This country has a plan for war with Putin. It puts the UK to shame

 As Russia’s campaign of sabotage continues to disrupt lives across Europe, many Europeans have been asking themselves why it seems nothing can be done to deter Moscow and stop the attacks.

From blowing up railway lines in Poland to shutting down major airports in Denmark, Germany and Belgium, the impact of Russia’s reckless targeting of civilian logistics is growing ever greater. And yet, as Sir Keir Starmer prepares for a Tuesday call with the “coalition of the willing”, whatever efforts are under way to address the problem seem limited – at least in public – to verbal complaints by European leaders.

The absence of visible countermeasures against Russia, whether co-ordinated across Europe or on a national basis, will have encouraged the Kremlin to believe it can carry on its campaign with impunity, while its victims across Europe are left baffled at their governments’ seeming helplessness.

Now, one of those governments has lost patience. After decades when the most passionate calls for taking a strong stance in response to Russia’s actions came from the frontline states in the east of the continent, the latest intervention comes from what might seem at first an unlikely source. The Italian ministry of defence has released a paper castigating the inertia and passivity of European states in the face of a clear and growing threat.

The document doesn’t pull its punches. It has a whole section dedicated to “Overcoming Inertia”, identified as one of the major challenges to Europe’s response. It proposes setting up a European Centre for Countering Hybrid Warfare, for sharing best practice and co-ordinating responses to challenges short of open war.

That may seem a little harsh on the existing European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, which has been conducting research and analysis in threats and resilience since 2017. But that’s one of the Italians’ key arguments. It’s time, they say, to stop admiring the problem and start doing something about it.

Sadly, that will to act remains unevenly distributed across Europe. In the UK in the same week, the Commons Defence Committee released its own scathing report on the unwillingness of the Government to face up to its defence responsibilities.

After a year-long inquiry, MPs said the Labour Government was moving at a “glacial pace” in responding to threats from Russia and China. Britain, it said, not only still lacks the kind of integrated air and missile defence system that has proven vital in defence against Russian long-range attacks, but doesn’t even have a plan for how to defend the country.

That’s a sad turnaround for a nation that until recently considered itself a defence leader in Europe. The incremental increases in defence budgets half-promised by Labour, measured in tenths of percentage points of GDP per year, will apparently be insufficient even to cover existing commitments, let alone rebuild and modernise the UK’s Armed Forces to keep pace with its European allies.

British defence spending delivers notoriously poor value for money despite the painful and morale-sapping penny-pinching inflicted on service personnel and their families. But sadly, the unwillingness to spend what is needed is a symptom of an even deeper problem.

The other events of last week – the latest attempt by the United States at enforcing Russia’s surrender terms on Ukraine, while completely bypassing European partners and allies, once again caused a panicked scramble by European diplomats to rescue the situation.

But that was only necessary because over months and years, those European partners had failed utterly to make themselves a relevant part of the solution to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

It is Western Europe’s general lack of interest in defence that has left the continent acutely vulnerable to Russian sabotage and to American disdain.

The passionate call to action by the Italian ministry of defence is replete with words like “absurd” and “unsustainable” to describe Europe’s attitude. We won’t know for a while if the paper will have any impact beyond those who are already fully aware of the continent’s deficiencies in defence.

But there is no excuse for being surprised. Europe’s predicament, with countries seemingly unable to play an active role in the defence of their borders and their citizens, has been a long time coming. It’s an emergency I described in my book, Who Will Defend Europe?, more than a year ago.

In the book, I asked whether Europe would wake up before it was too late. I had sincerely hoped that by now, something would have been done.

Sadly, as both Italy and the UK have confirmed, despite the looming threat from Russia and the increasingly strident wake-up calls from the new administration in the United States, much of the continent remains content to snooze.