Russia’s Foreign Spy Service (SVR) accused the UK of trying to sabotage the nascent Russian–US “New Détente” for self-interested geopolitical reasons. According to their sources, the success of their talks could break the Brits’ regional containment of Russia, which is why they’re employing a dual-track policy for preventing this. The first part involves information warfare fearmongering about Trump’s ties with Russia while the second seeks to escalate the Ukrainian Conflict through a conventional intervention.
SVR’s report lacks any bombshells since everything that they revealed was already self-evident to astute observers, but it’s still important that they lent credence to what others before them had already picked up on and the timing with which they did so. “France, Germany, & Poland Are Competing For Leadership Of Post-Conflict Europe” while the UK plans to divide-and-rule the continent like usual, to which end it’s expected to rely more on Poland and/or Ukraine with whom it’s been colluding since February 2022.
Few either saw it at the time or still remember, but the UK forged an informal trilateral alliance with Poland and Ukraine exactly one week before the special operation began, which was leveraged shortly after to convince Zelensky to abandon spring 2022’s peace talks with Russia as was explained here. In the three years since, Poland and the US have taken harder stances towards Ukraine, the first initially for domestic political reasons and the second due to Trump’s eagerness to “Pivot (back) to Asia” pronto.
The aforesaid developments have left the UK as Ukraine’s top supporter, the position of which it expects to maintain for as long as possible since that former Soviet Republic is the lynchpin in London’s regional anti-Russian containment strategy, but events might ultimately force it to abandon this project. Until that happens, however, the UK is doing its utmost within all realistic limits to complicate and even possibly sabotage the nascent Russian-US “New Détente” and associated deal over Ukraine.
Should it fail, which is seemingly inevitable, then the fallback plan could be to refocus on Poland as the core of a new regional containment coalition that’ll be smaller in scope but nonetheless still formidable. Poland has the largest economy of the EU’s eastern members, now boasts NATO’s third-largest army, and aspires to restore its lost “sphere of influence” at the expense of Russia’s security interests. These factors could converge to make Poland the UK’s preferred top partner in post-conflict Europe.
The only problem to these plans is that the US is poised to make Poland its own top partner on the continent so the UK might have to compete with its American ally or accept junior partner status vis-à-vis Washington in any trilateral that might form between them. At the same time, however, Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski is a diehard Anglophile who even had British citizenship till he gave it up in 2006 to join the government so he might operate as the UK’s “agent of influence” to advance its agenda.
From the UK’s perspective, the best-case scenario is that: the nascent Russian-US “New Détente” fails for whatever reason; the US then feels compelled to resume large-scale military support to Ukraine in response so as to teach Russia a lesson as Trump might see it; but the UK successfully manipulates Western public opinion to supplant the US as the “leader of the free world” due to its consistently anti-Russian position that never once wavered no matter how difficult things became for Ukraine in the past.
On the flipside, the worst-case scenario from the UK’s perspective is that: the nascent Russian-US “New Détente” succeeds; a pragmatic compromise follows in Ukraine which turns it into an informal joint protectorate between Russia and the US; the US then turns Poland into its top partner in post-conflict Europe; and the US, not the UK, guides Poland as it restores part of its lost “sphere of influence” and then uses this geopolitical network to divide-and-rule Europe by keeping Germany and Russia apart.
It’s precisely this sequence of events that’s presently unfolding and which might consequently provoke the UK into doing something very dramatic to sabotage this process out of desperation. Russia clearly has an interest in preventing that, ergo why SVR chose this moment to lend credence to what others before them had already picked up on about the UK’s interests in this context. Trump 2.0 must become aware of the threat that the UK poses to its plans and respond accordingly to defend the US’ interests.
