The British Prime Minister Andy Burnham received warnings from security experts about an imminent Russian retaliation against the United Kingdom, according to an investigation by Daily Mail published this Wednesday.
Intelligence sources indicate that the Kremlin is planning a "direct response" after miscalculating the new prime minister's commitment to Kyiv.
The trigger was Burnham's visit to the Ukrainian capital last Monday —his first trip abroad as head of government, made on Ukraine's Independence Day— where he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and co-chaired a meeting of the Coalition of the Willing.
During that meeting, the British government announced that it would allow the defense contractor MBDA to share classified information about the components of the cruise missile Storm Shadow, so that France and Ukraine could establish their own assembly lines in Ukrainian territory.
Burnham also signed an artificial intelligence agreement with Ukraine that grants the United Kingdom access to battlefield data to train AI models, and stated to Zelensky: "The United Kingdom is with you one hundred percent."
The Kremlin's reaction was immediate. The spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described the decision to share the missile plans as "extremely negative" and accused London of hindering any progress towards peace.
The Russian diplomat Andrei Fedorov went further and suggested that a "semi-military" response could emerge from "unknown sources."
According to intelligence sources cited by the Daily Mail, Vladimir Putin had calculated that Burnham would be "softer than Starmer" with Moscow.
The resolve of the new Prime Minister—who assumed office on July 20 after replacing Keir Starmer at the helm of the Labour Party—took the Kremlin by surprise and is said to have increased internal pressure on Putin to respond, especially after the stagnation of the Russian campaign on the battlefield.
The security analyst Mark Galeotti warned in a related article that "if he chooses to, Putin could order attacks that cause chaos and serious loss of life" in the United Kingdom, although not necessarily through conventional methods.
Galeotti describes a model of "war in the shadows": cyberattacks against hospitals, banks, energy systems, and railways; sabotage of undersea internet cables; and even covert operations through intermediaries, all designed to maintain the Kremlin's plausible deniability.
This scenario is not new. In April, Russia published a list of 21 European companies —including facilities in the United Kingdom related to drone production for Ukraine— that former Russian official Dmitri Medvedev described as "potential legitimate targets."
In this context of heightened tension, the CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, made a surprise, unannounced visit to Moscow on Tuesday—the first by a senior official of the Trump administration to Russia since January—to warn the Kremlin not to escalate the conflict, whether through nuclear weapons or by attacking Ukraine's Western allies.
The Kremlin confirmed that the meetings took place at the level of "special services" and that Putin was informed afterwards, although it denied that Ratcliffe met directly with the Russian president.
Burnham, for his part, traveled to New York this Tuesday to push for more Patriot missiles for Ukraine, and described the Russian threats as "outrageous," reaffirming that London’s support for Kyiv will not change: "We are not friends only when the weather is nice," he stated.
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