia’s heartland and its western enemies to allow defence in depth. Recovery of its defensive shield has been the main aim of Russia’s foreign policy since its recovery from the trauma of imperial collapse in 1990–1.

Russia’s often paranoid view of Western intentions has more justification than western Russophobia, since Western Europe has never suffered or even been threatened by Russian invasion. The following lines from Prokoviev’s opera War and Peace, dating from 1942, echo the dominant theme of much Russian literature:

The insidious enemy dared invade our land,
And soon he will cry!
Love for the Fatherland
And the bravery of our army,
And our prayers
Will give us victory.
Russia is not used to submission,
In battle the people defend freedom.
We will return calm to the Fatherland
And peace to other nations.

To equate NATO’s eastward expansion with the insidious Nazi enemy of 1941 might seem to be madness, yet this is the reservoir of feeling on which Putin draws in framing his justification for invading Ukraine.

Consider this: NATO was set up to keep the Russians from conquering Europe. Today, Russia must be prevented from becoming the “dominant military power in all of Europe.” Yet the Cold War itself was partly based on Western misconceptions. Few now believe that Stalin’s Russia, still less its post-Stalin successor, set out to dominate the whole of Europe: its purpose was to create a buffer against invasion from the West. However, the Cold War era did see a genuine ideological conflict between capitalism and communism. So it was not altogether fanciful to believe that we were engaged in a battle for the soul of the world.

Western analysts forget that the West’s victory in the Cold War robbed Russia of its shield. Under Putin, it has set out to restore as much of it as possible. This does not mean that Putin wants to conquer Europe, or that autocracies are naturally expansionist.

I have never believed that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified. Even worse than a crime it was a blunder, which has brought vast suffering to Ukrainians, brought Finland and Sweden into Nato, and created an anti-Russian country on Russia’s doorstep. To be sure Ukraine’s western backers were extremely imprudent in provoking Russia with talk about Ukraine joining Nato in 2008 and their role in the Maidan uprising of 2014 which overthrew the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich. Kyiv’s own policy towards its Russian minorities had also become increasingly repressive. Nevertheless, a wise and humane statesman would never have started the war. But this is a far cry from saying that Putin wants to ‘go on and on’.

The problem we have in making peace lies in the difficulty of escaping from the narratives etched deep in national psyches, which frame the policies of both sides. The solution to the disorder inherent in a world of sovereign nations is not that they should all arm themselves to the teeth, but that they should develop rules of coexistence, and practice the arts of diplomacy and conflict resolution.

IV. Military Industrial Complex. Warning.

War is the laboratory of technology. That the West has been the mother of technology is due largely to the fact that the European peoples have been fighting each other for nearly the whole of their history. Some of you may know the famous scene at the start of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when one of our fur-covered ancestors picks up a bone from a skeleton lying on the ground and realises that it can be used to fight off enemies. Having killed the leader of a marauding group, this humanoid throws up the bone in the air in triumph where it transforms before our eyes into a slender spaceship speeding towards Jupiter.

An early historical example is Archimedes who got distracted from pure thought by the command to build defences for the protection of Syracuse, resulting in the invention of the catapult. And we know about the great physicists and mathematicians involved in building the atomic bomb. Over the centuries governments have continually subsidised inventors not to produce a better life but to produce more efficient ways of killing.

AI as we know it today was incubated in war and war preparations. The computer wasn’t born in scientific institutes working for the common good but in the UK’s Bletchley Park and the USA’s DARPA programmes, the first designed to break Germany’s wartime code, the second to keep the USA ahead of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. These developments led to the internet, first developed for the purposes of military intelligence ARPANET, a US Department of Defence programme.

Of course, there have been civilian spin-offs from which we all benefit. But their military and intelligence deployment has grown in parallel. My fear is that the weaponization of AI technology won’t allow for civilian spin-offs because there won’t be any civilians left.

Let me end with a warning that comes not from a pacifist, but from a soldier. In his Farewell Address of 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower—Commander in the war against Nazi Germany—spoke of the emergence in the United States of what he called the military–industrial complex. For the first time in American history, he observed, the country had created a vast, permanent armaments industry in peacetime. Defence ministries, private contractors, universities, and research laboratories had become tied together by a common dependence on continuous military expenditure.

Eisenhower did not object to a strong defence. What concerned him was the danger that this new structure could acquire, in his words, “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought.” He feared that public spending, foreign policy, democratic oversight, and even the balance between national security and civil liberty could all be skewed by interests which had a stake—financial, bureaucratic, and psychological—in maintaining a climate of tension.

His warning was simple: if you build a machine for permanent mobilisation, it will find reasons to keep itself running.

And this, I fear, is where Europe is now heading. The rearmament programmes currently under way—the ever-higher spending targets, the proliferation of “whole society” security doctrines, the insistence that every aspect of national life must be subordinated to the demands of defence—reproduce precisely the dynamic Eisenhower warned against. A structure whose survival depends on imagining danger will never lack enemies.

Once a society accepts that war preparation must be its organising principle, it will begin to see threats everywhere. It will devise an ideology of vigilance, cultivate a rhetoric of existential menace, and treat dissent as a species of irresponsibility. The financial costs are vast; the political and moral costs are greater still.

Eisenhower’s point was not that there are no real dangers in the world—there were in 1961, and there are today. His point was that the apparatus of defence, left unchecked, can generate its own momentum, pushing nations into cycles of militarisation which bear little relationship to actual threats.

I would argue that, given the ‘lethality’ of the new generation of weapons, and the risk of nuclear war through miscalculation, the geopolitical emphasis should be not on rearming to win a war, but on (a) cooperation to achieve planetary and not just national security, and (b) verifiable arms agreements to control the development of AI/LLMs on the lines of the chemical and biological conventions, and for a long time, the nuclear non-proliferation.

That is why I support diplomatic efforts to end the Ukrainian conflict. This is often presented as pro Russian, of rewarding Putin for his aggression. I would argue that is a pro Ukraine policy. Even an unjust peace is better than the continuation of mass killing.

Europeans should reflect carefully on this. To defend oneself is prudent; to reorganise one’s society around the anticipation of conflict is paranoid.