The Kremlin has once again issued dire threats against the United Kingdom and other European states as it insists Western nations that assist Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s invasion are party to the conflict and will face “unpredictable” consequences.
The recent surge in Russian attention on The United Kingdom’s part in aiding Ukraine, manifested in a series of threats ranging from dark allusions to nuclear war to warnings of hybrid warfare attacks on weapons factories on British soil, continues again with fresh comments from Moscow’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lead spokesman for the Foreign Minister, Maria Zakharova, made the latest threats at a press conference on Thursday, stating the responsibility for escalation rests squarely on the shoulders of Western politicians.
The announcement by newly installed British Prime Minister Andy Burnham that his government will be releasing intellectual property to Ukraine to allow them to build Anglo-French bunker-buster cruise missiles domestically on Monday appears to have given particular impetus to Russia to make these complaints, above and beyond years of London actually handing over weapons and equipment. Following earlier threats on this subject, spokesman Zakharova said the presence of the missile in Ukraine is “literally the quintessence of London’s involvement in the Ukrainian conflict”.
She accused London and Paris of trying to “dodge responsibility for strikes deep into our country’s territory” by handing the blueprints to the deep strike missiles to Ukraine, but insisted this won’t work, and the lead nations in the Coalition of the Willing of Western states backing Ukraine will “bear direct responsibility for participating in terrorist attacks.”
Zakharova said Russia’s response to future Ukrainian strikes using British missiles and drones could include attacks on “any military sites and equipment of Britain in Ukraine, or beyond its borders”, and that by continuing to back Kyiv, Britain’s leadership are “playing with fire”. She went on: “The consequences may be completely unpredictable, including for them themselves.”
Making broader remarks on any nation that stands up to assist Ukraine, Zakharova added that “deployment of any foreign military contingents in Ukraine… is categorically unacceptable and will become legitimate military targets”. The United Kingdom does not officially have a major military deployment to Ukraine.
Russia has frequently resorted to such rhetoric throughout its invasion of Russia and, now as ever, whether they are bluster intended to deter Western aid to Ukraine or if they are sincere warnings of pending military action against NATO remains obscure. While the Russian MFA also namechecked France and Germany in Thursday’s remarks, it remains the case that Britain is fixed as “evil number one” to the Russian public, whith Moscow now long portraying London as the secret power pulling the strings behind the Western alliance and working to confound Russia’s legitimate desires.
Britain — “Perfidious Albion” — uses smaller European nations as “pawns” to further the aims of the “Anglo-Saxon” alliance, Zakharova’s boss Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in 2025. “This is well known”, he added.
Yet the pretext for today’s Russian hype of the missile blueprints being handed to Kyiv was immediately undermined by simultaneous comments from another Kremlin spokesman, which as Russian state media reported had stated that the blueprints were useless to Ukraine because they couldn’t build anything with them. The Storm Shadow missile requires “serious” industrial capacity, Major General Sergey Lipovoy said, and Ukraine lacks this because the Russian military has “been destroyed by our forces’ systematic strikes”.
Any attempts by Ukraine to build sophisticated Western weapons would be “chaotic” and doomed to fail, he said”, warning any home-built Ukrainian missile launch would be liable to veer dangerously off-course and bomb the territory of its allies instead.