The West must not rule out the possibility that Russia might attack the Baltic states, says General Ben Hodges, former commander of the US ground forces in Europe, in an interview with LRT.lt. According to him, Moscow would be able to do so in 3–8 years, depending on the circumstances.
First of all, how do you see the current situation in Ukraine?
I see us at a dangerous point. Dangerous because the US and Germany are not doing everything they can to help Ukraine. That’s what I mean by dangerous.
After ten years with all the advantages, Russia still only controls 18 percent of Ukraine, they’ve lost over 330,000 soldiers – killed and wounded – thousands of tanks and armoured vehicles, the Air Force still has not achieved air superiority, the Black Sea Fleet is having to withdraw from Sevastopol. The only thing that the Russians can do is launch expensive missiles at civilian targets. Ukraine is not in danger of being overrun, but its suffering is going on longer than it should because the US and Germany in particular have failed to make a commitment to helping Ukraine win.
For sure, there are challenges for Ukraine: they have got to fix their recruiting and mobilisation system, they have got to figure out how to operate more effectively against Russian electronic warfare capability. They desperately need from us longer range precision weapons that could target Russian headquarters, Russian artillery, Russian logistics. If they had ATACMS, Taurus missiles, there would be no Russian artillery or headquarters, or logistics, or ship anywhere in Russian-occupied Ukraine. That would make a big difference. It wouldn’t end the war, but it would make a big difference.
In Zaporizhia, Russia is now pushing into Ukraine’s positions. So, can we say that the Ukrainian counteroffensive was unsuccessful?
First of all, of course, the ground part did not achieve the results that all of us would have liked. But I’m reluctant to say it failed somehow because the ground part is only a part. This counteroffensive involves air, sea, land, special forces, cyber, and so on.
We see what the Ukrainians have achieved. With just three Storm Shadows they convinced the commander of the Black Sea Fleet that he needed to start pulling out of Sevastopol. Then another Storm Shadow destroyed the Russian ship Feodosia, so they had to move out of there also.
It’s more complicated than just to say that they failed. We failed, the West failed to make decisions on time and deliver capabilities that they needed on time, which gave the Russians extra months to prepare their defences. I think we let down the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainians made mistakes, but they certainly did not fail.
You mention the Ukrainian mistakes. What were they?
Of course, there were us and other advisers helping Ukraine with the planning. We encouraged them to do certain things and at the end of the day, we pushed them to launch an attack without having any air power. And we would never send an American soldier, a Lithuanian soldier, a British soldier, or a German soldier into an attack like that, without having already achieved overwhelming air superiority and without providing all of the necessary engineering or breaching equipment to get through these minefields. While that did not happen the way we would have liked, it was impossible to expect them to achieve any more than they did because we failed to provide enough.
It’s going to take a while before they have completely changed the culture to get rid of the old Soviet mentalities and to empower junior officers more, and I think they’ve got to fix that. They’ve got to fix their internal defence industry. We know from history that it’s possible to continue developing your own defence industry even when you’re at war. I think this is an area where Ukraine is going to keep working. Some British, German, and other companies have stepped forward and are setting up shop inside Ukraine. I think more of that needs to happen also.
At the start of the large-scale invasion, some military experts said that Russia did not have enough missiles, artillery, and other military resources to continue the war. But the missile and drone attacks have not stopped. What are Russia’s military capabilities now?
The Russians don’t have the capability to knock out Ukraine. They can’t decisively end the war. Their only hope is to drag this out to cause as much destruction as they can until the West stops supporting Ukraine, and that's their strategy.
When I look at these attacks, the way that they use their infantry, pushing them into the meat grinder because they don’t care how many casualties they have of their own soldiers, they’re doing this because it conveys the impression that it’s endless. Where do they keep getting these people? It looks like they have endless amounts of people. They don’t, obviously, but it looks like they do because they’re willing to keep doing this. Everything that we can do to help Ukraine kill as many of them as possible is going to be an important part of exposing this effort by the Russians.
It’s obvious that there are huge holes in the sanctions process. There are too many companies and countries, including from the US, that are still doing business inside Russia. This is incredible to me. Our government and other governments have got to close these loopholes.
The Chinese are also delivering capabilities to the Russians. Why are we just standing by? Iran is providing drones to the Russians. Why are we just standing by? What are we doing? Why haven’t we severed in a variety of means this delivery? There’s surely something we can do, and I think it’s a failure of political will on our part.
Finally, we have got to start thinking strategically. What happened with the Hamas attack on Israel was not a coincidence. Iran is Russia’s most important ally and Russia is Iran’s most important ally. Iran has three main proxy organisations – Hezbollah, Houthi, and Hamas. None of them could do what they do without Iranian support, money, weapons, etc. Who is benefiting the most from this Hamas attack on Israel? Surely not the Palestinians, not Hamas. It’s Russia. Russia has benefited from this diversion of attention and resources.
We have got to think strategically. We, the West, need to think about Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China – the Four horsemen of the apocalypse. They are all cooperating with each other. The others are helping Russia to go against everything that we say we care about. Until we get organised in the West about our defence industry, getting serious about all of our forces being capable and ready and using the combined economic power, it dwarfs anything. But we’re not working together and until we do that, we’re in danger of losing big time to these four horsemen.
In Lithuania, German analysts’ assessment that Russia may be ready for war with NATO in 5–8 years received a lot of attention. What do you think about this possibility?
First of all, I agree with that German assessment, and it could be even shorter. That number is based on an analysis of how long it will take Russia to rebuild their destroyed military, retool their defence industry, and catch back up on ammunition. These are the things that they would need to fight against NATO. I don’t want to put an exact number on it, but you could say it’s anywhere between 3 and 8 years, depending on what we do with sanctions, for example, if we don’t do anything to improve the sanctions regime, then they’ll be able to do things more quickly.
It’s important that Germany is finally waking up, and you don’t hear Germans saying, “Oh, we shouldn’t do something because it might provoke Russia”. They’ve finally gotten past that nonsense, but they still haven’t taken action to match the words. It was important that the chief of the German army, General Breuer, said that they were not ready to stop Russia at all. This is integrity from a German military officer and nobody in the Bundestag or the government could claim they didn’t know anything about it. This is where the Germans are at least moving in the right direction, just not fast enough. Once the German industry gets serious about ammunition production and other things, this will all help.
For Lithuania, there are several things that Lithuania has to do better. Number one, I would ask my Lithuanian friends, are you doing everything you possibly can to make sure that nations can move in and out of Lithuania as fast as possible? I’m talking about the US Army, British Army, German Army, Polish Army. This is the topic of military mobility, if your allies are able to get there as fast as possible. I would point to the Rail Baltica project. It’s unbelievable that this project is still not finished. The ability for allies to get to and through Lithuania as fast as possible is very important for deterrence. That’s number one.
Also, has Lithuania connected its defence planning with its neighbours? Are you truly integrated with Latvia and Poland, as well as with the Germans and the Americans who are inside Lithuania? And are you exercising? I would ask my Lithuanian friends, have all of your reserves, your territorial forces been identified? Do they know who they are? Have they exercised? Have they been called up? I see Estonia doing a lot of this, I see Finland doing a lot of this. I haven’t seen this happen so much from the Lithuanian side.
Finally, the air defence, missile defence... After watching Russia now for the last two years use precision weapons against civilian targets, that tells me that if they ever decide to invade a NATO country, that means they decide to launch Iskander and Kaliber, and all these other weapons against civilian targets in Klaipėda, Vilnius, or Kaunas, for example. Are we in NATO doing everything we possibly can to protect our populations, as well as our critical infrastructure? I don’t think we have anything close to the amount of air and missile defence required, and for sure, we haven’t practised it in a big air missile defence exercise.
In a recent interview with the Finnish media, you said that Russia could test NATO’s defences with a “small operation against the Baltic states”. What do you mean by “small operation”?
What I'm talking about there is this concept of escalate to de-escalate. A limited attack that would involve missiles, ground forces, and air forces seizing something and then stopping. Then they would turn to the West and say, “Do you really want to get into a nuclear war just because we connected Kaliningrad and Belarus” or “just because we took out to save the poor Russian-speaking population in Latvia”, for example.
Right now, they’ve seen that we in the West are terrified of any nuclear escalation. That means that we have demonstrated to them that we’re willing to stop doing things just because Russia might use a tactical nuclear weapon. What a terrible signal. But that’s the signal that we have sent. I don’t think it’s likely, but we’re being naive if we don’t consider the possibility that they would do that and then turn and say, “Is Lithuania really worth a nuclear war?” The disinformation effort that’s going on in Hungary, Italy, or the US constantly undermines our cohesion. A Trump presidency would make that even worse.
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