Russian fury grows over UK support for Ukraine

Tom Rogan

July 24, 04:07 PM July 24, 04:07 PM

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Ukrainian drones struck buildings in Moscow on Monday. The buildings targeted apparently included one just across the street from a Russian GRU intelligence service facility. Alongside last week’s Ukrainian strike on the Crimean Bridge, these strikes paint a picture of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vulnerability.

A similar picture is presented in Ukraine, where Russia’s war effort now exists largely as a defensive holding action. Contrary to media reporting, Ukraine threatens significant advances, having not yet committed most of its major armored and mobile infantry formations to its counteroffensive.

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As Putin suffers increasing vulnerability at home, the Kremlin and its supporters are growing anxious. And angry.

One particular target of Russia’s fury is the United Kingdom. It would be a gross understatement to say that the Kremlin has been shocked by the shift in the U.K.’s strategy toward Russia since the February 2022 start of the war in Ukraine. Successive U.K. governments, including that of then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had embraced an overt appeasement policy toward Russia. In return for billions of dollars in Russian private investments in the U.K. economy, British governments ignored rampant Russian espionage on U.K. soil and hesitated in the face of Putin’s foreign policy.

That has now changed. Since last year, the U.K. has sanctioned many Russian oligarchs and seized their assets. Three successive prime ministers have supported the U.K.’s provision of weapons, intelligence, and economic aid to Ukraine. And compared to the United States, the U.K. has taken a more aggressive, risk-tolerant posture in terms of its military support for Ukraine.

In ways both public and private, Moscow is showing it isn’t happy. British diplomats in Russia are receiving the kind of harassment once reserved only for Russia’s “main enemy,” the U.S. Russian rhetoric against the “Anglo-Saxon” U.K. is also heating up. The latest spark for Russia’s ire came with comments made by the head of the U.K.’s MI6 intelligence service last week.

Sir Richard Moore observed that a number of Russian officials have shared intelligence with MI6 since the start of the war in Ukraine. He encouraged others to do the same. In response, the prominent Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov used his Sunday evening show to lambaste the U.K. Mocking the U.K.’s inability to protect a former Russian MI6 agent, Sergei Skripal (who was targeted in a 2018 Russian GRU assassination plot), Solovyov described Moore as a “British piece of s***” and the U.K. as an impoverished “pathetic, weak” nation. Solovyov also offered a not-that-bad impression of the British accent.

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It would be easy to write off this rhetoric as the facile product of Russian propaganda. Still, it underlines the deeper Kremlin rage toward the U.K. Moscow had hoped the U.K.’s economic complications following Brexit would lead it to look inward and force it to retain Russian financial interests. Instead, the U.K. has seized the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to show its continued global relevance post-Brexit.

The U.K. evinces a failure of foresight on Putin’s part. And few things annoy Putin and his supporters as much as evidence of Putin’s misjudgment.