Michael Clarke Ukraine Q&A: Russian army 'like a sponge' and breakthrough in war is unlikely

Security and defence analyst Michael Clarke has just finished answering your Ukraine war questions - thanks to everyone who followed along and took part.

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"There is no succession plan because people like Putin never have one, because the plan may then become a threat to their own future," says Michael Clarke.

"A successor will be almost certainly in the Putin mould because Putin is surrounded now by sycophants - not unlike in the White House - who have all absorbed what he's created over the last 25 years."

Their attitude to the war will be similar, Clarke says.

"Over the last 25 years, the Russians have given up on the idea of peaceful coexistence. 

"They've come to the idea of security and peace through fear."

A leader emerging with a different view is a long way off, he adds.

"I'd say if Putin were to disappear next month, there'd be some period of chaos and it'd be the next [leader] but one, or maybe the next but two... who we might be able to get back on terms with."

Clarke says: "At the moment, peaceful coexistence is a foolish concept in the Kremlin - and it's a bit of a foolish concept in Beijing."

"This is a good question," Clarke says.

He says Russia's shadow fleet can be anything from 400 to 1,400 ships, with ships swapping from "legitimate to shadow fleet" on a whim.

Clarke adds that the "time may have come" for the West to be "more muscular" when dealing with shadow fleet vessels.

"My own view is to board them, bring them into a NATO port, send the crew home, and then we can argue for the next five to ten years legally as the ship rusts and rust away without any maintenance."

He says the problem so far has been getting enough evidence to hand over to the Maritime Arbitration Service or the courts.

"The thing that would make the most difference to Russia's perceptions would be much more military aid to Ukraine, so that the Russians start to lose some of this territory that they've taken so laboriously in the last 18 months," says Michael Clarke.

The situation on the battlefield could be changed if the Americans were prepared to put another $60bn into it, as they did in March last year, he says.

"Ukraine has the capacity to push Russian forces back, possibly quite a long way.

"If the Russians started to lose territory, then they'd be much, much keener on the ceasefire."

Watch below: Putin visiting Russian region of Kurks this week - after Ukrainian troops pushed out

Moscow can cope with sanctions, having worked out ways to circumvent them, says Clarke.

"The only thing that would make Putin reassess is losing territory on the battlefield in some relatively serious way."

He adds: "The Biden administration, famously, they gave Ukraine enough to stop losing, but not enough to win."

European armaments are too underdeveloped to help Ukraine this year, but if they are still fighting in 2026, "then things would look a bit different next year".

The current situation is "not quite a stalemate" but is "moving forward in Russia's favour but very, very slowly," says Paste BN' security and defence analyst Michael Clarke.

"They take some territory, they take some of the big cities, but then they don't get very far afterwards."

He says in 15 months the Russian army has "slogged away" to get 30 miles westward of the city of Avdiivka, which Moscow took in February last year.

Russian forces "should be 30 miles away within 48 hours if they've made a strategic breakthrough" but instead have only "covered 30 miles in 15 months," he adds.

"So are the Russians likely to make a strategic breakthrough? I don't see it. Looking at the reinforcements they've brought on stream, their army's getting less and less expert, just bigger."

He says the Russian army is "like a sponge: if you hit it, it just gets absorbed, but equally the sponge doesn't have that much of a punch of its own".

Elon Musk rushed thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine to replace communications services destroyed by Russia after its February 2022 invasion.

There have been concerns that Musk could turn off the service, though the Tesla and SpaceX owner said in March he would keep it running "no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy".

Clarke says Musk "certainly would" turn off Starlink if US President Donald Trump asked him to do so.

"The thing about Starlink is it is so technically superb - you've got to give Elon Musk credit," he says.

"Starlink is critical to Ukraine's war effort. It's not absolutely vital, but it is... they would miss it. And Europeans couldn't replace it quickly if Musk turned it off."

In terms of Europe paying for the service, Clarke points out that it already is.

"Poland pays $50m a year for all the Starlink terminals. There's 40,000 terminals, give or take, in Ukraine, and they're all paid for. The subscription is paid for by the Polish government."

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine is often called the first major drone war.

As the conflict has dragged on, drones without warheads have been used as decoys.

Their main task is to disrupt detection and interception systems targeting air threats, forcing the enemy to waste expensive missiles on fake targets.

Clarke says: "If they [Russia] send enough drones in waves, which they do, then a proportion can be just empty. 

"You're faced with 70 incoming drones in the first wave and you've got to decide, are you going to use 70 missiles to bring them all down and then find that in the next wave, you haven't got 70 missiles available?"

By increasing the number of drones with real warheads in each wave, the Russians then face weaker and weaker defences with stronger and stronger attacks.

He adds Russia has created a new type of Shahed drone that can vary its speed using AI, making it harder to track.

"The defender then needs AI to work out more carefully what's happening."

Drones are cheap, simple, can be launched from anywhere, and can overwhelm the defence.

Ukraine is currently bringing down 60% of each attack. 

At the point this reaches 30%, and Russia launches 200-300 drones three times a week, that "would change the situation in the air war".

The price of crude oil needs to drop to $50 or below per barrel in order to have an effect on Russia, Paste BN' security and defence analyst Michael Clarke says.

"Given their oil prices are drifting down, the Russians can live with $60," he says. He says that was thought to be a break-even price, where Moscow would not get so much income that they could fund the war.

"Now, if the price goes down to $50, even $55 by some analysis, then the Russians are in trouble," he adds.

"Then they're starting to actually break into their reserves to fund their war. They're not being able to fund it from energy income."

For reference, the current price of crude oil is around $63 per barrel.

Asked what could be done to force the price down below $50 per barrel, he says one key lesson from the war is that you cannot force the market to do something.

"You can't really manipulate the market in political ways, as we tried. So I don't think anything will force the oil prices down, except market conditions, because it's such a big industry," he explains.

"I don't think the Western nations can actually engineer it, because the market is just too powerful, but the market looks as if it is drifting downwards."

The Home Guard was an unpaid, armed citizen militia formed of men too old or young to serve in the military in the 1940s. Their task was to defend Britain against the Nazis in case of a land invasion.

The new government plans to revive the idea, with the group intended to protect Britain's key infrastructure from foreign threats and terror attacks.

Michael Clarke says the government knows that any announcement on this will be "full of Dad's Army" jokes.

"There'll be no shortage of Mr Mainwaring," he jokes, referring to Arthur Lowe's beloved character from the BBC sitcom.

He says the Home Guard would relieve the army and the police from "all sorts of things" and would come in especially useful "if we find ourselves in a militarised crisis with the Russians in the next ten years".

"It wouldn't be a joke," he adds. "It would be really important stuff. They would be properly trained and properly equipped and paid."

Clarke says the Home Guard could be brought into existence "in the next three to four years".

Paste BN' security and defence analyst Professor Michael Clarke says this is the fourth time he has heard the idea pitched.

Its failure in the 1960s was behind the anti-ballistic missile treaty because they knew a dome didn't work. 

The idea was then resurrected under Reagan and Bush in the 1980s and 2000s without success, he adds.

"Donald Trump is talking about the Golden Dome as if it's a version of Israel's Iron Dome.

"Israel's land area is 22,000 square kilometres. Britain's land area is something like 240,000 - so it's ten times bigger - and America's land area is almost 10 million.

"America is 400 times bigger than Israel, and the Israeli Iron Dome system is the best in the world, and it is not 100% [effective].

"The requirement is absolutely huge," he says, adding it would cost at least a trillion dollars.

A huge number of land-based interceptors are needed, and they have to be fired at missiles when they are launched, because otherwise the projectiles become too fast.

"The thing that might make it different... is supposing you could have the defences in space," says Clarke.

"That's heroic engineering. Can you take what you know exists on Earth and scale it up tenfold, put it in space, maintain it, put the whole system together, and know that the first time you use that system in anger, the first time you've ever been able to test the whole thing together, it will work to 98% effectiveness?

"Can't be done."

Could it work in US or UK?

Clarke says it is "much, much cheaper" to put things in space than it was when this idea was previously pitched, but "the idea of defending a big country is still economically impossible".

"You've still got the basic problems. It will still be cheaper to overwhelm the system than to actually keep the system up."

Missile defences are best at defending small areas - a "special dome" is "not technically feasible".

The UK could do with more missile defences for its ports and major systems, but just as an element of a deterrent, says Clarke.

"We don't have any real reliable defence at all against incoming missiles, apart from what the Navy has got in the Sea Viper system."