Putin can still blow up Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, and the West can swallow it - Colonel Grant

A very dangerous scenario is unfolding, in particular, around Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. At one time, Russians threatened us that they might use tactical nuclear weapons. We understand that President Joseph Biden said that this danger is quite high. And now we see this scenario with the so-called peaceful atom. Russian terrorists could use either explosives or blow up reactors or pumps from cooling reservoirs to create a major man-made disaster. Their behavior in the Kakhovka dam bombing showed the seriousness of their intentions, but the key here is the response of the West if they do indeed implement this hellish scenario

I'm sure that the West in the first place has actually told Putin through back channels that this is not a good idea. I mean the American government has set clearly that releasing a nuclear сloud which is effectively what this would do will be this considered as an attack on NATO because the nuclear сloud will go into NATO countries inevitably. So I think that the logical thing is that the Russians won't want to do this. However, we're not dealing necessarily with the logical animal when we're dealing with Putin and it's always possible that Putin sees that this is what he needs to do to stay in power.

Before actually looking at any other Western response, one has to remember that most of this war is being fought for Russian public opinion. What Putin is doing is public opinion, and he will need to look carefully. Does public opinion want him to blow up the power station or not? And if he thinks public opinion will support him or will make him stronger because he does this, then he will do it.

We need to look inside Russia to see what Russia is talking about and how Russia thinks before doing something else. The West is going to be really upset if this happens but I still wonder whether people will do any more than they've done previously. Nothing happened when the dam was blown. Which I found really challenging to my brain because if a dam was blown up like this in any other country in the world, even China, western countries would have been rushing aid, equipment or sniffer dogs, you name it. They'd have sent as much as they possibly could to the area, as they always do for disasters, but they did nothing. I worry that nothing might be the thing that happens again.

Vilnius Summit is coming up. Russia will escalate, but the key story, dear Colonel, is what possible scenarios will unfold at the Vilnius Summit?  In particular, we are talking about the so-called security guarantees for Ukraine on its way to NATO. We understand that this is an extremely serious matter. If the United States or the United Kingdom can conclude a specific security agreement with Ukraine, it will also mean a lot. Taiwan, for example, is not a NATO member, but Taiwan feels safe, and this is true for a number of other America's Euro-Atlantic partners who are not NATO members. I would like to see a very specific formula, whether we can achieve it in the current situation or whether we can get by with so-called palliatives.

That's a very sharp question. And I hate to say this but we're gonna have to wait for the Summit to see what actually comes out of it. Because it's not clear at the moment where the strength of argument lies. The White House talks a good talk but a lot of the times when it comes to the critical thing, they actually back down like with ATACMS and F-16. The security guarantees are of the same order. Will they give a security guarantee other than NATO? Well, perhaps but nobody's talking about it. There's nothing out in newspapers saying this has been agreed. There's no rushing around between capitals of people trying to create security guarantees. My feeling is that there is going to be nothing new after this Summit in terms of guarantees. I may be completely wrong. But I just don't sense that there is something happening because there are no discussions. And for security guarantees, you need people like Blinken to be going around the capitals for France, Germany, Britain and discussing what they're going to do and how it's going to happen. Now that may be a good thing. The fact they're not discussing may mean that there's a stronger argument towards NATO membership. But remember NATO membership is still got to overcome the hurdle of Hungary and the hurdle of Turkey. And both of those are still not convinced I think about NATO membership for Ukraine. So this could be a very difficult week for Ukraine. I don't see anything really extra positive outcoming out of this. But again, as I said, I may be wrong. It may be that countries are going there and we will hear what we want. But I think you have to be realistic and expect that you may not hear what you want as a country. And then the fight continues, and as I've said before the government has to start taking the war seriously, which is still not at the moment.

For me, the most characteristic indicator of how a particular military doctrine of assistance to Ukraine will be implemented is the allocation or non-allocation of F16s and ATACMS missile systems. We understand that these are extremely serious weapons, and we need them, our soldiers need them, as our commander in chief, General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, very clearly in his recent interview outlined what we need, as well as his vision of how things should be done. On the other hand, he also testified to an extremely important story, that is, even if the Russians commit an unprecedented crime, including the use of possibly tactical nuclear weapons, even if they are wrapped in the format of Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant, Ukraine will not give in, because the Russian interventionists leave us no other choice.

I think that would actually harden everybody in Ukraine even more than it's possible. To take the weapon systems as they are, in the context of ATACMS, I think not giving ATACMS to Ukraine has nothing to do with Ukraine. This has to do with the US and ATACMS because this is a key weapon system, and the US still has to keep one eye towards Taiwan and China, and it cannot give everything that is really serious to Ukraine. Okay, it could give some and that will make a difference but I suspect that the advice is to hold on to those because we may need them.

F-16 is a different thing. America does not need its f-16s. It's got many more in store that it could actually give, and I am both surprised and disappointed that they haven't taken this more seriously to actually help Ukraine take them. I do understand that there is a logistics problem on the Ukrainian side, that the Ukrainian system is not geared to managing a complex weapon system like F-16 but having said that we said the same about Patriot. And Ukraine has actually managed that quite well. So I think that the countries with F16 should take a risk and give them to Ukraine, and then work out how to keep them in the air afterwards.

Are there other weapon systems we need well, I think one of the things that I would say and I've written it and I would go back that actually Ukraine needs not just big ticket items like ATACMS and F-16, but a lot more small infantry systems to actually help because the bottom line with ATACMS will not buy you ground. F-16 will not buy you ground. The only thing that can buy ground is infantry, ordinary people fighting, and it will be a lot better if they had more night sights, more mortars, mortar ammunition, generally more infantry equipment, more small drones because then they will push Russia back much faster than they are doing now. So it's the infantry and infantry equipment, countermining equipment. Those are things that we should be spending more energy on for the front line, the necessarily the big ticket items.

With the Russians deeply entrenched in the south and the east, their logistics chains can be severed by long-range missile systems. We have seen how much the enemy's logistics have been changed as a result of the extremely successful campaign in Chongar, but on the other hand, we understand that Russian logistics there have been partially destroyed - this is extremely important, but the enemy continues to deploy plans.

One thing let's look at what you just said about the logistics. I mean, we've been destroying logistics for the last year and still the artillery is firing more at Ukraine than Ukraine is able to fire back at Russia. Just killing logistics is not doing it, also killing generals and still there are more of them.

You require the collapse of the army. Not just fighting them. Russia will try to keep the same shape for fighting that they have at the moment. It's very important for Russia because Russian soldiers and the Russian system does not like uncertainty at all. And therefore, they want certainty and certainty means face to face fighting. The last thing that Russians want is Ukraine to go behind them. Because that creates uncertainty, it means you need more radios to talk. It means you need commanders who actually have to think not just order. Russia will want to keep the battlefield in a square shape against Ukraine as much as possible. If they can bring in more people which they will I'm sure, they will just throw those people against Ukraine wherever they can to create this head to head fighting probably again around Bakhmut. And this is going to be the main thing they do. There isn't much else they can do except that because they don't have the capacity for clever fighting at the moment.

Russians have started using their reserve golden T-90M Breakthrough  tanks. They are burning extremely well, although I am not being flippant, this is extremely serious and high-quality equipment, but on the other hand, we understand that they cannot show anything fundamentally new in terms of strategy on the battlefield.

You know the answer to this. The people that are coming in are low quality and poorly trained. That doesn't mean that they are unintelligent and there lies a problem because if the Russian army starts recruiting more middle class people, then they're going to get people who've been in business and who are much more intelligent and will fight better than the alcoholic first couple of waves. But those people are also going to be more intelligent about thinking about what they're doing and they won't be happy with the leadership just throwing them as meat as they call it and dying. So this is actually maybe a bad thing for Russia. The other thing is I mean Putin's talking about recruiting 500,000 more people. Well, how do you train 500,000 who's going to do the training, for example? Who's going to find the equipment for them? I mean there already in the last months people have been coming to the front line without proper weapons, without being fed properly and without being prepared at all for this war. So I think if they recruit large numbers again, you're going to see exactly the same, maybe even worse that people coming to the front line who are totally untrained, just to rush them there as quickly as possible to fill holes that are now being created by Ukrainian forces pushing forward.

Dear Mr. Grant, you are not just a modest British colonel who, in his spare time, begins to study what is happening on the battlefield, study maps and so on. You communicate with a very large number of experts of various kinds, and I would like to ask you to give us a summary of the expert community's vision of possible Russian plans. How do they assess the new phase, or perhaps what is going to happen now, particularly on the Russian side?

The general feeling is that Russia will continue to do what it's doing at the moment because it doesn't actually have much capacity to do much else. So they're gonna throw more people into the battle in as many places as possible. We heard that people worried about the Wagner group possibly going to Belarus and then attacking from Belarus southwards towards Kyiv, but they can't do that. They don't have enough people. They don't have the training for that sort of battle. Even the Wagner group is good at head to head fighting.

And that's what they do because it requires courage. It requires a bit of nastiness and in the soul to fight like that, to attack like that, knowing that you are quite likely to die. The deeper the Russian army goes into society, the fewer people there will be happy to go forward and die.

The Russian plan is basically based upon the survival of Shoigu and Gerasimov's reputation and life on one side, which is to fight as hard as you can because I want to stay being Minister and I want to stay being Chief of Defense. So we have to win by throwing everything we can at the front line. And then Prigozhin who understands if you give him a bit more equipment and a few more convicts and things, he thinks he has the possibility to break through the line somewhere. But even if he does, his troops are not skilled enough or equipped enough to go anywhere. So they break through Bakhmut. Where do they go next?

They're not trained to do it. They don't have radios. They don't have the experience for anything other than First World War trench warfare type fighting. You will not see anything clever from Russia, I don't believe because they just don't have the mental capacity, the training capacity and the basic skills to do anything clever. It will be more of the same.

What do wise Euro-Atlantic experts say about the enemy's pain points?

No, I don't think it's fear of the enemy at all. Most of the experts I'm talking to are very clear that the West, especially the US, has not given enough equipment to win this battle properly. The experts are directing their attention more towards what is needed to win the war rather than the Russians. We all know what the Russians are like, we can see it. Now they've just built huge defenses because they can't do anything else really. And Ukraine needs better equipment. And as I said to you, Ukraine needs better infantry equipment, not centralized one that the general staff can use, but equipment that the infantry soldier can use so that he can get past mines, get into trenches and have the weapons that you actually need to fight in trenches. For example, I haven't seen any flamethrowers. Well flamethrowers were used in trenches a lot during WWI.

The Ministry of Defense should be looking at small mortars because that's how you can actually get ahead of you in trench lines. And the weakness of the Russian side is that they can't beat properly equipped Ukrainian troops individually, they can't beat them. But if the Ukrainian troops are not properly equipped, then lots of Russians will kill quite a lot just because of the numbers, the imbalance of numbers is there. So they're firing more - more artillery, more infantry small arms. The West needs to understand this and make sure that the weakness of the Russians is exploited by better trained and better equipped Ukrainian soldiers on the front line.

But on the other hand, we are also aware that the successes of the American coalition in Iraq during Desert Storm operation, for example, were due to the complete dominance of aviation. We understand how important the role of aviation, in particular of NATO countries, was in defeating the Milosevic regime.

I agree with you completely. I mean the war in Iraq was completely different because the Iraqi soldiers were simply not prepared for a major battle in this way. And they didn't have trench lines, and they didn't have deep trenches or anything else. They were much easier to overcome first by air and second by artillery because we were extremely strong in both. The strikes on those have basically broken everything up and most of them ran away.

We've not been able to do that because there's not been the same with Ukraine. Because as you say there are no F-16s and no A-10s as well, and the amount of artillery is still a lot less than that is required to do a major attack.

I shall finish by just saying that we are going to win. This could be a lot longer than people imagine. It could be a lot harder than people imagine because Russians in Russia seem to want to fight at the moment and I think that I go back to what I said on my previous interviews - the government needs to take this war seriously and start actually identifying what it needs to win not from outside, but what needs to be done inside to win?