Britain has every right to defend itself from Russia’s aggression

Russian President Vladimir Putin (Alamy)

4 min read4 hr

Vladimir Putin says Russia attacked Ukraine with a new medium-range missile “in response to the use of American and British long-range weapons on 21 November”.

“We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities,” Putin said.

The following day, Russia expelled a British diplomat, making allegations of espionage that Downing Street has described as baseless.

Twenty-one years ago, relations between Russia and Britain reached their apogee when Putin was granted full membership of the G8 and paid the first state visit to the UK by a Russian leader since 1874.

We were cooperating with a reforming Russia in every conceivable way – even helping to dismantle nuclear-powered submarines, destroy chemical weapons, and retrain officers for civilian life. Nato was building a partnership with Russia that encouraged Putin publicly to acquiesce in the entry of the Baltic states to Nato in the second enlargement.

Now relations could scarcely be worse. Putin’s repeated threats play large in western media, which is his intention. He has used nuclear blackmail and is doing all he can to influence the electorate in Germany, the second-largest provider of aid to Ukraine (after the United States), where the CDU candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, favours sending Taurus missiles to Ukraine.

Putin is of course seeking to raise the stakes in anticipation of the new Trump administration, not just rhetorically but also by expending missiles and pushing forward on the battlefront with record losses of men and materiel.

The Russians are aggressing against us and Nato partners by every means short of a direct military attack

Putin’s threats need to be seen in context. We are conscious of the acute stress in Ukraine but much less widely reported are the pressures on Putin and his system. It is not easy for him to replace the 1,000 to 2,000 troops his army is losing each day.

For fear of a public backlash, he has held off a second mobilisation (and, humiliatingly, gone cap in hand to Kim Jong Un for men and weapons). His economy is in a mess, skewed by the costs of war. Gazprom is bust; oil revenues are falling; industry is suffering from technological backwardness accentuated by sanctions and acute labour shortages; infrastructure is crumbling; and the war is starving health, education and welfare of funds. It is set to get worse.

This will not stop Putin. Thus far, he has shown no sign of compromising in his drive to force Ukrainian capitulation (assisted, he hopes, by scared westerners); but it gives him an incentive to find a way out which he can call victory.

From Soviet times, the Russians have always picked out the UK when seeking an adversary in Europe. The British were, and still are, seen as hardliners in Nato. Ex-KGB officers like Putin will never forget that we threw out 105 Soviet spies in 1971, and more recently generated mass expulsions from the West after the Skripal attack.

So, are we at war? No. We still have diplomatic relations, and it is important to maintain channels of communication. Russia and Nato have always taken extreme care to avoid a direct attack upon each other. The Russian high command well understands the potential consequences. We are not deploying forces in Ukraine. For all their bluster about escalation, the Russians know that it is legitimate for us to help Ukraine to defend itself against a Russian attack – and one which uses foreign as well as Russian-made missiles, drones and artillery shells.

But we are in a proxy war (as happened at times during the cold war). The Russians are using threats of war and are aggressing against us and Nato partners by every means short of a direct military attack: cyber-attacks, testing air defences, surveying and possibly cutting undersea cables, subversion, arson, assassination, fake messaging on social media, interference in elections and doubtless more.

We have every right to respond robustly. That is not war or escalation. It is self-defence.

Sir Roderic Lyne is a former UK ambassador to Russia

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