Why conflict with Russia is the new norm - and what it means for defence suppliers

As NATO leaders gather in Ankara this week for the Alliance's 2026 summit, one question underpins every item on the agenda: how long must the West sustain its confrontation with Russia? In this special edition, Jonathan Shaw argues that the answer is indefinitely - and that companies in the defence and security sector should plan accordingly.

Major General (Retd) Jonathan Shaw CB CBE served for more than three decades in the British Army. Commissioned into the Parachute Regiment, he fought in the Falklands campaign, commanded 2 PARA, and served as Director Special Forces before commanding the Multi-National Division (South-East) in Basra, Iraq in 2007. He ended his military career as Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff, where he was the first head of the UK's Defence Cyber Security Programme. Jonathan is now a Senior Advisor with Strategical to businesses and governments on defence, security and cyber issues, and remains a regular commentator and speaker on geopolitics.

Take Putin at His Word

When someone tells you what they think, it is best to pay attention. So when, in July 2021, President Putin issued a paper outlining his historical view of the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, and followed this up with a list of demands of NATO and the US in December 2021, we should take him seriously. For if we want to understand the current conflict in Ukraine, we need to understand his ideological position.

How can we summarise his position? Key is his view that the peoples of Ukraine, Russia and Belorussia are essentially one, dating back to the 9th century. The invasion of Ukraine is seen as an act of liberation, not conquest. His key demand in December 2021 was that there be no further NATO expansion eastwards; i.e., that Ukraine should be debarred from joining. He further demanded that NATO forces be withdrawn from Eastern Europe, i.e., former Warsaw Pact nations. These demands are all consistent with his long-term position that 'the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical catastrophe of the century'. His aim clearly is to roll back reality to 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall. His cyber invasion of Estonia in 2007, military invasion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia in 2008, and energy and trade coercion between 2009 and 2015 impacting Ukraine, Moldova, and other Eastern European states were all a prelude to his military annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine in 2014, from which his full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine is a natural extension. Under-reported at the time was Russia's use of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (Putin's modern version of the Warsaw Pact) to suppress disturbances in Kazakhstan in January 2022. I would judge that this successful use of the military to achieve his political objective encouraged him to do the same in Ukraine a month later.

Sovereignty Without Constraint

When we look at Putin's decision-making, we need to recognise that Putin takes, and is seen by his subordinates as having, a very particular definition of sovereignty. This follows the views of his philosophical guide, Alexander Dugin, who advocates civilisational sovereignty over national sovereignty (Ukraine falling under the overall Russian civilisational suzerainty). The President of Russia needs equally to be free from all global (i.e., external, non-civilisational) constraints if he is to be truly sovereign. A sovereign does not operate constrained by the rule of law - he is the law. Only a ruler free from all legal, cultural and behavioural norms can be truly sovereign. Knowing this, we should deduce that the only treaty worth signing with Russia is one that we can enforce when (not if) Russia breaks it - for they will when it suits them.

Why the War Will Outlast Its Rational End

Putin's ideological isolation is reinforced by his Covid-induced, health-obsessed paranoia, with access restricted to a closely filtered set of advisers. Thus, Putin is isolated both physically and ideologically from people who might speak truth to power. So Putin's view of the Special Military Operation (SMO) is likely to be wildly optimistic. This will prolong the war far beyond its rational end date, as will other dynamics which reinforce this.

One is Putin's fear of the effect on society if the one million soldiers mobilised in Ukraine come home to Russia. The precedents are not good. In 1905, the defeat in the war against Japan triggered the First Russian Revolution; devastating military defeats during the First World War were a primary catalyst for the Russian Revolutions of 1917; Stalin kept victorious troops on the new territories conquered in the Second World War precisely to minimise domestic disturbance; and the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was a primary catalyst in accelerating the collapse of the Soviet Union. Critically, Putin will recall how the Afghan operation had created economic exhaustion, a sense of loss of military invincibility and political disillusion; there are many symptoms of these arising in Russia now.

While the war economy Russia has created since 2022 is showing signs of strain now, this command economy actually suits the Russian collective culture of top-down direction. Putin will be loath to revert to a peacetime, more free-market model. And the economy has shown greater resilience than expected, which will fuel Putin's determination that Russia outlasts Ukraine in this attritional struggle. He will also be hoping that Ukraine's current technological drone advantage over Russia is only temporary. A century-old observation by a British general, 'Boney' Fuller, in the 1920s, identified what he called the 'constant tactical factor', whereby each technological advance creates an advantage that lasts only as long as it takes the adversary to create a counter and in turn seize the advantage. Ukraine has a drone advantage now, but this is not guaranteed to last.

After Putin: No Grounds for Optimism

For people who believe in the Great Man theory, Putin presents a classic exemplar of history being shaped by the impact of extraordinary individuals. Yet while Putin may present a particular articulation of Russian nationalism, Dugin's influence shows that he taps into a broader and more profound stream of Russian thought. His grievances with the collapse of the Soviet Union and resentment at the lack of respect for Russia, inherent in its downgraded global standing, are shared by many Russians. Surrounded now by sycophants and supporters of the SMO, an increasingly paranoid Putin will be aware that if he ends the invasion he faces the end of his rule and potentially his life. And we should not be optimistic about who follows him.

The fundamental flaw in regime change as a strategy is that it assumes that the current regime is an aberration; remove it and a better regime will emerge. This idea persists even though the evidence of regime-change interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran shows this does not work. For regimes tend to be manifestations of the culture of the society from which they come. Remove one set of leaders and another set with the same cultural biases will emerge. A gardening metaphor applies: the nature of the soil composition tells you what plants will flourish in that soil - don't fight the soil. In trying to plant democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, we fought the political soil - and lost. In assassinating one set of Iranian leaders, Israel and the US have empowered a more extreme version of the same mindset. Were Putin to stand down or be deposed, he would most likely be succeeded by a more extreme version of Russian nationalism, which is likely to continue his politics, potentially in a more extreme form.

The Planning Assumption

For reasons of Putin's own motivations and the likely course of his successor, the Russian threat is back and should be the planning assumption for geopolitical analysts and hence for commercial interests in the defence and security sector. The governmental challenge is to rebalance public spending built on the fruits of a peace dividend that now needs to be reinvested in defence and security. The sooner this happens the better, as the threat is mounting steadily and funding is needed now if the full range of industry, particularly SMEs, are to be kept in the market, available as the threat evolves.

What This Means for the UK Defence Market

Jonathan Shaw's assessment points towards a UK defence market shaped by sustained strategic competition rather than a temporary period of instability. If conflict with Russia is the new norm, then defence planning, industrial policy and commercial strategy must move beyond short-term reactions to the war in Ukraine and towards a longer campaign of deterrence, resilience and regeneration. For companies in the defence and security sector, that reframes the fundamentals of pipeline management: demand will be durable, but so will competition for it, and customers will place a growing premium on credibility, readiness, supply chain resilience and the ability to scale. Opportunity qualification and go/no-go decisions made against a short-war assumption deserve to be revisited against a long one.

The practical implication is that Business Winning in defence will increasingly favour organisations that treat it as a structured discipline rather than a series of reactive bids - building capture plans early, investing in sustained stakeholder engagement across the customer community, and grounding competitive positioning in genuine market intelligence. SMEs in particular will need to show not only technical innovation, but the campaign discipline to survive long procurement cycles, integrate into larger industrial teams, and respond as the threat evolves. The companies best placed to succeed will be those that treat the Russian threat not as a passing crisis, but as a structural feature of the market - and build their capability, partnerships and campaigns accordingly.