A difficult and volatile relationship
Since 2000, UK–Russia relations have moved through five phases. From early 2000 to mid-2003, they were on an upward trajectory. In late 1999 the team around Putin (then Russia’s prime minister) identified UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as someone who could facilitate the new Russian leader’s entrance onto the world stage: modern, media-savvy, more likely than some of his Western contemporaries to remain in office for a long time, and on good terms with his US and EU allies. Blair visited Russia in March 2000, shortly before Putin was elected president. During the next three years the relationship between the two leaders blossomed. Bilateral commercial ties rebounded as Russia’s economy recovered from the financial crisis of 1998, culminating in a landmark deal on 1 September 2003 between BP and TNK (the Tyumen Oil Company), one of Russia’s principal oil producers. Relations weathered disagreements over the US-led invasion of Iraq in early 2003, in which UK forces participated; Russia’s war in Chechnya; the UK’s unease over democratic backsliding in Russia; and increasingly fractious US–Russia relations. In June 2003, Putin became the first Russian leader since 1874 to pay a state visit to the UK.
The period from late 2003 to November 2006 saw a spectacular breakdown in UK–Russia relations.
The second phase, from late 2003 to November 2006, saw a spectacular breakdown in relations. A watershed occurred when the UK refused in early September 2003 to extradite a fugitive tycoon and Putin opponent, Boris Berezovsky, to Russia. The bilateral relationship then soured, because of a number of factors. These included UK concern at growing authoritarianism in Russia; Blair’s decision not to attend the events staged in Moscow in May 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War; pressure by Russian regulators on BP and Shell; and the campaign of harassment that was waged against the UK ambassador in Moscow, Sir Tony Brenton, by Nashi, a Putin-supporting nationalist youth movement that targeted Brenton for meeting with civil society organizations. Relations nosedived in November 2006, when Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) who had been granted asylum and citizenship in the UK, was murdered in London with radioactive polonium, almost certainly by FSB operatives.
In the third phase, which ran from 2007 until early 2014, there was an uneasy stabilization of relations. By mid-2007 – having expelled four intelligence officers from Russia’s embassy in London and cut engagement with the FSB, but having failed to secure the extradition of the prime suspects in the Litvinenko case – the Labour government had decided to move on. It still judged Russia to be an important security interlocutor, albeit an increasingly hostile one. The financial crisis which began in 2008 made the government even keener to improve relations: it put fresh emphasis on commercial diplomacy to support economic recovery. The election of Barack Obama as US president in November 2008, and the ‘reset’ in relations with Russia that he launched in 2009, also influenced UK policy.
This rapprochement was continued by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, headed by David Cameron, that took office in the UK in May 2010. The 2010 SDSR took a relaxed view on Russia: its 75 pages made just two (largely positive) references to the country. Commercial and geopolitical considerations were again at play. In October 2012 BP announced that it would take a 19.75 per cent stake in Rosneft, Russia’s largest state-owned oil company, which had bought out BP’s private Russian partners in TNK-BP. In March 2013 the inaugural ‘2+2’ meeting of UK and Russian foreign and defence ministers took place in London. Yet the clouds were darkening, with growing instability in the Middle East and especially in Syria, a renewed Russian domestic crackdown following Putin’s re-election as president in March 2012, and, most fatefully, the growing EU–Russia stand-off over Ukraine in 2013–14.
The fourth phase, during which bilateral relations entered another downward spiral, began in February 2014 and ended in March 2018. Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, and its subsequent war in eastern Ukraine, shattered UK policymakers’ complacency. The UK pushed for Russia’s suspension from the G8 (March 2014) and for the imposition of sanctions by the US and EU (March to July 2014); and it supported the conclusions of the Wales Summit of NATO leaders (September 2014), at which NATO committed to strengthen its presence on the territory of its eastern members.
The transformation of official UK views was evident in the 2015 SDSR, commissioned by the new Conservative government, again led by Cameron. Unlike in the 2010 SDSR, Russia was mentioned frequently, in particular in a section entitled ‘The resurgence of state-based threats’, which stated that: ‘Russia has become more aggressive, authoritarian and nationalist, increasingly defining itself in opposition to the West’. It went on to assert that Russia’s annexation of Crimea and destabilization of eastern Ukraine ‘have shown Russia’s willingness to undermine wider international standards of cooperation in order to secure its perceived interests’. The document emphasized UK support for Ukraine, and the need for coordination with allies and partners. It went on to state that ‘We […] want to keep open the possibility of cooperation’, giving the example of international efforts to combat the threat posed by the so-called Islamic State group and citing successful cooperation with Russia on negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme. However, Russia’s brutal military intervention in the Syrian conflict in 2015 further exacerbated bilateral tensions. In January 2016 an official inquiry into the Litvinenko murder (belatedly announced in 2014) concluded that both Putin and FSB director Nikolai Patrushev had ‘probably’ approved the killing.
The UK voted to leave the EU five months later, in June 2016. During the remainder of the fourth phase a new Conservative government, headed by Theresa May from July, was consumed by the tumultuous domestic consequences of the referendum. Relations with Russia became a lower-priority issue, although the annual National Security Capability Reviews (NSCRs), which reported in 2016, 2018 and 2019 on the implementation of the 2015 National Security Strategy (NSS) and the SDSR, continued to emphasize the threat that Russia posed.
In the fifth phase, which started in March 2018, the bilateral relationship crashed to its lowest point in decades. Sergey Skripal, a former officer in Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, who had been granted UK citizenship, was poisoned with a Russian-made nerve agent in Salisbury, together with his daughter. The attack was assumed to be an attempt on the Skripals’ lives. (Three other UK citizens were to come into contact with the nerve agent, one of whom later died.) The UK responded much more sharply than it had to the murder of Litvinenko, expelling 23 intelligence officers from Russia’s embassy in London (this formed part of an action, coordinated with partners, in which about 150 Russian intelligence officers were removed from embassies in 26 countries). Senior contacts were suspended, and border and counter-intelligence measures tightened. Russia responded with equal severity. In early September the UK police identified two GRU officers as suspects in the attack.
The 2018 NSCR, published in late March, unsurprisingly judged the Russian threat to have intensified: the Salisbury attack was ‘an unlawful use of force against the UK’ that followed ‘a well-established pattern of Russian State aggression.’ Moreover, both the 2018 and 2019 NSCRs presented Russian actions as part of a broader assault on the rules-based international order. All three NSCRs stressed the importance for the UK of allies, particularly the US, France, Germany and other NATO members; the need for an all-government response (the so-called Fusion Doctrine); and a continued commitment to European security, including a strong post-Brexit defence and security partnership with the EU.
Since the Salisbury attack, top-level in-person political contact with Russia has virtually ceased. Officials engage behind the scenes, and confidential channels of communication remain in place. The sides have rebuilt their embassy staffs, which were shredded by reciprocal expulsions in 2018. Networks of non-government ties still exist, including through the sizeable and sometimes well-connected Russian diaspora in the UK. Economic relations have been largely immune to political turbulence but are not of major significance. Cultural, sports and educational exchanges continue. Until the imposition of COVID-19 restrictions, thousands of UK and Russian tourists visited each other’s countries. The political relationship is, however, broken.
Russian views of the UK
Russian views of the UK are an important part of this story. First, Russian policymakers consider the UK to be a hostile power. This viewpoint was vividly expressed in January 2019, when Patrushev (by then secretary of the Security Council of Russia) branded the UK the ‘standard bearer’ of an anti-Russian campaign waged by the West. In this version of events, the UK bases its foreign policy on its relationships with the US and US-led organizations, fomenting instability in Russia, championing NATO’s enlargement and seeking to pull countries such as Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence. In 2016, one Russian commentator described the UK as ‘Russia’s toughest opponent’ within the EU. Nor did Russian analysts expect relations to improve after Brexit. In the words of one: ‘The nature of Russian–British relations will probably not change much. They were also uneven before Britain joined the EEC in 1973.’ Russia, observed a third commentator in 2018, was one of the UK’s ‘main foreign policy opponents’. An issue that angers Moscow is the number of political opponents of the current regime who have settled in London, some of whom have been given political asylum. Because it allegedly enables them to operate with impunity abroad, this is seen as interference in Russia’s internal affairs.
Second, however, Moscow clearly regards the UK as a lesser power than Russia – a long-standing perception that UK decision-makers have consistently underappreciated. Revealingly, successive Russian foreign policy concepts, which provide snapshots of how Russian policymakers see the world and their country’s place in it, barely mention the UK. When discussing cooperation with leading EU member states, the 2008 version sniffed that ‘Russia would like the potential of engagement with Great Britain to be realized along similar lines.’ The next version, in 2013, reiterated the same underwhelmed formula, word for word. (That year Putin’s press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, reportedly described the UK in the margins of the G20 summit in St Petersburg as ‘a small island that no one pays attention to.’) The 2016, and most recent, concept ignored the UK altogether.
Russian policymakers recognize that the UK has important attributes, in that it is: like Russia, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and a leading member of other multilateral organizations and formats; a nuclear weapons state; the second largest military spender in NATO; alongside France, one of only two significant military powers in western Europe; and the possessor of one of the largest economies in the world. Moreover, its enjoyment of close relations with the US (in certain spheres) is recognized, as is its deployment of capable diplomatic and intelligence services. Yet, from a Russian perspective, the UK is unable to run an autonomous foreign policy – unlike Russia. Interviewed in 2018, Andrey Kokoshin (a former first deputy defence minister and secretary of the Security Council of Russia, and a seasoned security policy thinker) summed up mainstream Russian thinking thus:
Third, the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with the US, which UK governments consider one of its greatest strengths, is seen in Moscow as a symptom of weakness. In 2005 an experienced UK-watcher offered this judgment:
In effect, Russian analysts argue, the UK has tried to offset its waning influence by positioning itself as an outrider of the US, rallying NATO’s European members (and, before 2016, the EU) behind US policies to augment its own influence in Washington. A group of Russian commentators argued in 2015 that ‘Moscow not unreasonably perceives London to be merely the communicator of American initiatives.’ Commenting on Theresa May’s visit to Washington, DC, in January 2017, days after the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president, another observer detected a UK desire ‘to play the role of global actor, ready to carry out all possible missions across the world jointly with the USA.’ In 2020 Russia’s ambassador to the UK, Andrey Kelin, observed that: ‘Really, here in London, there has evolved a very powerful pro-American lobby that intentionally goes along with everything that Washington does, and this implies antagonizing relations with Russia.’
Russian analysts argue that the UK has tried to offset its waning influence by positioning itself as an outrider of the US, rallying NATO’s European members behind US policies to augment its own influence in Washington.
Finally, Russian leaders view UK governments as duplicitous. For the Kremlin, the refusal to extradite Berezovsky exemplified this trait, because it came eight days after the signing of the TNK-BP deal, which Putin had personally authorized. Putin seems to have concluded that he had been deceived: from his perspective, he might reasonably have expected Blair to return the favour. Their personal relationship, central to the improvement in relations during the preceding three years, never recovered. The UK government’s protestations that its hands were tied would have seemed absurd and disingenuous to Russian policymakers – how could a court overrule a sovereign political authority? Elsewhere, Russian analysts accuse UK leaders of whipping up anti-Russian sentiment to mask divisions over Brexit or to strengthen NATO unity.
One commentator captured Russian views of the UK in 2015 thus: ‘To many in Moscow, the UK is an irritating junior partner of the United States, largely alienated from the rest of Europe and with little independent influence in international affairs.’ For Russian observers, Brexit confirms this unflattering assessment.
The impact of Brexit on the UK: Russian views
The Kremlin’s attitude towards Brexit at the time of the referendum remains a subject of debate. In the run-up to the vote its public position was one of neutrality. Russian expert opinion was divided between those who favoured Brexit, because it promised to remove a confrontational member state from the EU, and those who worried that it would set off wider uncertainty in Europe. There are differing views about the extent to which Russia tried to influence the outcome of the poll and, if it did try, how much impact Russian activity had. According to the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee (DCMSC), the Russian ambassador to the UK at the time, Aleksandr Yakovenko, and his staff – at least one of whom was subsequently expelled as an intelligence officer – held several meetings with the leading funder of one of the main pro-Brexit campaigns, Leave.EU. The Russian state-controlled media outlets RT and Sputnik also broadcast a large number of anti-EU items during the referendum campaign. Remarkably, the UK government has rejected calls for an official investigation of these questions. That is highly regrettable: even if an inquiry concluded that the impact of Russian activity was negligible, it would provide reassurance and help to draw a line under the matter.
However divided Russian observers were before the referendum, the consensus among them in its aftermath has been that Brexit is weakening the UK and its international influence. Russian policymakers have long been contemptuous of the EU as a geopolitical actor, shown by the disrespectful treatment of Josep Borrell (High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) when he visited Moscow in February 2021. But they know that the EU amplifies its members’ voices in areas such as trade policy, where it is a giant in global terms. When the EU27 can agree (which they sometimes cannot) on sanctions against Russia or support for the EU’s eastern neighbours, notably Ukraine, the impact is much greater than if member states act separately and in an uncoordinated fashion. Even if a future UK government decides to work more closely with the EU on foreign and security policy than currently foreseen, Russian commentators understand that Brexit greatly weakens the UK’s ability to shape the bloc’s actions, shifting the centre of gravity in the EU towards countries, including France and Germany, whose leaders advocate more accommodating policies towards Russia.
Consequently, Russian analysts judge that without a compelling alternative to EU membership, Brexit reinforces the UK’s strategic decline. As one of them
wrote in 2020:
Finally, and most damaging in terms of the effect on Russian perceptions, Brexit has highlighted and aggravated divisions within the UK – between and across political groups, regions and generations. In the words of one Russian UK-watcher, ‘Brexit is now the main dividing line in the United Kingdom, having relegated the confrontation along the left-right horizontal political spectrum to a secondary position without eliminating it […] Brexit has caused a most profound political crisis in Britain.’ According to another, ‘one cannot exclude the break-up of the United Kingdom as a consequence of the independence of Scotland and the reunification of Ireland by the end of the 2020s.’
UK–Russia relations: four lessons
The recent history of UK–Russia relations offers four important lessons. In the first place, with virtually no shared values and few convergent interests, the foundations of the relationship are fragile at the best of times. As will be seen from the analysis that follows, UK and Russian decision-makers disagree about most international security issues, and understand normative concepts such as rule of law, democracy, human rights and state sovereignty very differently. A modest economic relationship throws these contested political issues further into relief. Consequently, UK–Russia relations are prone to sharp swings (one analyst has described them as ‘pendulum-like’). In the mid-2000s relations collapsed from a post-Cold War high (Putin’s 2003 state visit) to what was then a post-Cold War low (the Litvinenko murder) in little more than three years.
Secondly, the largely adversarial nature of the UK–Russia relationship since 2000 accords with the longer historical pattern. A former UK ambassador to the Soviet Union has noted: ‘At some of the turning points of European history [the UK and Russia] found themselves in alliance, but there were long periods of low-level friction, mutual distaste and occasional hostility.’ Confrontation is not inevitable, but this historical legacy means that UK and Russian policymakers typically regard each other with caution and suspicion.
For leaders in Moscow, Russia is a great power alongside the US and China in a ‘multipolar’ or ‘polycentric’ world. By contrast, the UK is viewed as a second-level power that does not treat Russia with due respect. Seen from London, Russia is a major power, but is flawed and less influential than it thinks.
Relations are also complicated by the two sides’ self-aggrandizing views of themselves. For leaders in Moscow, Russia is a great power alongside the US and China in a ‘multipolar’ or ‘polycentric’ world. By contrast, the UK is viewed as a second-level power that does not treat Russia with due respect. Seen from London, Russia is a major power, but is flawed and less influential than it thinks. For their part, most post-war UK leaders have exaggerated the UK’s stature and influence, including with Russian counterparts, even though no Russian leader has considered the UK to be Russia’s equal since the first half of the 1940s. Consequently, it is assumed in London that Russia takes the UK more seriously than it does. Mismatched perceptions cause misunderstanding and frustration in both capitals.
Finally, the UK–Russia relationship is buffeted by forces beyond the control of the UK authorities. In the mid-2000s it deteriorated partly because of instability in several of Russia’s post-Soviet neighbours, and partly because of mounting friction between Russia and the US.
UK–Russia relations: a less forgiving global context
Three wider trends will affect the UK’s ability to deal with Russia in the 2020s. In the first place, the Western-centric order created at the end of the Second World War is weakening. The US is shifting its focus away from Europe, towards Asia. There has been a resurgence of state-based security threats, including from Russia. Russia’s internal deficiencies may eventually threaten its global pretensions, although that is far from certain. Meanwhile, it is more confident and assertive abroad than at any time since 2000. Its leaders believe that a US-led system is giving way to a multipolar model, with Russia part of its great power hub.
In addition, more than a decade of economic crisis across the world has fed sovereign and private sector indebtedness, populism and protectionism. The global economy of the 2020s will be more fragmented than it was during the two decades following the end of the Cold War. The centre of economic gravity is returning to Asia, with China once more at the core, as it was until the Industrial Revolution. Again, it is uncertain how much Russia, which is stuck in its own low-growth equilibrium, will benefit. Movement towards global decarbonization also raises doubts about the sustainability of Russia’s model of political economy, founded on the recycling of hydrocarbon rents. But these will be difficult times for the UK, a medium-sized power now outside the world’s largest economic bloc and advocating freer trade just when political and populist resistance to the concept is on the rise in many countries.
Thirdly, Western liberal democracy has sustained severe reputational damage, particularly since the financial crisis that began in 2008. Brexit epitomized the resultant backlashes against established institutions, parties and leaders, as well as opposition to the impact of globalization on societies and identities. Authoritarian forms of government have spread and consolidated in much of the world. The long-term vitality of Russia’s political system is highly questionable, but its leaders have concluded that Western liberalism is in retreat, having ‘outlived its purpose’, as Putin claimed in 2019.
UK–Russia relations are therefore at an impasse. Underlying dynamics suggest that they will not become more cooperative in the foreseeable future; if they do, they are unlikely to stabilize at a higher level for long. Russian decision-makers consider the UK to be both a lesser power than Russia and in decline. They judge that Brexit is further diminishing it, politically and economically, possibly to the point of territorial disintegration. In addition, the UK finds itself in an increasingly disorderly world that, rightly or wrongly, Russia’s leaders believe is undermining the West.
How should the UK build policy towards Russia in these unpropitious circumstances? The next section addresses that question.
