Email to a group of friends

Generally, we deal with open-source information. At times, we receive gems from those who are quietly talking to one another – and the world is talking.  At times, these quiet conversations between friends highlight issues that we don’t pick up.

It is encouraging that groups of friends talk. Away from the hustle and bustle, just quietly. They don’t conduct 24/7 interviews on some tube, they don’t shout, they don’t seek attention; they quietly educate themselves and seek and impart understanding. There are many such groups and it is a privilege to receive email from one of them.

This was sent to me by Maxwell Scott.

Email to a group of friends

The fact that China is now sending Russia some of its latest drones suggests that it has quietly dropped its public stance of neutrality on Ukraine in the aftermath of the Israel/US attack on Iran.

At a time when Sir Keir Starmer is about to buy some nuclear-capable F35-A fighters, it is a good idea to point out how useless that approach is.

Regarding NATO, Ukraine and drones, there are some prize quotations here:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/25/change-in-nato-mindset-was-brought-on-by-vladimir-putin-as-much-as-trump

DS

“The Russian president’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the first jolt, but there is a second uncomfortable reality. If there is a sustainable ceasefire in Ukraine, it will mean the deployment of a European-led peacekeeping force in the country – and after a while, Russia’s military might will inevitably recover.”

There is not going to be a ceasefire, because there was no deal in Istanbul, apart from the one regarding exchanges of prisoners.  Neither European NATO nor Zelenskiy want a deal because that would jeopardise Ukraine’s funding to an even greater extent than it is now, with the ending of the Biden-funded military aid. The USA cannot produce enough military equipment to cover the rate of losses of such equipment in Ukraine. For example, there has been an admission from the USA that all Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles sent to Ukraine have been destroyed. The idea that Russia’s military needs to recover is fatuous.  There are huge reserves of personnel in the Russian Army, fully trained and with better equipment than is being used in Ukraine.”

“Nato planners believe that if Russia were to agree to a ceasefire, it could quickly, within perhaps three, five or seven years, pose a serious threat to the alliance’s eastern flank.

The Kremlin could maintain an army of 600,000 soldiers and, by spending 6.5% of GDP on defence, begin to restore its stock of munitions and equipment.”

Russia already poses a serious threat to NATO’S eastern flank, with new military districts created next to Estonia, Helsinki, Finnish Karelia, and near Murmansk (near the most northern Finnish military air base).  That does not mean that it is about to start an invasion of NATO territory, but it does mean that NATO would suffer serious consequences if it tried to invade Russia.

With regard to the claim that Russia could maintain an army of 600,000 soldiers, and by spending 6.5% of GDP, begin to restore its stock of munitions and equipment, this is utterly delusional. The Russian Army is currently over 2 million, of which 600,000 are already deployed in Ukraine. It is recruiting at the rate of 30,000 volunteers per month, plus conscripts who are not allowed to fight in Ukraine, thereby creating a labour shortage in the Russian economy. Since Russia spends only 7 per cent of its state budget on military activities, including on the Aerospace Force and the Navy, the Russian Army only has a share of that.

While I have not yet checked to try to find out what percentage of GDP is taken up by the state budget, I will assume that it is 50 per cent of GDP. [That seems too high, but it will do for the sake of argument.] If so, total military spending will be 3.5 per cent of GDP. It seems that few in the collective West have any conception of how large the Russian economy is. Going on IMF figures for 2024, its population of about 147 million produces the fourth largest economy for GDP by parity purchasing power. India is not that much larger on the same measure with a population of 1.5 billion. So, the Russian Army of over 2 million absorbs less than 3 per cent of GDP, at a guess. It has huge stocks of equipment and munitions, supplemented by artillery shells from North Korea, and a smallish number of drones from Iran. It is innovating at an astonishing rate, and that only refers to equipment in the public domain.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/25/ukraine-russia-autonomous-drones-ai

DB

This suffers from taking Ukrainian estimates of Russian military capabilities at face value. It fails to take account of the huge implications of Russian industrial capacity with all components being sourced inside Russia.

There is a very recent exception of a new drone wholly sourced from China, but that too is based on industrial capacity, rather than artisanal production techniques using mostly imported components, as in Ukraine.  Inevitably, the Ukrainian rate of innovation is slower, and its production facilities are regularly identified and attacked.

Some Russian drones such as the Okhotnik [Hunter] are exclusively for aerial combat, which means that the Okhotnik has never been used in Ukraine, since there are few Ukrainian fighter planes left. The Ukrainian claim that networking drones is a new idea is false, since Russia has used the networking knowledge derived from the fact that in the late 1970s it had networked supersonic cruise missiles designed to attack NATO naval vessels, according to Andrei Martyanov. It has also produced the Bhramos supersonic cruise missile jointly with India. No NATO country has supersonic cruise missiles, to my knowledge. The USA still uses Tomahawk subsonic cruise missiles, which like much of its strategic weapons was developed in the 1980s.

With regard to autonomous drones, Russia has had various kinds since at least 2023. Nowadays the Geran-2 is not only autonomous, but flies higher than Ukrainian air defence can hit, and gathers in clusters before attacking its targets, thereby overwhelming air defence batteries. In other words, it is networked.

Slavyangrad Telegram channel, 25 Jun 2025:

The Geranium-2 kamikaze drone, equipped with a thermal imaging camera , discovered by the enemy.

The drone is a version of the original Iranian Shahed-136, as indicated by the serial number MS001 , as well as the presence of a characteristic four-component CRPA antenna Tallysman satellite navigation.

The presence of a thermal imaging camera allows the operator to detect heat sources, which ensures targeted destruction of targets in the dark and in smoke or fog.

According to the enemy, the drone’s optical module integrates a single-board computer Nvidia Jetson Orin for targeting using machine vision algorithms.

In addition to the computer, the drone is also equipped with a direct radio control system, just like the similar drone with Iranian components demonstrated a few days ago. [end.]

So this drone can be autonomous or can be guided by First Person Video [FPV], which implies that it is resilient in the face of Ukrainian [NATO] EW [Electronic Warfare] counter measures. That is effectively admitted in the above article. I do not have time to describe other drones. See the V2U described in The Guardian article above for one example.

In this context, the UK Prime Minister has suddenly decided to buy F35-A fighters, which are capable of carrying nuclear bombs. This is using technology that is over 50 years old (gravity nuclear bombs) with very expensive planes that do not work very well. The stealth coating on all versions of the F35 gets stripped away when it goes supersonic, so it is even more visible to radar. (It can in any case be detected by radar interferometry: two radars operating on different wavelengths.)  In addition to a network of other radars, Russia has an over-the-horizon radar that covers most of Western Europe including the whole of the UK and southern Norway. It can detect small light aircraft taxiing on the runway at Schipol Airport in The Netherlands, and so it would detect such F35-A fighters the moment they took off.

Russia has publicly stated that it does not consider the UK Trident submarines to be a deterrent. That is because it has at least three different ways of neutralising it and doubtless follows Royal Navy submarines with its diesel-electric submarines that are made of titanium rather than steel and so can dive deeper than NATO submarines. They doubtless carry supercavitation torpedoes that have no analogue in the West. It also has hunter-killer nuclear submarines, also made of titanium, and long-range underwater drones called Poseidon, which can loiter on the seabed for months and can blow up an aircraft carrier group. So, it can easily destroy a single NATO submarine. It can probably also cut undersea cables, just like the American submarine USS Jimmy Carter.

Consequently, transatlantic cables are probably far more vulnerable than the recent UK strategic review imagines. Russia is also known to be developing short-range underwater drones, which may be for coastal defence, but which presumably be deposited by the submarine Belgorod to loiter near the exit point for UK submarines between the Mull of Kintyre and Northern Ireland.  A Russian submarine recently loitered ostentatiously in the Irish Sea, presumably to demonstrate how vulnerable the UK Trident submarines are, but the hint does not seem to have been taken seriously.

Maxwell Scott.