NATO member the U.K. will face different threats from Russian missiles over the next two decades, a new research report will warn, as European members of the alliance scramble to plug gaping holes in the continent’s air defense network and rapidly rearm.
The U.K. needs to boost its defenses against Russian missile attacks in the coming years by putting better shields around the important military sites Moscow would hope to target with cruise missiles, a report published by the influential British defense think tank, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) will say on Thursday.
Since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Russia has debuted several new advanced weapons it claims are very difficult or impossible for Western air defenses to detect.
At the same time, the air defense network NATO members would rely on in the event of a Russian attack is threadbare and officials are clear that air defenses are a top priority as the alliance’s members hunker down to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. The Financial Times reported in May 2024 that NATO had just 5 percent of the air defenses it needed to cover the alliance’s eastern and central European members in the event of a full-scale attack.
“In the near future, Europe would be unable to defend itself against a Russian attack,” one Czech defense official told Newsweek earlier this year.
Providing air defense batteries and equipment to Ukraine has stretched Europe, and American experts have warned there is no joined way for the U.S. to reliably intercept large-scale intercontinental ballistic missile attacks from Russia or China.
President Donald Trump‘s Golden Dome, currently being developed by the Pentagon at what is expected to be a huge cost, is being positioned as a way to protect the U.S. from “aerial attacks from any foe,” including all types of sophisticated missiles.
“Different components of the Russian threat are likely to become acute at different periods during the next two decades,” according to the RUSI report, penned by the think tank’s senior research fellow, Sidharth Kaushal.
Russian cruise missiles will be the main threat to the U.K.’s military installations in the short term before Moscow can build up significant numbers of its more experimental weapons, the report says.
Russia first deployed its new Oreshnik—”hazel tree,” in Russian—intermediate-range ballistic missile against a site in central Ukraine in November 2024. The missile had several warheads that landed in different locations as part of what is known as a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV).
The Kremlin has also wielded the Kinzhal and Zircon hypersonic missiles against Ukraine, touted by Russian President Vladimir Putin back in 2018 as two of the country’s “next-generation” weapons.
For the moment, Russia can only roll out Oreshnik missiles on a limited scale, and Moscow prioritizes its hypersonic weapons for deterring the U.S., according to the RUSI report.
But the U.K. will need to quickly work out how best to protect against Russian cruise missiles, including using surface-to-air missile systems, before knuckling down with preparations for ballistic or hypersonic onslaughts, the report said.
Cruise missiles will be the main Russian threat for the next five years, but “beyond the mid-2030s, however, it is likely that the threat spectrum will broaden,” according to the report. “Beyond 2040, defences against targets such as hypersonic glide vehicles will also become a higher priority.”
A British military official said earlier this year the U.K. had simulated what a Russian strike on the country would look like based on Russia’s initial waves of strikes on Ukraine in 2022, remarking: “It was not a pretty picture.”
“It reinforced the fact that we really need to get after this,” said Air Commodore Blythe Crawford—who retired as the Commandant of the U.K.’s Air and Space Warfare Centre in April. It is understood some of the missiles penetrated U.K. simulated defenses.
It is generally accepted that air defenses are unlikely to consistently intercept all high-volume incoming aerial attacks, but layers of different systems try to mitigate as many threats as possible.
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