The Kremlin controls the climate now — didn’t you hear?

A UK think tank claims Russia might secretly weaponise solar geoengineering to flood Europe. There’s no evidence, of course—but in today’s threat economy, fear pays better than facts

Only a certain kind of brain looks at solar geoengineering — once the preserve of sci-fi nerds and PowerPoint eco-panels — and thinks: “Oh yes, the Russians’ll weaponise that.

But that’s precisely the leap of logic performed by one Matt Ince, a former UK security insider now moonlighting at RUSI, who this week dropped a paper so laden with speculative menace it should have come with a tinfoil hat and a lightning rod.

The pitch? That Moscow might — just might, mind you — start fiddling with the sun to soak the rest of Europe in floods and fury. Not because there’s any evidence, oddly enough—Ince himself admits there isn’t—but because, well, Russia. And that, in 2025, is considered enough to prise open the taxpayer’s purse.

To be fair, the report waits until two-thirds of the way through to concede that there’s “no public evidence” the Kremlin has even considered this. But by then, the narrative has been built. The mind suitably massaged. The psy-ops complete.

The premise rests on solar geoengineering—stratospheric aerosol injection, cloud brightening, etc.—methods barely out of the lab, never mind the arsenal. These technologies, still debated among climate scientists, are framed here not as desperate tools to cool a warming planet but as a potential new front in hybrid war. Think Russian chemtrails with a strategic brief.

Apparently, the Kremlin’s now plotting to flood the Danube, torch the vineyards, and wreck your ski trip to Chamonix — all from a control room in a bunker outside Kursk. The sun goes dim over Geneva—not because of carbon emissions or planetary dysfunction—but because some GRU colonel decided it was time to brighten a few clouds. Allahu Akbar, even the weather is Russian now.

It’s vintage threat inflation. High on theatre, low on substance. The kind of stuff a BROSINT mind dreams up after one too many white papers and too few field notes. What used to be the playground of conspiracy theorists—weather control, chemtrails, electromagnetic sabotage—has been repackaged in the dulcet tones of policy prose. And it’s being sold not from an anonymous Telegram channel or X account but a think tank bearing a royal charter.

To its credit, RUSI does include the usual hedges. The “coulds” and “mights,” the solemn recognition that these technologies remain speculative, that there’s no proof, and so on. But that’s the trick. Float the theory, caveat it to death, then demand funding to explore it further. Ince calls for new governance structures, more surveillance, greater coordination. Of course he does. It’s a threat factory model: spin out menace, dress it as foresight, send the invoice; get paid.

This is not the careful work of sober strategists.It’s like shaking a snow globe and phoning in a flood warning. And yet it feeds into the broader pathology afflicting much of the West’s security commentary: which some call Russia Derangement Syndrome. A reflexive need to ascribe to Moscow powers both diabolical and divine. Putin becomes a Bond villain who poisons spies, rigs elections, and now—apparently—controls the climate. Worse still, a new 007 has yet to be cast, so who will save us?

It’s not enough that Russia can wage war. It must also be the source of every calamity: the blackout, the broadband glitch, the torrential rain. Somewhere, deep in the Urals, a console is manned by a figure in epaulettes and fur, adjusting levers to ruin your summer barbecue.

Ince’s work would be laughable if it weren’t symptomatic of something more serious: the complete militarisation of public policy. They no longer debate, they deter. They no longer negotiate, they isolate. Every angle comes back to escalation. It’s the only chord they seem to know. Even science fiction is now a casus belli.

In any sane strategic culture, you’d want your analysts to explore options—coercion, cooperation, contingency. But here we are, stuck in a moral binary where every Russian action is hostile, every Russian intention malign, and every Russian cloud pregnant with rain and revenge.

This is not serious analysis. It’s cosplay in a think tank blazer. And it hammers home a deeper truth: peace, in this ecosystem, is not the goal. It’s the enemy. The real danger isn’t that Moscow might one day weaponise the weather. It’s that the West's own institutions already have—where even a bit of drizzle becomes another reason to fund the next war.

Welcome to geopolitics in 2025. Bring an umbrella.