How the UK Leads on Arming Ukraine

Kyiv — It’s long been thought of as the “special relationship,” but it’s also a highly complementary one.

While the United States is Ukraine’s most important partner, delivering or pledging just over $46 billion in military aid since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the United Kingdom, at $7.1 billion, has played a more brazen and pathfinding role in being the first Western nation to send advanced weapons systems – systems which Washington has been skittish or more sluggish to supply.

The UK led the pro-Ukraine coalition in offering Challenger 2 main battle tanks on Jan. 15, two weeks before the U.S. announced its own plans to send Abrams. Fourteen British tanks in themselves weren’t enough to make a huge difference in the war effort, but by donating them, other Western countries, such as Germany, felt emboldened to hand over more of their own Leopard 2s and authorize third party countries to do likewise.

The UK has also already delivered long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has confirmed Ukraine has successfully used against Russian targets, whereas the U.S. has still declined to provide anything of that power and range. Storm Shadows, which were modified to be fired from Ukraine’s Soviet-era Su-24s, can hit any targets within Ukraine's internationally recognized borders, including occupied Crimea.

“In my meetings with presidents and prime ministers, they've been clear that the UK's willingness to act first to save Ukrainian lives by providing specific equipment shifted the dial significantly,” Alicia Kearns, the head of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, told Yahoo News. “It enabled more countries to step forward and provide the support needed to limit and prevent atrocities by Russian forces against Ukrainians.”

A short while after the British decision to provide cruise missiles to Ukraine was revealed the French government announced it was also sending its own version of the Storm Shadow, the SCALP-EG, developed in collaboration with the UK.

Unnamed Biden administration officials told Politico on May 9 they believed the British trigger-pulling on Storm Shadows would “silence critics” who have been pressuring the U.S. to send its own Army Tactical Artillery Missile Systems (ATACMS) to Ukraine. Yet it didn’t even silence the commander-in-chief. President Joe Biden told reporters on May 29 that the question of providing ATACMS was “still in play.”

London’s bullishness, both U.S. and UK officials say, has had a galvanizing effect on Western security assistance in general.

One senior U.S. diplomat told Yahoo News, speaking on the condition of anonymity, that the provision of Storm Shadows even helped break the White House’s impasse on F-16s.

At the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, Biden announced the U.S. would begin training Ukrainian pilots on how to fly the American-made fourth generation fighter jets, a process that the U.S. Air Force judged will take four months, far shorter than the 18 the Pentagon previously estimated.

Nor is the UK’s forward-leaning posture recent or new.

Months before the full-scale invasion, the UK began flying plane loads of shoulder-launched anti-tank missile launchers, the Anglo-Swedish NLAW, to Ukraine at a time when doing so was still highly controversial in Europe, where the prevailing assumption was that Russia would overrun the country in days.The Royal Air Force C-17 heavy transport planes were tasked to fly a circuitous route to avoid German airspace on their way to Ukraine, to avoid the possibility of a fellow NATO ally declining overflight permission, as Berlin was itself highly reluctant to send lethal kit to Kyiv and fearful of perceived escalation with Moscow.

Successive British prime ministers – there have been three since the war started, all from the Conservative Party – have been of one mind on helping Kyiv claw back territory. The U.K. 's support for Ukraine is unusual in the fact that it transcends party lines in Britain, with the opposition Labour Party being as hawkish if not more so than the ruling Tories. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace is almost universally admired for his wartime stewardship of security assistance. In an interview for Yahoo News in May Wallace’s Ukrainian counterpart Oleksii Reznikov said that in the UK is the one country whose electoral outcome he doesn’t agonize over, as the “opposition is as strong as the current government in terms of supporting us.”

“The Labour Party has stood united with the government and the British public in support of providing Ukraine with the military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian support it needs to prevail, David Lammy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, told Yahoo News. “We continue to push the government to close the loopholes on sanctions, the repurposing of sanctioned assets and the creation of a special tribunal to prosecute Putin and his cronies personally for their crimes.”

The Brits have also been out front in justifying Ukrainian-orchestrated military operations inside Russian territory.

After a series of drone attacks in and around Moscow on May 30, the difference in reactions from Washington and London was stark. “As a general matter, we do not support attacks inside of Russia,” State Department spokesperson. “We have been focused on providing Ukraine with the equipment and training they need to retake their own sovereign territory.” British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, however, was unambivalent, emphasizing Ukraine's "legitimate right" to "project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia's ability to project force into Ukraine itself.”

Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and now deputy chair of Russia’s National Security and Defense Council, tweeted in reply: “The goofy officials of the UK, our eternal enemy, should remember that within the framework of the universally accepted international law which regulates modern warfare, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions with their additional protocols, their state can also be qualified as being at war.”