Someone Else's War

Welcome to your weekly briefing.

Geopolitics is often thought of as a background consideration to the job. It shapes the travel advisories and the threat briefs, but it happens somewhere else, to someone else's principal, in a country we fly into and back out of.

That line between the war over there and the work over here is getting thinner. A conflict our client has no part in can still put their business, their staff, or their supply chain on someone's target list, and the people sent to do the damage may be hired locally, for cash, with no obvious tie to a foreign state. That is a harder problem than a known adversary at a known address.

This week, On the Circuit, we look at how a war a country is not fighting can still land on its doorstep, and what that means for the sites and people we protect.

Russia warned on August 27 that it could strike British military targets inside and outside Ukraine if Kyiv keeps firing UK-made long-range cruise missiles into Russian territory. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, at a Moscow briefing, called it the strongest such warning to date, and said London was close to being complicit in what she termed terrorism against Russian civilians. It came a day after Moscow accused Ukraine of hitting a shopping center in occupied Donetsk with a British Storm Shadow missile, and after London agreed to let Ukraine build those missiles locally.

The warning was the sharpest in a rising series. On August 18 the Russian embassy in London said Britain's support for Ukraine would carry consequences, after reports that drones from two British firms had been used in long-range strikes inside Russia. A former Russian deputy foreign minister told the BBC those consequences could include attacks, and that Moscow was betting NATO would not respond in force. British ministers said the support would continue.

For anyone responsible for security in Britain, the immediate risk is the campaign already under way, rather than a missile on London. Last October, five men were jailed for a combined 53 years over an arson attack on a Ukrainian-owned warehouse in Leyton, east London, that caused about a million pounds of damage in March 2024. The men were recruited through the Wagner Group, a private military organization acting for the Russian state, and they had also carried out surveillance on two businesses in Mayfair in preparation for further attacks. It was the first case prosecuted under Britain's National Security Act.

Counter Terrorism Policing described the use of British proxies as a new tactic favored by hostile states, and said counter-state-threat investigations have risen sharply. The same pattern runs across Europe, from an explosive drone found by a runway at Leipzig-Halle to a disrupted plot in Warsaw, with arson and sabotage repeatedly traced back to Russian intelligence. The targets are mostly commercial, from logistics depots to warehouses to companies tied, sometimes loosely, to Ukraine, rather than government buildings.

For those who are protecting people and sites in the UK, this changes who and what you consider as the threat. We are used to planning around a motivated individual, or a criminal after money or goods. The Leyton case is different. Ordinary men were recruited online and paid to set fire to a specific building for a foreign government, with a second target already under surveillance.

Would you spot pre-attack surveillance on a commercial site that you’ve never once thought of as a target. The good news is that this is preventable with the basics we already train for, from access control to surveillance detection to knowing who holds the keys. The warning is that those basics now have to cover sites that felt, until recently, like nobody's target.

The Tactical Medicine is your field guide when something goes wrong on a detail. It covers what to carry, what to do in the first few minutes when a casualty cannot wait, and how to keep someone alive until the professionals take over.

🇨🇩 DR Congo. The Ebola outbreak has reached 5,515 cases and 2,642 deaths, a fatality rate near 48 percent. Travelers who were in the country within the past 21 days cannot board US-bound flights.

🇮🇩 Indonesia. Protests returned to Jakarta and other cities around August 27, a year after unrest that killed at least ten. The US embassy told Americans to avoid the parliament complex and protest sites; a police post in Slipi was set alight.

🇳🇵 Nepal. A Himalayan flood has killed more than 390 people and left over 1,500 missing across Nepal and Tibet. Nepal's tourism department said 668 trekkers from 34 countries, including 90 Americans and 33 Britons, were out of contact.

🇮🇷 Gulf. Iran's security chief warned that any Gulf state joining new US sanctions would be treated as a target, and said Iran would again go after tankers in the Persian Gulf.

REGULATION. The UK's Security Industry Authority has opened a consultation on the biggest change to licence training in years. An in-date first aid qualification and an English-language test would become conditions of a licence for close protection officers, door supervisors and guards, alongside new content on drones, spiking and Martyn's Law. It affects more than 510,000 licences, closes on October 23, with new qualifications due in 2027.

FRAUD. An eight-month Interpol operation against West African crime networks led to 58 arrests across 22 countries and identified 263 suspects. Most arrests came in Johannesburg, where a syndicate ran romance and investment scams on retirees in English-speaking countries; about 2.67 million dollars was seized and 257 bank accounts blocked. Investigators also flagged a rise in sextortion aimed at teenagers.

You can close out a detail perfectly and still lose money on it, after the invoice goes out. Eighty-five percent of contractors are paid late, and a large part of what you are owed is recoverable, some of it a statutory entitlement almost nobody in this industry ever claims. There’s another less obvious loss too. The day rate that looks healthy on the booking email is not the money that reaches your account, and in April a tax change moved a liability back onto contractors without most of them noticing.

This week's premium piece is the admin half of the job nobody teaches on a course, written for a protection contractor rather than a generic freelancer: what your working status actually costs you, the rule change with your name on it, and how to collect what you are owed. It comes with two working tools, a status and true-cost calculator and a full invoicing and escalation pack, both built for how this industry actually invoices.

Q: A threat you'd written off comes back. What makes you re-add the countermeasure you cut?

🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️ Your own read on the ground (50%)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ A confirmed incident nearby (31%)
🟧⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ The client finally asks for it (13%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Something else (6%)

Your Comments:

VSM: "Detecting changes in the environment reveals evolving risks before they impact operations. This shows that proactive situational awareness is essential, especially when adapting or restoring security measures in response to shifting global threats."