Charlie discusses how individuals and organisations can prepare for increased tensions with Russia and gives an insight into what other countries are doing to be better prepared for escalation.
“Prepare for the big war and pray it never comes” – Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukrainian politician.
I was at the RWN (Resilience World Nexus Summit) conference in London this week. The organisation is a new conference organiser, and there were lots of senior people speaking, so I thought it would be interesting to go along. As with any conference, there was a mix of really interesting talks and many dull ones. Much of the format was panel discussions, which I don’t really enjoy.
One particular session stood out for me, and this was the session on ‘Ensuring Readiness for Geopolitical Uncertainty Today and Tomorrow’. Two of the panellists’ thoughts particularly struck a chord with me. They were Justin Crump, CEO of Sibylline, and Oleksandr Kamyshin, a Ukrainian former minister and politician whose office develops cooperation with German and European partners. Justin Crump is an excellent speaker and is often seen on TV, while Kamyshin was a big guy dressed all in President Zelenskyy’s black, and you certainly wouldn’t want to mess with him politically or in a pub fight.
Part of their talk was on a possible war with Russia. The panel asked how many of the audience felt that we were already at war with Russia, and perhaps half to two-thirds of the audience put up their hands. They then asked who had a plan for war if it started, and three put up their hands. Their point was that we need to prepare for a war, or an escalation of a war, with Russia, and that the event was fairly inevitable.
They talked about a European blind spot in 2022, when many politicians and leaders refused to believe that Russia would invade Ukraine, although all the signs were there, from tanks massing on the border, to field hospitals stockpiling blood, which you don’t normally do if you are conducting an exercise. However, we chose denial bias, and it came as a shock to many when it happened. The panels’ argument in their talk was that we are choosing the same denial bias or grey rhino thinking: that a full scale war won’t happen and Russia wouldn’t dare to escalate its war with Europe further.
We, in the UK, feel that we are perhaps isolated from the worst of a war, as there is quite a lot of continental Europe and the Channel between us and Russia, so we are better defended than most. However, we have already had a number of attributed Russian attacks, such as the Salisbury poisonings, the Leyton warehouse arson in March 2024, and arson attacks against properties linked to Prime Minister Keir Starmer in May 2025. So despite being far from Russia, we have been attacked.
Those in Europe are taking this more seriously. A client of ours, a pharmaceutical company in Germany, where pharmaceutical companies are considered critical infrastructure, is working with the German government as part of Operationsplan Deutschland, which is coordinating military defence with civilian support, including businesses, transport and logistics, in preparation for a possible conflict. On my Camino walk a couple of weeks ago, I was speaking to an Estonian dentist. She didn’t strike me as a prepper, but she had a grab bag ready to flee her house at short notice if there was a possible Russian invasion of her country. Perhaps not all her fellow countrymen had done the same level of preparation, but it struck with me, as those who have Russia as neighbours take the threat seriously.
If we believe that war is inevitable, or at least that there is a high likelihood of the present low-level conflict escalating further, then what should we do to prepare for it? I think we need to consider a number of scenarios and have prepared, or at least thought through, our possible responses. The difficulty for me in these cases is what level we should prepare for.
If we got to a WW2 level of war, where the country’s survival is under threat and the country has to have mass mobilisation and a war economy, many of the organisations we work for would perhaps cease to exist or would pivot from what they do now and use their skills to support war aims. Car manufacturers would be building tanks, software and IT companies would be designing software for drones, and many financial institutions would be closed down and their people conscripted. I am not sure how far we need to plan for this, even if it is likely that what our company produces is not needed in a total war.
Perhaps what we can plan for is an escalation of hybrid warfare, with attacks on infrastructure and utilities. How would we continue to operate if undersea internet cables were cut? If there were attacks on the UK grid or water infrastructure, could our organisations continue, and how would we deal with this? There is also an interesting question about our responsibility as a company to our employees. Do we have a role in helping them prepare and providing for them if an incident impacts their home life, or is our responsibility to the company, with the response to attacks on infrastructure being a government issue? There was an interesting conversation on the panel about the resilience of the Ukrainian people, how they are very self-reliant and don’t expect the government to come to their aid. In the UK, we are much less resilient and expect the government to help us when a disaster occurs.
I am still forming my ideas on what we should be doing about this. Perhaps in the UK, we are suffering from the bystander effect. When we see something happening or about to happen, we presume it is someone else’s responsibility. If everyone appears unconcerned, we can conclude that help is unnecessary, even when something is clearly wrong. I think it is time within the business continuity community to start asking the questions: what are we doing, and what does planning look like? Perhaps a good start might be for the government to issue some planning assumptions which we can then work to, to ensure that we are all preparing for a similar scenario. There is some information on the National Risk Register under ‘Conflict and instability’, but it is quite brief. Wishing this risk away is not going to stop it happening. Although some may say we are doom-mongering, if there is a reasonably high likelihood of this happening and a high impact, we should, as professionals, do something to prepare ourselves, our families, and the organisations which employ us.
