Ukraine war Michael Clarke Q&A: 'Russia would have defeated Germany and Italy' (2025)

Security and defence analystMichael Clarkehas just finished answering your Ukraine war questions - thanks to everyone who followed along and took part.

Scroll down through this live page to catch up, or check out the key points.

You can also watch it back at the top of the page.

Clarkesays Ukraine did manage a breakthrough on the frontline in Kharkiv in 2022.

"They threw the Russians out of most of the Kharkiv province, and half of Kherson, they threw the Russians out onto the other side of the river," he says.

"So they can do it. But what it takes to do it is firstly a concentration of forces, that they do not have at the moment, and secondly they caught the Russians by surprise on all those occasions in Kursk, in Belgorod, in Kharkiv and winning Kherson.

"They caught unprepared, less-than frontline Russian forces and took them by surprise. And they could still do that.

"What they can't do is bring big force to bear on a front where the Russians are expecting them. And neither can the Russians.

"Neither side is able to make a strategic breakthrough.

"They have made it when they've taken the other by surprise, but only in those conditions."

Poland would have fared just like Ukraine, but Germany or Italy would have rolled over, Michael Clarke says.

"They couldn't have withstood it without Article 5," he explains.

"Poland and Germany and Italy were so completely militarily unprepared that they relied on Article 5 effectively to protect them.

"The nature of the article means an attack on one shall be interpreted as an attack on all."

Clarke then sets out the various scenarios.

"A Russian attack against Germany, who would win? Russia.

"A Russian attack against Italy, who would win? Russia.

"A Russian attack against Poland, who would win? It would probably end up a bit like the Ukraine war now."

Watch below: Special Sky News report on whether Germany is ready for war

Focusing on Poland, Clarke says the country is emerging as a major power.

He says the army is moving towards "200,000 with a big reserve, 5% of GDP, they're going to spend on defence, the Poles are taking this very seriously".

"They are the third biggest armed forces in NATO behind Turkey and the US - they are emerging as a major player."

Some quickfire questions for Michael Clarke now...

Can Putin be arrested if he were to enter Turkey?

A short answer here - no.

That's because Turkey is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court.

"Putin is free to travel to Turkey because they're not bound to arrest him," Clarke adds.

"If you travel to Italy, they are a signatory, they'd be bound to arrest him or to create some mechanism which says, we derogate from the ICC for the next two weeks to allow this summit to take place."

How likely is it that the Russian army morale breaks, given the huge casualties?

In a sense, the morale is already broken, because Russia is using them in "human wave attacks", Clarke says.

"The latest information from the Institute for the Study of War, which is very good on these things... they say that they're pretty sure now that Russia is replacing its battlefield losses, which it wasn't doing until recently," Clarke adds.

"But these people have got a month's training, so they do a month's basic training for being a civilian. And then they go to the battlefield, they go to the front, and the morale is pretty bad."

However, Clarke says he doesn't think there's any chance the Russians are "going to crack", because they're able to feed more and more people into the war.

"And they've got a war economy, which is feeding stuff in some, pretty good stuff."

Can the UK be protected against multiple conventional missile attack?

The short answer is no.

"We're wide open to ballistic missile attacks in this country," Clarke says.

"The only defence we've got, Sea Viper missiles, which are on destroyers, we've got six of those, but only three of them are operational at the moment."

But those missiles are to defend the destroyer itself.

"The idea that they could defend any significant part of the UK is fanciful," Clarke says.

The UK has never had to think about this until recently, Clarke adds.

The Ukrainian air force said earlier today that it lost an F-16 fighter jet after an "unusual situation" on board, but the pilot was able to safely eject.

A commission has since been appointed to investigate all the circumstances of what happened, but it did not appear to be a result of Russian fire.

Addressing a question about what happened,Michael Clarke says it is the second jet Ukraine has lost.

"It's not surprising that if the F-16s are in action, that some of them will be lost," he says.

"It could be to another jet, to ground-based fire, a technical fault, or it could be friendly fire, that does happen.

"The main thing is that the pilot ejected and is in safe hands on the Ukrainian side of the border and the jet, one hopes, is also on the Ukrainian side of the border."

Clarke says if the jet has fallen on the Russian side of the border, he predicts they will be stripping the aircraft down and "having a good look at it".

Speaking specifically about the F-16s, Clarke says they are a "previous generation of aircraft" but are still "pretty good" when reconditioned.

"They are good for lots of things, including air-to-air fighting and ground attacks," he says.

"They won't win the war for Ukraine, but they are certainly glad to have them. [We think] they have around 100."

It's nothing to be particularly alarmed about at the moment, Michael Clarke says.

"They're opening up some bases on the Norwegian and on the Finnish border, there are about four or five bases.

"Some of them are old air bases that are reopening and they look as if they're opening or starting a base for armoured vehicles and for troops.

"So there are four or five areas, in which they're opening several bases."

But Clarke says those bases are to be expected.

"Finland joined the alliance and Russia said we will respond and they are responding by, as it were, strengthening that border.

"But it's nothing to be particularly alarmed about at the moment."

He adds that Russia is strengthening Kaliningrad, although they haven't got much there at the moment.

"The Russians could increase their forces in that area by anything between 30 and 50%."

Clarke says "everything we know about Putin's belief and the people around him is absolutely consistent, Ukraine does not deserve to exist as a state".

"When people ask me this question, I refer to a very long essay that Putin produced, I think in July 2021 the year before the war started, which was on the historical nature of Russian and Ukrainian society.

"Historically, it was rubbish, but it was a long, long essay about how Ukraine really isn't a proper state and so on, so forth.

"You look at that, and I remember at the time, my friends in the security business saying to me, 'look at that document. That document really is authentically Putin'. And I heard that from a number of people."

Clarke adds that after the Munich Security Conference in 2007, it was clear Putin never accepted Ukraine as a state.

"There is a sense that Putin's work will not be seen as done to him, if - by the time he leaves power or dies - Ukraine is not reabsorbed into Russia.

"He's absolutely consistent on that. And there's no ambiguity about it."

That's not surprising, our security and defence analyst Michael Clarke says.

He explains that there are two possible things the delegations would have discussed.

"One is some of the peripheral issues, such as prisoner exchanges, prisoner swaps, but they've been going on regularly in any case, so they don't need to go to Istanbul to agree to another prisoner swap," Clarke says.

"Possibly the issue of getting Ukrainian children back, as that's quite a sensitive one for the Russians because they have to admit that they've been abducted to make some progress there.

"I'm sure the rest of it was about, as Marco Rubio said, negotiations about negotiations, talks about talks."

What peace talks are like behind the scenes

Clarke points out that Rubio previously said there had been enough talks about further talks.

"I'm pretty sure that when we see what comes out of this Istanbul meeting, it'll be negotiations about something new."

He goes on to explain that the first couple of hours in these kinds of meetings are taken up by opening statements.

"What they normally say is there's an agenda, you go through the order of items, and everybody goes through their agenda.

"Coffee break, and then you come back, and somebody says 'what are you going to say in the communique'? So you argue about the wording, which is read out by the chairperson.

"Whoever it is, you can use up two hours doing nothing at all."

So, can Ukraine at least give the Russian delegation a sense of what they would want from a peace deal?

Michael Clarke says Ukraine could offer to never join NATO, maybe even to stay out of the EU.

"But they have to know that Russia would leave them as a viable state that could arm itself," he adds.

"And that's what the Russians won't live with at the moment."

They want to create a Ukraine that's a "non-viable state" with no "appreciable armed forces" - so that it's wide open to a future invasion, so that it's not economically viable.

In other words, they want a state that "hasn't got a lot going for it", despite its size.

"There's no reason to believe that he actually wants a long term peace, because that's not good for his rule," he says about Vladimir Putin.

"The Ukrainians now know that what they offered before the war started in 2022, 2021, is probably not adequate anyway, but it's all they could logically offer if they are to remain a viable sovereign state."

Putin would like to be like Stalin "in many respects", our security and defence analyst Michael Clarke says.

"Stalin wasn't that clever, he was completely deceived by Hitler," he explains.

"Stalin went into the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939, which basically blew the whistle on the Second World War beginning.

"Then Hitler turned on him in June 1941, and Stalin was completely naive about that."

Clarke says that's something everybody could see coming.

"He should have known, his intelligence were telling him the Germans were planning this enormous operation.

"Everybody could see it coming but he still stuck to the terms of the deal hoping he somehow had a special line with Hitler, and he didn't.

"Stalin hoped against experience that it would be okay, but they were then confronted with the enormous invasion, of which 27 million Soviet citizens died in the Second World War.

"Most of those, proportionately, were in Ukraine."