On 24 August 2026 British Prime Minister Andy Burnham visited Ukraine, his first overseas visit since coming to office on 20 July. This followed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky becoming the first foreign leader to be hosted by Burnham’s government on 26 July. Burnham is sending a clear message to the British ruling class that his Labour government will be even more aggressive in confronting Russia than the Starmer government it replaced.
During the 2015 Labour leadership contest, Burnham pledged that his first foreign visit as Labour leader would be to Israel. Now, coming to power after almost three years of Zionist genocide and worldwide protests for Palestine, he decided a trip to Israel would be political suicide. So he settled for British imperialism’s next-best attack dog: Ukraine.
During his visit, Burnham announced in an act of significant political escalation that Labour would hand Ukraine blueprints for components to produce its own SCALP medium-range cruise missiles. SCALP is the French equivalent to British Storm-Shadow missiles, which Ukraine has already been given to strike targets deep inside Russia.
Burnham’s Labour government is openly lobbying the US to allow Ukraine to produce its own cutting-edge Patriot interceptor missiles. The US has supplied these to Ukraine since April 2023, but dwindling US stocks and sluggish production have meant Ukraine has all but run out and is now failing to intercept Russian ballistic missiles. July 2026 was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since the start of the war.
British imperialism has consistently escalated NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine since 2022 under both Conservative and Labour governments. In response to Burnham handing Ukraine missile blueprints, Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: ‘Britain is participating in this war … on the side of the Kiev regime. Britain methodically and regularly adds fuel to the fire’.
On 4 August a Ukrainian drone hit a busy beach on the Black Sea in Southern Russia, killing seven Russian civilians and injuring 40. This follows a recent escalation of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian civilian sites. In July and August Ukrainian drones struck some 30 Wildberries sites, Russian’s equivalent of Amazon, killing a similar number of civilians. Several of these attacks were around 50km from Moscow. Early September, Zelensky threatened civilian airlines, warning that the ‘Russian sky is becoming completely dangerous’ as a result of increased Ukrainian drone strikes. Ukrainian missile and drone strikes deep inside Russia have only been made possible by Western arms, intelligence and tracking data. Burnham providing SCALP missiles again is another example that politically, British imperialism is leading the escalations.
Burnham used his visit to Ukraine for an outpouring of anti-Russia chauvinism, like his predecessors Starmer and Johnson. In response to Peskov’s comments, he accused Russia of making ‘outrageous threats’ against Britain. Burnham’s visit coincided with Ukraine’s ‘Independence Day’, which commemorates the breakup of the Soviet socialist bloc in 1991. Burnham compared Ukraine’s military effort to Britain’s during the Second World War, saying: ‘my nation kept the flame of European freedom alive in the 20th century, you hold that flame in the 21st.’
Burnham’s comments gloss over the fact that during the Second World War Ukraine was a hotbed of Nazi collaboration. In May 2026 Zelensky sparked a diplomatic row with Poland when he named a Ukrainian special forces unit after the fascist Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought alongside the Nazis against Soviet forces during WW2 and massacred tens of thousands of Poles in Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine in 1943. On 26 August Ukraine bestowed its Order of Freedom, a top state honour, on US billionaire Elon Musk.
On 24 August the Labour government announced a plan to use Ukrainian battlefield data to train AI models to protect British defence sites and national infrastructure from protesters or hostile states. The scheme will use buried fibre optic cables as AI-enabled sensors to detect unusual movement around such sites which would indicate an imminent attack by ‘hostile actors’, including pro-Palestine protesters.
As inter-imperialist rivalry intensifies, the British ruling class will demand even more brutal repression of anyone who opposes British warmongering and militarism. Burnham’s Labour is eagerly showing that it is up to the task.
George O’Connell
