Introduction
For more than a decade – and particularly since Russia launched its undeclared war against Ukraine in 2014 – the UK’s Russia policy has seemed increasingly incongruous. Political relations have become steadily more antagonistic, and these days the UK finds itself in disagreement with Russia over most major international issues. Its leaders look at the world and define its interests in ways that routinely conflict with the outlook and policy choices of their Russian counterparts (and vice versa). At the same time, the UK has continued to build economic ties with Russia, assuming that business interests can be insulated from a political relationship that has become more and more confrontational. Russia has never been a top-tier commercial partner for the UK, but UK decision-makers have consistently talked up economic relations, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. From a UK viewpoint, the biggest elements of the commercial relationship remain the multi-billion-pound direct investments by BP and Shell in Russia’s energy sector. In 2017 the value of UK exports to Russia amounted to slightly more than £6 billion, of which services contributed some £2.9 billion.1 Various service industries – including banking, accountancy, law, property and public relations – cater to Russia’s elites. For these clients, many of them at or close to the centre of power in Moscow, an attraction of the UK is its model of ‘light touch’ regulation. Despite the EU’s imposition of Crimea- and Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia, successive UK governments have taken for granted the premise that bilateral economic relations can be largely sheltered from an increasingly problematic political relationship.
The nerve-agent poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergey Skripal, who had been granted UK citizenship, and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on 4 March 2018 should have put paid to such thinking.2 Eight days later, Prime Minister Theresa May described the incident as ‘an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom’.3 If her remark means anything, it has to signify that the tension at the heart of the UK’s Russia policy is now untenable. The Salisbury attack was not just a brazen violation of UK sovereignty. It was also a UK policy failure: the failure, again, to protect a UK national from attack by organs of the Russian state. An appropriate response would involve not just a belated and emphatic prioritization of political and security interests over economic interests. It would also entail the active use of financial and supervisory tools to achieve those national security interests in order to reduce the risk of another attack, and in the knowledge that the UK would pay an economic price. Bilateral relations would retain their economic dimension, but the UK would at last align its policy thinking and actions with post-Salisbury requirements. As two British analysts wrote shortly after the attack, ‘For too long Britain has sought to meet a skilful and growing Russian state threat while servicing the interests of its major beneficiaries. This contradiction is no longer strategically or ethically sustainable.’4
2 There were of course three other victims: Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who was involved in the initial response to the poisoning of the Skripals; and Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, who reportedly came across a contaminated item discarded after the attack. Dawn Sturgess died on 8 July.
3 Hansard, 12 March 2018.
4 Gould-Davies, N. and Nixey, J. (2018), ‘How Britain Can Respond to the Skripal Attack’, Chatham House Expert Comment, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 12 March 2018, https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/how-britain-can-respond-skripal-attack (accessed 13 Oct. 2018).