Why more attention needs to be paid to what Russia’s intentions are - Patrick Mercer

Tell me who’s missing in this frenzied dialogue? Correct, Mr Putin: you know him - the bloke who’s got more nuclear weapons than anyone else, a Regular, battle hardened army of a million and the feller who just demonstrated that he’s willing to use intermediate range missiles which could reach a defenceless Britain and be tipped with nukes. Doesn’t he get a say in all this?

Of course he does and that’s why Mssrs Trump and Putin spoke directly to each other last Tuesday in an unprecedented, personal phone call that announced a 30 day ceasefire for “energy infrastructure”. Ukraine and the Eurozone didn’t even get a look in, yet many are trying to see this as a breakthrough. All it means, though, is that long range drone and missile strikes against oil refineries, power plants etc in both Russia and Ukraine will stop for an experimental period.

Other than for an exchange of prisoners, President Putin gave not an inch: don’t be beguiled by politicians hoping to gain some glory from this, the bloody fighting continues without pause.

Of course this is just a first step, but the clearing of Russian territory near Kursk along with the imminent fall of major, fortress cities in the Donbas and Kiev’s crippling casualties make Moscow believe that she’s as close to having won on the battlefield as she needs to be.

There’s still a huge amount of wrangling to go. Will the ceasefire hold and develop; what will happen to Ukraine’s NATO membership; how much ground must Kiev cede and a multitude of other, crucial stuff? But, for the officers of the forward planning branch of the Russian General Staff, Ukraine is pretty well done.

So what next? I was in Crimea in 2014 when Russian forces annexed that peninsula and I predicted that a decisive push by Russia in the Donbas would follow shortly afterwards. I was wrong there, but I got the size and shape of the so-called Special Military Operation that burst upon us three years ago mostly right. But, if you’ve got more than a million Regulars all tweaked up, whose experience and edge is going to fade quite quickly and who are expensive to keep under arms, you’ve got to ask what are they for?

Optimists say they’ll do nothing more than perfect their drone aerobatics and do lots of press ups whilst deterring further NATO expansion. Pessimists, though, write headlines like this, ‘Talk about an invasion is everywhere’ — How Lithuania is preparing for war with Russia’.

And there’s good reason to worry about a Russian thrust towards her exclave of Kaliningrad with all the dangers that poses for Poland, the Baltic States and NATO - but not yet, I fancy.

Rather, look towards Romania and the lands that stretch west from the port of Odessa through Russophile Transnistria via nervous Moldova towards this sprawling, beautiful country that already teems with US/NATO troops. It’s Moscow’s great fear that Romania will develop into an even more heavily armed camp on her western flank with the garrisons already there being vastly expanded.

The first step towards Romania, though, is the vital port of Odessa which Russia tried to capture in 2022. Had she succeeded, Ukraine would have lost most of her access to the Black Sea making resistance to Moscow even more difficult. Now, Russia’s General Staff assesses that as more aircraft and troops become available from the Donbas and Kursk fronts, it may be time to roll the dice again.

With Ukraine staggering, the battle lines frozen and even peacekeepers in the offing, the Russians may think it worth the risk to seize Odessa then ‘relieve’ their tiny forces in Transnistria before elbowing through Moldova right up to the Romanian border before any peace agreement brings land grabbing to a halt.

There are several, intriguing rumours doing the rounds, though. The first is that Russia might insist on a naval base within Odessa, just as she had when Ukraine governed Sebastopol. Conversely, though, Kiev might send a powerful force to liberate Transnistria before ‘reinforcing’ Moldova in order to preempt the Russians. Last, and most fascinating of all, both Britain and France also have long standing interests in the Odessa region.

French firms and enterprises have long been embedded in that rather glamorous port and Mr Macron stated several months ago that any intervention by his forces would focus precisely there and along the coastline. Britain, meanwhile, has had special intelligence links with this area throughout the current campaign.

Where the last act of this grisly war will be played out is hard to know. For my money, though, it’ll be just where British and French warships fired the first shots of the Crimean War in 1854 - and that went well, didn’t it?

Patrick Mercer is a former MP for Newark and Army colonel.