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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky<\/strong> made an unexpected trip to Britain last week on a whistle-stop tour of European capitals, pleading for more powerful and longer-range weapons to use in his war against Russia.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n What was hard to ignore once again was the extent to which the UK is playing an outsize role in Ukraine.<\/p>\n Last year, shortly after the start of the war, the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson<\/strong>, hurried to Kyiv \u2013 presumably on Washington\u2019s instructions \u2013 apparently to warn<\/a>\u00a0Zelensky off fledgling peace talks with Moscow.<\/p>\n At around the same time, the Biden administration made clear<\/a> it favoured an escalation in fighting, not an end to it, as an opportunity to \u201cweaken\u201d Russia, a geo-strategic rival along with China.<\/p>\n Since then, the UK has been at the forefront of European efforts to entrench the conflict, helping to lobby for the supply of weapons, training and military intelligence to Ukrainian forces.<\/p>\n British tanks and thousands of tank shells \u2013 including, controversially, some made from depleted uranium \u2013 are being shipped out. Last week, the UK added hundreds of long-range attack drones to the inventory.<\/p>\n And an unspecified number of \u00a32m-a-blast Storm Shadow cruise missiles, with a range of nearly 300km, have started arriving. Last week Ben Wallace, Britain\u2019s defence secretary, said<\/a> the missiles were already in use, adding that Kyiv alone was deciding on the targets.<\/p>\n Storm Shadow allows<\/a> the Ukrainian military to strike deep into Russian-annexed parts of Ukraine \u2013 and potentially at Russian cities too.<\/p>\n A recent leak revealed<\/a> that the Pentagon had learnt through electronic eavesdropping of Zelensky\u2019s eagerness for longer-range missiles so that his forces were \u201ccapable of reaching Russian troop deployments in Russia\u201d.<\/p>\n Britain now pays little more than lip service to the West\u2019s claim that its role is only to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression. The supply of increasingly offensive weapons has turned Ukraine into what amounts to a proxy battleground on which the Cold War can be revived.<\/p>\n During Zelensky\u2019s visit to the UK last week, Johnson\u2019s successor, Rishi Sunak<\/strong>, effectively acted as an arms broker for Ukraine, joining with the Netherlands in what was grandly dubbed an \u201cinternational coalition\u201d to pressure the Biden administration and other European states to supply Kyiv with F-16 fighter jets.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Washington appeared not to need much cajoling. Three days later, Biden dramatically changed tack at a G7 summit in Japan. He effectively gave a green light for US allies to supply Ukraine not only with US-made F-16s but similar fourth-generation fighter jets, including Britain\u2019s Eurofighter Typhoon and France\u2019s Mirage 2000.<\/p>\n Administration officials surprised European leaders by suggesting the US would be directly involved in the training of pilots outside Ukraine.<\/p>\n After a highly staged \u201csurprise\u201d visit by Zelensky to the summit at the weekend, Biden said<\/a> he had been given a \u201cflat reassurance\u201d that the jets would not attack Russian territory.<\/p>\n British officials, meanwhile, indicated that the UK would start training Ukrainian pilots within weeks.<\/p>\n No 10 has made clear<\/a> that Sunak\u2019s purpose is to build \u201ca new Ukrainian air force with Nato-standard F-16 jets\u201d and that the prime minister believes \u201cUkraine\u2019s rightful place is in Nato\u201d.<\/p>\n These statements seem intended once again to block any potential path towards peace.<\/strong> President Vladimir Putin repeatedly spoke out<\/a> against Nato\u2019s growing, covert involvement in neighbouring Ukraine before Russia launched its invasion 15 months ago.<\/p>\n It is hard to imagine that the UK is heading off-script. More likely, the Biden administration is using Britain to make the running and soften up Western publics as Nato becomes ever more deeply immersed in the military activities of Russia\u2019s neighbour.<\/p>\n Ukraine is being gradually turned into the very Nato forward base<\/a> that first set Moscow on course to invade.<\/p>\n At the same time, Britain appears to be exploiting the Ukraine war as a showcase for its weaponry. After the US, it has been the largest supplier<\/a> of military equipment to Ukraine.<\/p>\n This week it was reported that UK arms exports hit a record \u00a38.5bn, more than double last year\u2019s total. The last time Britain was so successful at selling weapons was in 2015, at the height of the Syrian war.<\/p>\n Europe\u2019s weapons largesse is, we are told<\/a>, the precondition for Ukraine to mount a long-awaited counter-offensive to take back territory Russia has seized in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.<\/p>\n Speaking candidly in Florence this month, Josep Borrell<\/strong>, the European Union\u2019s top diplomat, ruled out peace talks. Ukraine needed massive supplies of arms because otherwise \u201cUkraine will fall in a matter of days\u201d, he said<\/a>.<\/p>\n Borrell\u2019s warning not only suggested the precariousness of Ukraine\u2019s situation but implied that, out of desperation, its leaders might be prepared to approve ever riskier combat scenarios.<\/p>\n And thanks to British meddling, the heavy toll of casualties as the war rages on \u2013 among the Ukrainian population and Russian soldiers, as well as potentially inside Russia\u2019s borders too \u2013 may be felt not just over the coming months but for decades.<\/p>\n In March, Declassified<\/em> broke<\/a> the story that some of the thousands of tank shells Britain is supplying to Kyiv are made of depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive heavy metal produced as waste from nuclear power plants.<\/p>\n Keir Starmer\u2019s opposition Labour party has said<\/a> it \u201cfully supports\u201d the UK government\u2019s supply of these armour-piercing shells to Ukraine, despite the long-term risk they pose to those exposed to the chemically toxic contamination left behind.<\/p>\n DU shells fragment and burn when they hit a target. One analyst, Doug Weir, from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, told Declassified<\/em> that the ammunition produces \u201cchemically toxic and radioactive DU particulate [microscopic particles] that poses an inhalational risk to people\u201d.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, British ministers insist<\/a> the threat to human health is low \u2013 and worth the risk given the military gains in helping Ukraine to destroy Russian tanks.<\/p>\n As Declassified<\/em> has highlighted, however, a growing body of evidence following the use of such shells by the US in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and by Britain and the US in Iraq a decade later undermines these reassurances.<\/p>\n Italian courts have upheld<\/a> compensation claims against the country\u2019s military in more than 300 cases where Italians who served in the police or as soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo have died of cancer after being exposed to DU.<\/p>\n Many thousands more Italian former service-people are reported to have developed cancers.<\/p>\n In 2001 Tony Blair\u2019s government downplayed the role of DU in Italy\u2019s deaths to avoid upsetting the new administration of George W Bush. Both leaders would soon approve the use of DU rounds in Iraq, though the UK admitted a \u201cmoral obligation\u201d to help clean up some of the contamination afterwards.<\/p>\n The West has taken little interest in researching the effects of DU weapons in Iraq, even though local civilian populations have been the most exposed to its contamination. DU shells were used extensively during both the 1991 Gulf war and more than a decade later during the US and British-led occupation of Iraq.<\/p>\n Iraqi government statistics suggest the rates of cancers leapt 40-fold between the period immediately before the Gulf war and 2005.<\/p>\n The city of Fallujah, which the US devastated after the 2003 invasion, is reported<\/a> to suffer \u201cthe highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied\u201d. Birth defects are said to be roughly 14 times the rate in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions of Japan, where the US dropped atomic bombs.<\/p>\n In 2018 the British government reclassified<\/a> a 1981 report into the dangers of DU weapons by the Ministry of Defence\u2019s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment it had made available three years earlier.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, James Heappey, the armed forces minister, has misleadingly suggested that international bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have found no long-term health or environmental hazards associated with DU weapons.<\/p>\n But as Weir told<\/a> Declassified<\/em> in March: \u201cNone of the entities cited by the MoD has undertaken long-term environmental or health studies in conflict areas where DU weapons have been used.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, they simply don\u2019t know \u2013 and possibly don\u2019t care to find out.<\/p>\n Weir added that the WHO, UN and International Atomic Energy Agency had all called for contaminated areas to be clearly marked and access restricted, while at the same time recommending that risk awareness campaigns be targeted at nearby communities.<\/p>\n British officials have also recruited the Royal Society to their efforts to claim DU is safe \u2013 as the US did earlier, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, citing two of its reports published in 2001 and 2002.<\/p>\n However, the Royal Society has vocally distanced itself from such claims. A spokesperson told<\/a> Declassified<\/em> that, despite the British government\u2019s assertions, DU was no longer an \u201cactive area of policy research\u201d.<\/p>\n Back in 2003, the Royal Society rebuked Washington, telling the Guardian<\/em> that soldiers and civilians in Iraq \u201cwere in short and long term danger. Children playing at contaminated sites were particularly at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, the chairman of the Royal Society\u2019s working group on depleted uranium, Professor Brian Spratt, warned that corroding shells could leach DU into water supplies. He recommended removing ordinance and conducting long-term sampling of water supplies.<\/p>\n By lobbying for more overtly offensive weapons and introducing DU shells into the war, Britain has raised the stakes in two incendiary ways.<\/p>\n First, it is driving the war\u2019s logic towards ever greater escalation, including nuclear escalation.<\/p>\n Russia itself possesses DU weapons but is reported to have avoided using them. Moscow has long warned that it regards<\/a> use of DU in Ukraine in nuclear terms: as the equivalent of a \u201cdirty bomb\u201d.<\/p>\n In March Putin responded to the UK\u2019s decision to supply DU tank shells by vowing to move \u201ctactical\u201d nuclear weapons into neighbouring Belarus. Meanwhile, his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said<\/a> it put the world \u201cfewer and fewer steps\u201d away from \u201cnuclear collision\u201d.<\/p>\n But Britain is also creating a situation where a catastrophic move, or miscalculation, by either Russia or Ukraine is becoming ever more likely, as events last week highlighted only too clearly.<\/p>\nLip service<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u2018Rightful place is in Nato\u2019\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Risk to health<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Cancer deaths\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Voices silenced\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n