Are the UK and Russia already at war?

Russia is “at war” with the UK, according to a top UK defence expert and former chief adviser to the White House on Russia. “We’re in pretty big trouble,” Fiona Hill told The Guardian, describing a Britain caught between “the rock” of Vladimir Putin’s intransigent Russia and “the hard place” of Donald Trump’s unpredictable US.

While there has certainly been no formal declaration of hostilities between London and Moscow, Russia has long been “menacing the UK in various different ways” congruent with a war footing, said Hill. She cited “poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyberattacks and influence operations” with Britain as a target.

Unveiling the government’s Strategic Defence Review last week, including a commitment to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, Keir Starmer said that the UK would become “a battle-ready, armour-clad nation”. We cannot, he said, “ignore the threat that Russia poses”.

What did the commentators say?

It has been “steadily dawning” on the British governments of the past few years that “war is no longer something that only happens to other people a long way away”, said Keir Giles in The Independent. MI5 and MI6 have issued blunt warnings about Russia‘s “staggeringly reckless” acts of sabotage, with MI5 chief Ken McCallum “describing Russia’s mission of triggering ‘sustained mayhem’ on British streets”. These destabilisation attempts “have, until now, been isolated pinpricks and test runs across Europe”, but “could have devastating effects if delivered in a mass, coordinated fashion”.

In December, University of Hull national security professor Robert Dover wrote on The Conversation that “Russia is already at war with the West” and “has been so since its occupation of Crimea in 2014″. Then, Putin signalled that he was “prepared to escalate further and threaten wider military conflict” – a warning Nato and Western nations were slow to heed. Countries closest to Russia, such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Lithuania, grasped the threat “most keenly”, while it has taken years for the rest of Europe “to understand that they are dealing with a continual escalation”.

Neither war with Russia nor a full-scale attack on the UK is “an immediate threat”, said Eliot Wilson in The Spectator, but “the international security situation can change very quickly”, so failing to prepare “would bear the taint of criminal irresponsibility”. The UK’s renewed commitment to defence spending puts it in “good company” with Nato allies such as Poland and Germany, who are “aiming to transform their militaries to meet the challenge presented by Russia”, said NPR.

British people “might reasonably ask why Russia would attack them at home”, said The Independent’s Giles. One answer is the “very real sense in which the UK has been a problem for Russia”, with Britain leading the charge in galvanising “European and even American resolve to support Kyiv, pouring weapons into the country when others had written off Ukraine‘s chances of survival”.

What next?

For its part, Russia has denied any overt or covert attacks on the UK, and has criticised what it calls “a fresh salvo of anti-Russian rhetoric” in the government’s defence review.

“Russia poses no threat to the United Kingdom and its people”, said a statement from the Russian embassy in London. “We harbour no aggressive intentions and have no plans to attack Britain. We are not interested in doing so, nor do we need to.”