Operation Steadfast Defender roared into life  at the start of 2024. Across the European Union,   an entire continent joined forces for  an unprecedented display of military   strength. Not since the end of the Cold  War has there been such a large military   exercise in Europe. 90,000 soldiers, along  with hundreds of tanks, aircraft, ships,   as well as cyber and space warfare branches,  all conducted war games across Europe. All 31 NATO nations, as well as partner  Sweden, joined in the war games,   putting their troops to the test in a huge and  very public display of strength and unity. The   exercise started in January with the goal  of running through to May, with war games   taking place at key strategic locations, including  Finland, Estonia, Poland, and the Baltic states. Unsurprisingly, these locations were  chosen, just as it is no secret who this   display of power is aimed at. Vladimir Putin’s  invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shook the world,   but nowhere were the tremors felt more strongly  than in Europe. Since the Second World War,   the continent has experienced incredible stability  and unity with its members. While not everyone   agrees all of the time, and various countries  have joined and left the EU over the years,   war has been the last thing on  the minds of most member nations. Not anymore. Some signs suggest that Putin  is not planning on stopping at Ukraine.   Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service  issued a somber warning in February.   Russia is preparing for a full-scale  war with the West in the next decade. An attack on one NATO member is treated  as an attack on all. Suppose Russia is   to step across the border into any of  its NATO members like Finland, Estonia,   Poland or Lithuania, they will be met  with the combined force of 31 nations,   including long-time rival the U.S. And yet  there is one nation in particular who are   ramping up in preparation for war ahead of most  of the other NATO members—the United Kingdom. So why is it that the UK, in particular,  is preparing for war? They are hundreds   of miles away from the Russian border and  highly unlikely to be invaded by Putin. It   may have something to do with a statement made  by Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev,   a close ally of Putin’s, making a  comment on the 19th of February 2024. “Attempts to return Russia to the  borders of 1991 will lead to only   one thing. Towards a global war with  Western countries using the entire   strategic arsenal of our state. In  Kyiv, Berlin, London, Washington.” What does he mean by the 1991 borders? In  1991, Ukraine, as a newly independent state,   inherited the old borders that the Ukrainian  SSR had shared with Russia. This was the   internationally recognized border up until 2022  and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In short,   Medvedev is saying that if Russia loses  the war in Ukraine and is forced to return   to respecting this 1991 border, Putin will  hold the Western nations that have come to   Ukraine’s aid personally responsible.  And there are three front runners for   providing the most aid so far in the war:  the United States, Germany, and the UK. If Medvedev’s statement is true and  Russia’s intent in defeat would be to   launch their “entire strategic arsenal,”  that would peg the UK as one of their top   4 targets. Included within that strategic  arsenal are almost 6,000 nuclear weapons. Would Putin be desperate or bitter enough to  launch them? Would the UK stand any chance   in a war against Russia? And how likely is  all of this to happen in the next ten years? Let’s dive into it. To start things off, why are tensions so  high between the UK and Russia in particular? The UK government is often one of the  first to speak out against Russia.   The UK led the sanctions on Russia  following the invasion of Ukraine   and was the first to impose new sanctions  following the death of Alexei Navalny. To give you a full history of UK-Russian  relations, we would need to go all the   way back to the 1500s. That’s a  topic for another video. Instead,   we will start at the end of the Cold War. Decades  of tension between the West and the Soviets were   thawed with the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev.  In 1994, Queen Elizabeth II visited Russia,   marking the first time in history that a  British monarch had set foot on Russian soil. But this all took a turn with the election of  Vladimir Putin in 2000. Putin’s introduction into   the presidency was marked by a tighter hold on the  freedom of Russian citizens and an increasingly   assertive foreign policy. Putin’s government  demanded that several high-profile defectors   who had found asylum in the UK be extradited  back to Russia. Businessman Boris Berezovsky   and the Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev  were both thorns in Putin’s side and represented   a threat to his leadership and vision of a  controlled and united Russia. The UK refused   under the grounds that the two were political  asylum seekers with a right to protection. This initial tension was totally  overshadowed however by the events of 2006,   with one of the highest-profile cases  of secret service conflict in history.   An assassination attempt on foreign soil  that went so drastically wrong that the spy   involved is still a household name in the  UK to this day nearly twenty years later. Alexander Litvinenko. The photograph of Litvinenko in his hospital bed  is perhaps the most significant image in British   journalism from the 21st century. Hairless  and pale, with arms crossed over his stomach,   a turquoise gown draped over his shoulders, and  a cold, unreadable expression on his dying face,   the mystery and darkness of Litvinenko’s life are  captured perfectly in that unsettling photograph. Alexander Litvinenko has served as an FSB officer,  Russia’s secret service that replaced the KGB,   throughout the 1990s. While there, he was  shocked at what he saw. Under the Soviet regime,   the KGB had been working to protect the values of  communism from external threats. It was seen as a   necessary evil to serve the greater good. With  the fall of the Soviet Union, Litvinenko saw   that communism had been replaced by a mentality  more akin to that of a criminal gang. He was   the first person to describe Vladimir Putin’s  government as being like the ‘mafia.’ Power,   personal gain, and security were all top  of the agenda. Anything, or rather anyone,   that threatened any one of those things  for Putin or his inner circle were targets. Soon enough, this applied to Litvinenko himself.  He defected from the FSB and came to London.   Litvinenko had worked as a detective in the FSB.  He was one of the best. Fiercely observant, he   always noticed the little details. After a quick  encounter, he would have collected a long list of   features, traits, and weaknesses of those around  him and read the subtext underpinning situations.   These skills of observation are likely what  saved him from the initial attempt on his life. Sitting outside the Millenium Hotel by Grosvenor’s  Square, Litvinenko met with two FSB agents. They   were just around the corner from the US embassy  and the supposed base of operations for the   CIA. There was a statue of Ronald Reagan with an  inscription from Mikhail Gorbachev at the base. “With President Reagan, we traveled the  world from confrontation to cooperation.” Pretty ironic then that the FSB officers  were in the process of slipping Polonium   210 into Litvinenko’s cup of tea at that very  moment. Polonium 210 is a highly radioactive   and extremely rare isotope. It  is undetectable in food or drink,   so dangerous that you only need a tiny amount  of it to guarantee that your target will die.   Developed thousands of miles away, it had made  its way around the world to this very spot,   leaving radioactive traces at every  stop on its way through London. Litvinenko did not see the poison go into  his drink. Yet he still did not drink it.   The man was a patron of exiled businessman  Boris Berezovsky and a former FSB agent. If   there was one person in the world who knew not to  trust a drink from a fellow Russian, it was him. Litvinenko had a target on his back,  and he knew it. He hadn’t been laying   low since coming to the UK 6 years earlier.  He had been one of Putin’s most cutting and   outspoken critics, working initially  as a writer and journalist. In 2003,   he’d been approached by British MI6  agents, whom he had agreed to join. He didn’t touch the radioactive cup. But the agents tried again. At the Pine Bar, they  sat together under the guise of defecting to help   Scotland Yard. Litvinenko’s suspicions remained.  A pot of tea was on the table with a few used mugs   dotted around, but the other men had moved on to  stiffer drinks by the time he arrived. When the   men asked him whether he’d like to order a drink,  he declined. They didn’t seem particularly phased   by his refusal and continued the meeting.  The other men couldn’t stay long. There   was a football game they were going to see. They  made an offhand comment that there was still some   tea in the pot if he’d like it. They even called  the waiter over to give Litvinenko a clean mug. Eventually, Litvinenko relented. He peered  into the teapot. It was almost empty. The   others must have been drinking it already. There  were dregs in their mugs. He was quite thirsty… Litvinenko poured himself a mug  and sipped it. It was green tea.   He didn’t particularly like green tea.  And even worse it was cold. He had a   couple more sips so as not to let it go  to waste, but he gave up pretty quickly. But getting up to leave the bar, Litvinenko  could already tell something was wrong. Those   men had come here to kill him. He knew that for  sure. Had he misjudged them? Had they failed? Forensic experts later combed over the bar  in great detail. They tested everything from   the furniture right down to the cutlery.  Painting a picture of what had happened   was so easy they wouldn’t have needed CCTV.  The teapot that Litvinenko had poured his   drink from registered over 100,000 becquerels  per centimeter squared. Just 10% of that level   of radiation was enough to kill a person. The  table alone where they sat was 20,000 becquerels. Worst of all, nobody knew what had just  taken place. The staff at the bar put the   teapot in the dishwasher with everything  else multiple times and served countless   guests at that table before the police got  to the scene. Weeks later. By this point,   the entire bar was a radioactive disaster.  Tracing the damage caused by this kind of   radiation is incredibly difficult. How do  you track down random people who went to a   bar they may not even remember the name of?  How do those people connect the sudden onset   of cancerous cells in their bodies to a cup  of tea they drank in London one afternoon? Even Litvinenko did not know what had happened  at first. Seventeen days passed before he was   hospitalized. The doctors couldn’t make  sense of what was happening to him. His   body was behaving like a man being subjected to  constant chemotherapy. The kind of symptoms he   was expressing don’t just happen to someone.  They can only point to one thing. Poisoning. Police investigators arrived on  the scene and sat with Litvinenko,   interviewing him eighteen times in  total. As he lay in his hospital bed,   he knew that his death was already a certainty.  In a way, he was a kind of ghost. And so there   was nothing else for him to do but solve his  murder. On the 23rd of November 2006, he died. Litvinenko’s interview files were released to  the public in 2015. The details of the case   paint a shocking picture of Russia’s actions.  The Polonium 210 is not just a smoking gun but   a breadcrumb trail. British intelligence agencies  were able to trace every movement and decision of   the men involved in Litvinenko’s assassination,  right down to which toilet cubicle they used,   which sink they used afterward, and where  they poured out the rest of the poison. What was most damning and stirred up anger in  the British population and government was the   total lack of regard for the lives of innocent  civilians. Deadly levels of radiation were found   in public spaces all across London. Polonium  210 traces were found in over 60 sites in the   UK. Even more worrying were the trace amounts  found on aircraft responsible for 221 flights,   most between the UK and Moscow. 33,000 passengers  were contacted about this. Could it be that this   was not the only time Russia had sent agents  armed with Polonium 210 into the UK? The only   reason it was discovered in Litvinenko’s  case was because the tea had gone cold. This marked a turning point in Anglo-Russian  relations. The early 2010s saw an improvement   in relations with Putin visiting the London  2012 Olympics and hosting a visit for British   Prime Minister David Cameron. At the time, the  hope was that Cameron could act as a political   ‘go-between’ for Russia and the US to ease  ongoing tensions, but it was not to last. In 2014, Putin ordered the invasion and annexation   of Crimea. Cameron did not hesitate  to condemn the actions. In his words,   the Russia election into the annexation  of Crimea did not count as the people   had "voted under the barrel of a Kalashnikov",  stating, "Russia has sought to annex Crimea...   This is a flagrant breach of international  law and something we will not recognize." What followed was years of sanctions and  repercussions for Russia, championed and   pushed by the UK in particular. The UK cut  all military ties with the country, stopped   trading weapons with them, and imposed economic  sanctions. In retaliation, Russia cut off all food   exports to the UK. Years of back and forth under  different Prime Ministers as well as Brexit and   COVID all saw one thing remain consistent.  The UK’s stance was staunchly anti-Putin. Then, history repeated itself  in March 2018. In Salisbury,   Russian-British double agent Sergei  Skripal and his daughter Yulia were   targets of a botched assassination  attempt. This time it was Novichok. Novichok is a kind of nerve agent that  attacks the central nervous system,   leading to respiratory problems and cardiac  arrest. It was developed with four goals in mind. To be undetectable using standard  NATO chemical detection equipment.  To penetrate NATO chemical protective gear. To be safe to handle.  To circumvent the Chemical  Weapons Convention list. This was a nerve agent designed to  attack NATO countries specifically,   but also use loopholes to stop it from breaching  international laws around chemical weapons. Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious on  a bench in Salisbury by a passing nurse. Witnesses   saw Yulia’s eyes open but unresponsive as she  foamed at the mouth. They were rushed to A&E,   where they were put under intensive care.  After several weeks spent unconscious,   they eventually awoke. Once they were well enough,   they were taken to an undisclosed location  to be protected, treated, and interviewed. The UK was once again outraged at Russia and  imposed even more sanctions, but the dust didn’t   have time to settle before there was another  apparent assassination. Just a few months later,   in July, there was another double poisoning  of two British citizens using Novichok again.   What was most curious was that it was just  7 miles North of Salisbury in Amesbury. Charlie Rowley had found a pretty  perfume bottle in a trash can. Rowley,   deciding it was too good to go to  waste, gave it to Dawn Sturgess,   who happily sprayed it onto her wrist. Within  15 minutes, she was dead. Rowley fell ill too,   having come into less close contact  with the perfume, but survived. Investigators quickly connected the  dots. The perfume was the nerve agent   used in the assassination attempt of the  Skripals. Whoever the Russian agent was   had disposed of the bottle in a trash can to  hide the evidence. Scientists examining the   bottle concluded there was enough Novichok in  there to kill thousands of people. The police   officer who inspected the Skripal’s house  in a full forensic suit was hospitalized   from exposure to the poison and was left with  undisclosed life-altering medical conditions. In a speech that year, Chief of the General Staff   Mark Carleton-Smith underlined the severity  of Anglo-Russian relations. In his words,   British troops must be ready to "fight and  win" against Russia's "imminent" threat. "The misplaced perception that there  is no imminent or existential threat   to the UK – and that even if there was, it  could only arise at long notice – is wrong." And then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.  The UK, at the time of writing, is the third   biggest supplier of aid to Ukraine after the  US and Germany, since the start of the war at   $15 billion. The list is extensive: hundreds  of armored vehicles and tanks, artillery, air   defense systems, ambulances, ammunition, drones,  and so much more. Most notable are the over 5,000   NLAW missiles that infantry units can fire to  take out enemy tanks which have proved highly   effective during the war effort. While the  Ukrainian military is much smaller than the   Russians, they are kitted out with the latest  technology, which has given them a real edge. The UK was also swift to impose sanctions.  They banned Russian Aeroflot flights from   entering their airspace, locked Russia out  of the SWIFT banking system, and froze the   assets of several wealthy Russians in London  who had ties to Putin. London had played host   to Russian oligarchs for over a decade as a kind  of safe haven. The city had benefited financially   from welcoming them. Most notable was the Chelsea  football club, one of the biggest in the world,   which was owned by Roman Abramovich. For 19 years,  he had owned Chelsea, seeing them win multiple   Premier League titles and transforming them into a  world-class team through his financial investment.   When Russia invaded Ukraine, the UK government  forced him to sell the club. He was deemed to have   ‘clear connections’ to Vladimir Putin. Yachts  were seized, and bank accounts were frozen. The strategy was to hit Putin’s inner circle  where it hurt: their wallets. For decades, Putin’s   friends had enjoyed massive financial prosperity.  The UK was able to put a significant dent in that.   It did little to persuade Putin to end the war.  If anything, it has made him more vindictive. Since this point, the UK has had a direct and  honest tone when talking about Russia that is   rarely seen in British politics. The UK government  has openly accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine   and most recently asserted that the death of  Alexei Navalny -Putin’s political adversary who   died mysteriously in a Russian prison in 2024- was  directly caused by Vladimir Putin. The gloves are   off, and the British government has shown they  are in no mood to mince their words anymore. So, let’s get back to the question at the top   of the video. How likely is it that  Russia will go to war with Britain? Well, in March 2022, Russian television broadcast  a hypothetical segment hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov,   the head of the Russian state media  group. The segment was titled The   Sinkable Island. It was a simulation  of a nuclear attack on Great Britain.   This was not a fringe television  show. It was a prime-time threat. The outlook in the UK is grim but determined.  With turbulence in UK politics as an election year   looms and the balance of power looks to change  hands from a Conservative government to Labour,   one thing is clear. The anti-Putin policies  will remain. The UK is set to continue   upping its sanctions as imports of Russian  diamonds, copper, and aluminum are banned. There is a growing sense of tension as  the UK sends 50 of its Challenger tanks   to join the war games across  Europe. Major Simon Robertson,   the second in command of 17 Port and  Maritime Regiment, Royal Logistic Corp,   said grimly as the tanks were transported away  that Britain needed to be "ready for anything." In January, a UK nuclear submarine  did a test launch of a Trident II   D5 missile. While this one was unarmed,  the missile is capable of carrying multiple   nuclear warheads that can be deployed  from the missile in the air. Or at least,   that’s the theory. The missile was supposed  to fly 3,700 miles but quickly went off course   and landed in the ocean just off the US coast.  Worryingly for the Royal Navy, this marked the   second of that type of missile that had failed  in a row. If the Cold War had shown anything,   it was the importance of having a strong nuclear  deterrent, and the public failure of two missile   tests reflects poorly on the country’s  readiness for the worst-case scenario. This joins a growing unease in the UK  about its readiness for war. The UK   economy over the last decade has been flat.  The country did not bounce back from COVID   as well as many of their European neighbors,  suffered a financial hit from leaving the EU,   and saw higher than average inflation rates that  triggered a cost of living crisis. Investment   into the military has taken a backseat in recent  years in an attempt to steady the domestic ship. One example is the UK’s fleet  of tanks. 213 tanks in total,   it pales in comparison to the 1,750 sitting  in Russia’s inventory. A new upgrade to the   Challenger 3 variants is in progress, but  only 148 of the UK’s tanks will see the   upgrade. It’s costing £800m but critics within  the UK government argue that it is not enough. British soldiers have been spending  time training in Finland, Poland,   and Estonia over the last year. Each country  would be a potential target for Russian invasion,   and each is a member of NATO. Should  Putin choose to expand his borders   even further than just Ukraine, one of these  countries would be a likely target. However,   if he were to invade them, he would be met  with the might of all 31 NATO countries. Many unknown entities are hiding in the  fog of the next ten years. The Ukraine   conflict's outcome will likely be  decisive in setting the course.   Should Russia successfully take over the whole  country, perhaps they will set their sights on   another target. Perhaps NATO will be  forced to step in to protect Ukraine   from total collapse. If Russia loses,  Medvedev has made it abundantly clear   that it could spell all-out war against NATO,  with the UK ranking near the top of the list. And yet, the UK is not shying away from  these threats. War games, missile tests,   cold weather training, reinforcing allies  across Europe, the message is clear. If   Russia wants a war with NATO, the UK intends  to be standing there ready on the frontlines. Now check out “Analyzing Russia's Massive Failures   in War Against Ukraine.” Or  watch this video instead!

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