How Refreshing? An Initial Assessment of the UK’s Integrated Review Refresh

“War is messy, and we have already seen how the conflict is spreading away from the frontlines,” said Emily Ferris, the Russia and Eurasia research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, RUSI, a London-based defence and security think tank. She cited attacks on infrastructure in southern Russia and deep inside Ukrainian territory, as well as instances where missile debris had landed in Poland and Moldova. “Some of these are accidental, some are not,” she said. “But the closer the two sides come to a war of attrition, the riskier the behaviour is becoming.”

As Russia's army struggles in Ukraine and the United States warns China against supplying Moscow with weapons, Beijing faces a choice it had hoped to avoid, said Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute, a London think-tank. "Either they do nothing and risk seeing Russia humiliated in Ukraine, which is not in China’s interest. Or they come to Russia’s aid and risk a much bigger deterioration in their relationship with the United States and other Western countries," he said in a telephone interview.

Ukraine needs extra lines of defense to ensure that public money is used effectively during the war and to secure the integrity of reconstruction funding after the war, according to a conference at Press Club Brussels Europe last week. The first line of defense is the institutional framework of anti-corruption and audit agencies. The other line of defense is civil society and investigative journalism which is active in the middle of the on-going war. This was the main conclusion of a conference (14 March) organized by the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies (CFCS) at RUSI Europe.

“War is messy, and we have already seen how the conflict is spreading away from the frontlines,” said Emily Ferris, the Russia and Eurasia research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, RUSI, a London-based defence and security think tank. She cited attacks on infrastructure in southern Russia and deep inside Ukrainian territory, as well as instances where missile debris had landed in Poland and Moldova. “Some of these are accidental, some are not,” she said. “But the closer the two sides come to a war of attrition, the riskier the behaviour is becoming.”