On 7-8 July NATO held its 2026 summit in Ankara, Turkey. NATO imperialists, Britain at the forefront, openly discussed their ongoing preparations for military confrontation with Russia. The Labour government is ramping up military spending and anti-Russia chauvinism as it seeks to reassure the British ruling class that it is prepared militarily to see off any threats to their interests.
During the summit, Labour announced it will lead a £37bn European initiative to expand NATO’s ‘Deep Precision Strike’ capabilities over the next ten years, providing European NATO members with new long-range precision missiles capable of striking Russia from most of Europe. Then-Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper described it as ‘sending a clear message to President Putin; NATO is stronger, more European and ready to defend our citizens against the long-term threat posed by him and the Russian state.’ The Ankara Summit Declaration similarly referred to the ‘long-term threat Russia poses to Euro-Atlantic security and stability’, and ‘the persistent threat of terrorism’. For the Labour government, Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian and energy infrastructure are ‘terrorism’, but the Israeli state’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in Gaza is not.
On 18 July Ukraine launched a drone attack on two warehouses of Russia’s biggest online retailer Wildberries, killing eight Russian civilians and injuring 62. One of the warehouses struck was 40 miles outside Moscow. Ukrainian President Zelensky claimed Wildberries is supplying components and civilian goods with military applications to the Russian military. In reality, the attacks on Russia’s equivalent of Amazon will do little to dent Russia’s war effort. They were instead designed to inflict psychological terror, as admitted by Ukraine’s drone forces commander: ‘this is about destroying, within seconds, the illusion of a comfortable peacetime existence for the obedient population’ of Russia.
Ukrainian attacks deep inside Russia are only made possible by Western imperialist arms and intelligence. The Guardian revealed the extent of this in March 2025, saying about British intelligence passed to Ukraine:
‘Reconnaissance data collected from satellites, ground stations, surveillance aircraft such as [RAF] Rivet Joint, and even covertly deployed ground forces is accumulated and shared with Ukraine in conjunction with open-source material to enable damaging deep missile and drone strikes into Russia.’
Ukraine’s imperialist backers have continually escalated their proxy war with Russia by granting Ukraine increasing capabilities and permission to strike further inside Russia with Ukrainian drones and NATO long-range missiles. Britain was the first to supply long-range missiles to Ukraine in May 2023.
The British ruling class is clamouring for war with Russia and is constantly pressuring the Labour government to free up money for military spending by making swingeing cuts to public services. The ideological supplement to this is chauvinism peddled by the ruling class and its various media mouthpieces, designed to condition the working class into accepting the inevitable consequences of imperialist war: austerity, scarcity and conscription.
The Labour government labels Russia ‘authoritarian’, a common tactic employed against perceived enemies of British imperialism to justify aggression against them. Labour’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review declared that Britain faces ‘multiple, direct threats to its security, prosperity and democratic values’. At the Ankara summit, Labour’s representatives were too busy discussing their military preparations for defending Britain’s ‘democratic values’ against Russia to pass comment on the Turkish government’s arresting of 209 leftist opposition politicians, journalists and lawyers in ‘anti-terror’ raids two days earlier. In reality, the British state is prepared to forego any and all of its ‘democratic values’ in order to crush internal resistance to imperialism, as the criminalisation and use of terror legislation against pro-Palestine activists throughout the genocide has demonstrated.
Labour politicians and the corporate media alike constantly fearmonger about an imminent Russian invasion. On 5 June then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned: ‘It is our intelligence assessment and the assessment of other countries in NATO that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030’.
In the four and a half years since the start of NATO’s proxy war with Russia in February 2022, NATO has escalated the conflict to the point of providing Ukraine with the means to launch terror attacks on civilians hundreds of miles from the front lines. Throughout, British imperialism has politically led the crossing of Russia’s ‘red lines’ of escalation. It is British imperialist warmongering which is threatening imminent war with Russia, and not the other way around.
George O’Connell
