Stockpile bottled water, tinned food, a Swiss Army knife, and anything else you might need for a 72-hour interruption in utilities and essential public services. That is the government-recommended survival kit for British households, echoing similar advice from the European Union’s crisis management commissioner, Hadja Lahbib.
News? Hardly. It is not only a Russian attack on critical infrastructure that we should worry about. Wetter, warmer, windier weather, plus hooliganism, incompetence, and bad luck can cause disaster too. An electrical fire shut down London’s Heathrow Airport for a whole day last month, causing colossal disruption: other power supplies were available, but the airport staff could not respond in time.
Nor should it be news — despite headlines in the British press — that Russian undersea warfare poses a serious threat to national security. Russia is planting a network of devices to track the movement of the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines. Russian oligarchs’ super-yachts may be used for electronic surveillance work. Neither “revelation” is surprising. We have known too for years that Russia is placing sabotage equipment on the seabed.
The real story is not about Russian mischief or malign intent. It is about the failure of Britain and similar countries to build proper defense and deterrence. The private owners of the sophisticated systems and networks that make modern life work have no great incentive to invest in costly resilience. As a result, avoidable fragility abounds.
Another failure is the belief in officialdom that telling the truth will cause unnecessary panic (translation: people would ask awkward questions). Politicians and defense chiefs have pooh-poohed the idea that Russian threats are real and direct. The Kremlin menaces only faraway countries such as the Baltic states, Georgia or Ukraine. Any incidents on the home front are isolated, atypical, and easily dealt with.
That has not been true for years. And now the deceit is outright dangerous. Imagine that Britain joins an international coalition that puts troops in Ukraine as part of some post-ceasefire security force. Imagine that Russian drones or rockets attack them, causing fatalities. If we do nothing, accept Russian excuses, or express “grave concern”, we have destroyed our remaining credibility. The national security imperative is clear: strike back hard against the Russian units and bases that have killed our soldiers.
But just as Prime Minister Starmer is about to give that order from his bunker below Downing Street, warning lights flash in the control center that manages Britain’s electricity transmission network. Power interconnectors with Europe are reporting faults. The engineers implement the backup plan, firing up gas-fired power stations—only to find that the main natural gas pipeline to Norway has sprung a leak too.
What then? Does Britain go ahead regardless, and risk not only blackouts, but further Russian sabotage such as the scrambling of databases, the paralysis of the banking system, or cyber-attacks on our air traffic control? At this point, we may finally understand that the real target of Russian hybrid warfare has been our decision-making.
It is probably too late to build all the defenses we need. Nobody can protect every point of every one of the scores of cables and pipes the British Isles depend on. Russia has had years to plant remote-controlled sabotage devices that can threaten these nerves and arteries of our civilization. On land, emulating Finnish-style comprehensive defense will take decades.
Far better to deter such attacks in the first place, by making potential aggressors believe that they face a devastating response. But rebuilding such perceptions quickly is dauntingly hard too. By the time Britons work out whom to blame, it may be too late to matter.
Edward Lucas is a Non-resident Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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