Britain rejects ‘baseless’ Russian claim expelled envoys were spies

The Kremlin has ordered six employees at the UK embassy in Moscow to leave owing to ‘signs of espionage’ – after Putin warns the West over missiles.

President Putin has said that allowing Ukraine to hit Russian targets with Storm Shadow missiles would mean NATO countries were at war with Russia. Picture: Alexei Danichev / POOL / AFP

Russia says it has expelled six British diplomats it claimed were spies as President Vladimir Putin warned that Moscow and the West would be “at war” if Ukraine were allowed to use western missiles on Russian territory.

The Foreign Office condemned the expulsions and said the claim made on Friday that the diplomats were spies was “completely baseless”, adding: “We are unapologetic about protecting our national interests.”

The expulsions were announced by Moscow as Sir Keir Starmer prepared to meet President Joe Biden in Washington to discuss Ukraine’s possible use of British Storm Shadow missiles against targets on Russian soil.

Sir Tony Brenton, a former British ambassador to Moscow, said Russia’s action against the diplomats was an expression of the Kremlin’s anger at the proposal to allow Ukraine to use the weapons beyond its territory.

“[The West] has gone through a steady sequence of us doing things that the Russians increasingly don’t like, supplying F16s [fighter jets], supplying cluster weapons and so on,” Brenton said.

“And at each stage Putin has alluded to their ownership of nuclear weapons and said, ‘We’re going to do something awful eventually’, and they’ve done nothing. And what they’re trying to do now is persuade us that this time they really mean it. The expulsions are part of that.”

Further steps could include strengthened co-operation between Moscow and the West’s opponents, such as Iran and allied groups, Brenton added. “They’re looking at ways of inflicting harm indirectly so that we don’t get ourselves into an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, which everyone wants to avoid.”

Speaking to state television on Thursday night, Putin warned that if Ukraine struck Russia with western-made long-range missiles, “this will mean that NATO countries, the US, European countries are at war with Russia”. Russia would then “make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for us”, Putin added.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammyin Washington on Friday after a meeting with US President Joe Biden. Picture: Saul Loeb / AFP

Some European politicians played down Putin’s remarks. Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said he “would not attach excessive importance” to the comments.

Russian state media named the British diplomats expelled as Jessica Davenport, Grace Elvin, Callum Duff, Katharine Mcdonnell, Thomas Stevenette and Blake Patel.

The UK said their accreditation had been revoked last month and they were reported to have left some time ago. The FSB, Russia’s successor agency to the KGB, said the six diplomats had their accreditation removed as a response to “numerous unfriendly steps taken by London”, adding that “signs of espionage actions were detected in their work”.

The FSB also alleged that the Foreign Office’s eastern Europe and central Asia directorate had been “reorganised into a special service tasked with ensuring our country’s strategic defeat” after the start of the war in Ukraine.

The Russian state-controlled TV channel Rossiya-24 said that the British diplomats involved had met banned non-governmental organisations and media designated as “foreign agents”, such as the Memorial rights group and Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper. “Foreign agent” status was introduced in 2012 and is used to smear individuals, groups or media outlets critical of the Russian authorities.

Ukraine has already been striking Russian territory, including in a suspected drone attack this week on a high-rise block of flats near Moscow. Picture: Tatyana Makeyeva / AFP

An FSB employee told the channel officers were “tired” of chasing diplomats across Moscow and surrounding towns as they engaged in “classic British espionage”, making rapid changes of public transport and “sitting for several hours on benches in the freezing cold” as they met members of banned groups.

The officer claimed that the diplomats’ spouses were being deployed as spies and young children used to cover up espionage activities. “Basically, one cannot speak of any diplomatic etiquette,” the officer added. The FSB claimed it had documents showing that “London is co-ordinating the escalation of the international military-political situation”.

Brenton said meeting people from across the political spectrum was the work of any diplomat. “It’s the job,” he said.

The expulsions are the most serious since Moscow kicked out 23 UK diplomats and shut down the British Council in Russia in March 2018 amid increasing tensions over a nerve-agent attack on the former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. That followed Britain’s expulsion of the same number of Russian diplomats over the novichok attack, for which the UK government blamed the Kremlin.

UK-Russia relations, bad since the Moscow-orchestrated murder of the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with polonium in London in 2006, nosedived as a result and worsened still further with Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Britain is frequently portrayed in state media as Russia’s greatest detractor in Europe and a slave of American attempts to weaken and isolate Moscow.

The Times