RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Aerospace & Defense Defying Russia, UK Leader Brings Missile-Making Plans To Ukraine By Kevin Holden Platt ,
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Kevin Holden Platt writes on space defense, SpaceX, ISS, Space War I Follow Author Aug 25, 2026, 12:27am EDT Aug 25, 2026, 01:24am EDT --:-- / --:-- This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . Just days after Russia threatened to retaliate against Britain for providing Kyiv with explosive drones, and despite the Kremlin’s rocket blitzes across Ukraine, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham defied Moscow by hand-carrying blueprints to assemble long-range cruise missiles into the embattled democracy.
Burnham touched down in Ukraine on its Independence Day, bringing plans for Kyiv to co-produce cutting-edge long-range Storm Shadow missiles, co-designed by the British and French.
The new prime minister said in a press statement that Ukrainian and French defense tech experts would “establish local assembly lines in Ukraine” for the bunker-buster missile .
Burnham’s widely heralded arrival in Ukraine came right after the Russian Embassy to the UK issued an ominous but amorphous threat to all of Britain.
“Reports that the Kiev regime is using British drones to carry out strikes deep inside Russian territory confirm that London is deliberately opting for an escalation of the Ukraine crisis,” the Russian diplomats said in a message posted on Telegram.
“The United Kingdom is acting as an accomplice and co-perpetrator of the bloody crimes and terrorist attacks committed by Ukrainian neo-Nazis, seeking to contain Russia and inflict maximum damage on it by proxy.”
The Kremlin calls Ukraine’s democratic freedom fighters, and their popularly elected Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky, “neo-Nazis,” even though it is Russia itself that has revived the war strategies and mass bombings of civilians, cathedrals and synagogues that the Third Reich spearheaded during its bombshell invasions across Europe.
“London’s actions will inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer,” added Vladimir Putin’s envoys in London.
“The deeper its involvement in the conflict and the greater its support for Kiev’s terrorist machinery, the higher the price it will pay.”
Peter Dickinson, a leading scholar on the Ukraine clash, and the competing weapons technologies and war strategies and political systems of democratic Ukraine and autocratic Russia, told me in an interview that the new threat is part of Moscow’s long-running hybrid war against Ukraine’s backers across Europe.
This shadow war, he says, has included the Kremlin’s sending a drone packed with explosives into an east German airport , near NATO and Ukrainian military aircraft, firing a cruise missile 90 kilometers into Polish territory, and plotting the assassination of an American inside Poland.
American intelligence agencies, he told me, have even predicted that Russia could launch a limited armed attack on a NATO state sometime this year.
All these acts of aggression, he says, are aimed at splintering NATO without sparking a full-scale war with the alliance.
“An escalation to more direct military aggression remains unlikely,” he predicts.
Without a forceful Western response to Russia’s shadow war, he says Moscow is bound to continue pumping up its provocations against NATO.
Prime Minister Burnham’s defiant summit with Zelensky, and his aid in helping Ukraine turn out fleets of Storm Shadow rockets that can hit targets deep inside Russia, underscore Britain’s “unwavering commitment to Ukraine,” Burnham said.
“The UK is four-square behind Ukraine’s independence, and Russia's threats only strengthen the UK's resolve.”
“We will not back down until there is a just and lasting peace.”
"The friendship between our two countries,” he added, “will long outlast Russia’s illegal war.”
The widely popular prime minister added he is pushing forward the British-French formation of a defense “Coalition of the Willing” “to secure Ukraine’s long-term security” and “committing £25 billion in funding, including £16 billion in military assistance and £5.6 billion in non-military support.”
Peter Dickinson, a globally influential scholar at the Atlantic Council, one of the top defense and diplomacy think tanks in Washington, DC, told me that Moscow has aimed many of its hybrid war maneuvers at Britain, which is depicted across the Kremlin’s corridors of power as Public Enemy Number 1.
“Russian hostility toward Britain and suspicion of Britain dates back to the imperial rivalry of the nineteenth century, when Russian expansion into Central Asia brought the tsarist empire closer and closer to the borders of British India.”
“Throughout this era, Britain and Russia engaged in a complex competition for empire and influence involving military, diplomatic, and commercial elements that came to be known in British history as ‘The Great Game’.”
This, he adds, “is the foundation of modern Russia’s deep distrust and demonization of Britain, which is often depicted in Kremlin propaganda as the scheming mastermind behind all of Russia’s misfortunes.”
On the Ukrainian battlefront, he says, Russia “cannot possibly acknowledge being beaten militarily by the Ukrainians.”
“It is therefore extremely useful from a Kremlin perspective to blame everything on the British and claim that Russia is actually at war with Britain and other Western powers.”
“By pointing the finger at Britain and accusing London of orchestrating attacks inside Russia, Putin can distract from the embarrassing reality of Ukraine’s growing ability to bring the invasion home to Russia.”
Moscow’s next moves to intensify its shadow war against the UK, he predicts, could extend to “more sabotage efforts targeting British infrastructure and sites associated with support for Ukraine, and more targeted killings.”
President Putin, a onetime KGB mastermind of subter...
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