SO many numbers have been thrown up by Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. First there were military graphics in the newspapers bristling with figures, like a macabre game of Top Trumps. How many men, tanks and planes did the Russian president have massed at the border? What forces could Ukraine muster to defend itself?

Then there were the cost of sanctions, or of waging war, in euros, rubles and dollars. Finally, and most importantly, came the growing tally of lives lost, of women raped, of children bombed, of families fleeing. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the statistics of death and destruction emerging from Ukraine.

Read more by David Leask: https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/20056760.david-leask-george-galloway-branded-russian-state-affiliated-media-fair/

But there was one particular number that made me gasp when it was quietly revealed last month: 60. That is how many people working in the British Foreign Office can speak Russian. This petty little figure might not sound scary against the backdrop of a full-scale war between two of Europe’s biggest states.

But it should worry you. Because it tells you your government has had its eye off the ball.

We are eight years into Putin’s assault on Ukraine, the most serious and obvious security risk our continent has faced since the Second World War. We are two decades in to the Russian president’s ever more authoritarian and kleptocratic rule.

So you might imagine British authorities would have been beefing up their skills, their collective understanding of the continent’s biggest state. Nope. Five years ago Whitehall officials admitted they only had 83 people who spoke proficient Russian. The number has dropped by a quarter since.

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Britain’s foreign service, of course, is a shadow of its former imperial pomp. For years, old diplomats have been warning of the decline in language skills, especially Russian. Labour last month said the latest numbers showed ministers were “asleep at the wheel”.

We do not know anything about the Russian language capacity of UK intelligence agencies. And, in fairness, some of the decline in Russian is because British diplomats serving elsewhere in the former Soviet Union are learning local languages instead, which is no bad thing.

However, I think it is safe to say that British state institutions lack a cadre of civil servants and advisers with the basic language skills needed to understand what has been happening in eastern Europe.

Perhaps more worryingly, so does our wider society.

We have been wrong about Russia, and wrong about Putin. Repeatedly and seriously. Or many of us have been. We should be starting to try to work out why.

Me? I suspect a national deficit of language skills may prove to have been a factor.

Think of those Tories who took tainted cash from the waifs and strays of Russian exiles and expats in London, some of them politically exposed. Or of the supposedly left-wing anti-imperialists who ended up denying war crimes or human rights abuses on behalf of Putin or his proxies and cronies. Or those Scottish nationalists who – absurdly – decided that the propaganda channels of Europe’s most authoritarian unionist were just the same as the BBC.

Read more by David Leask: https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/19984701.david-leask-scottish-online-warriors-fall-putin-propaganda/

We tolerated this level of cupidity and stupidity for the best part of two decades. Would we have done so if we had more people who were familiar with what was actually going on in Russia? If we had more pundits, politicians and, yes, punters who could patter po-russki? Maybe not. At least not quite so easily.

Speaking Russian, of course, doesn’t make you an expert on Russia any more than speaking English makes you an expert on England.

And, it has to be said, there are a lot of Russia-watchers who have misjudged Putin. A good few, for example, earlier this year thought that Kremlin troops massing on Ukraine’s borders were there as a show of force, as an exercise in heavy-metal diplomacy. Clueless myself, I remember hoping they were right and fearing they were wrong.

The global leader with the best non-native Russian – ex-chancellor Angela Merkel – is now facing difficult questions about Germany’s Ostpolitik on her watch.

So there is no linguistic magic bullet for getting foreign or defence policy right. And there are plenty of voices without language skills worth hearing on the current conflict, on its causes and consequences.

But have we got a knowledge gap? I’m afraid we do. The state will no doubt try and address its specific language skill deficit. There will be a rush to get civil servants and others up to the required level. Universities, which find language teaching expensive because of the smaller classes needed, will be chided to boost their capacity on Russian.

This is often how language-learning policy goes, with knee-jerk fads for Chinese one decade, then Arabic the next. It is a recipe for the kind of failures we have seen on Russia.

We need to ensure we have people with a whole variety of “country and language” skills. For national security, if nothing else.

You never know where the next threat – or opportunity – will come from. Scottish authorities, meanwhile, met the

challenge of Putinism by abolishing Higher Russian.

So here is one more shocking number: how many teenagers does the Holyrood government think should leave school with a basic indigenous qualification in the most spoken language in Europe?

Zero.