Russia is already at war with Britain and we can no longer rely on Trump, defence adviser warns
Britain is already at war with Russia, one of the authors of the government’s strategic defence review has warned, while arguing that the UK can no longer rely on the US as a dependable ally.
Dr Fiona Hill, who served as the White House’s chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump‘s first term, said the UK is in “pretty big trouble”, warning that the country is stuck between “the rock” of Russia aggression and the “hard place” of an increasingly unreliable US under Mr Trump.
Her comments come after the government’s strategic defence review (SDR) – unveiled last week – found that the armed forces are not ready to fight opponents like Russia or China.
“Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn’t fully anticipated,” Dr Hill told The Guardian, concluding that “Russia is at war with us”.
Arguing that the Kremlin has been “menacing the UK in various different ways” for years, she cited “the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber-attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they’re putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables”.
The SDR, authored by Dr Hill, Lord Robertson and General Sir Richard Barrons, was presented by defence secretary John Healey last week. He warned that the British army needed to become “10 times more lethal” in the face of the “immediate and pressing threat” from Russia and the rise of China.
“We are in a new era of threat, which demands a new era for UK defence,” he told MPs.
The review found that the armed forces are not ready to fight its opponents as a result of inadequate stockpiles of weapons, medical services that cannot cope with a mass-casualty conflict and a personnel “crisis” that means only a small number of troops are ready to be deployed.
Meanwhile, General Sir Richard Barrons, warned that a cruise missile was “only 90 minutes away from the UK”.
Sir Keir Starmer, unveiling the review of the Govan shipbuilding yard in Scotland, pledged to make Britain “a battle-ready, armour-clad nation”. The plan includes increasing the army to 100,000 personnel, commissioning 12 new submarines, deploying drones and rolling out artificial intelligence systems.
However, doubts were raised over the government’s big ambitions to make Britain “safer and stronger” after Sir Keir refused to commit to spending 3 per cent of Britain’s gross domestic product on defence by 2034, which the review warned was essential to ensure the plans were affordable.
Dr Hill, who was highly critical of the Trump administration, said Britain could no longer rely on the US’s military umbrella as it did during the Cold War, at least “not in the way that we did before”.
It comes after the SDR contained a similar warning, saying: “The UK’s longstanding assumptions about global power balances and structures are no longer certain.”
The defence adviser argued that the US president “really wants to have a separate relationship with Putin to do arms control agreements and also business that will probably enrich their entourages further, though Putin doesn’t need any more enrichment”.
