Why has Russia accused British diplomats of spying?

Relations between London and Moscow are at a nadir - Russia's move doesn't change much.

Photo by MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images

Britain has lost another six of its diplomats in Russia – their accreditation revoked for “conducting intelligence and subversive work.” On the surface this accusation of spying is a retaliation. Britain has been doing some unsubtle lobbying of its allies to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory.

UK-Russian relations are possibly at their lowest since the end of the Cold War. And as far as the Kremlin sees, Britain is Europe’s Russophobe-in-chief. The Conservatives and Labour have been in lock-step policy-wise since the start of the Russian invasion and that has followed Keir Starmer into Downing Street – as evidenced by this drive to approve Ukraine’s use of our long-range missiles.

Allowing the use of Storm Shadow missiles, made by Britain and France and assisted by American technology, to strike inside Russia, could provide Ukraine with a strategic advantage over the coming months. And reaching this agreement before the US election is critical. Defence sources and NATO officials say that once it’s done, it would be a political headache for a Trump administration to unpick. But more than that: with winter coming, there are advantages to hitting Russian logistics hubs just before the freeze sets in.

“Rebuilding capacity in winter is hard in that part of the world,” one NATO official tells me. “It’s not just that the ground is harder and conditions are nasty, but the roads are muddier. It’s just horrible to get around.”

But, the potential use of American, British and French technology has predictably allowed Putin to accuse NATO of direct involvement in the war. British and NATO officials are extremely relaxed, however. “We’re not worried about retaliation over this,” a British defence source said on Friday morning. “Russia is already scurrying around trying to sabotage our support to Ukraine anyway. We’ve absorbed that without too much fuss.”

From the British perspective, relations with Russia couldn’t get much worse. It’s worth remembering that even before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the two countries had been sparring in tit-for-tat diplomacy. Theresa May’s government successfully corralled Western allies to expel Russian diplomats following the 2018 poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on British soil. Notably, even the Trump administration joined in this action, expelling 60 Russian diplomats.

If relations between London and Moscow were bad then, they are much worse now. Back then, the Kremlin at least had useful idiots in opposition: Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman at the time notoriously questioned evidence that Russia was behind the attack, making comparisons to the evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

But from 2020 onwards, when Starmer replaced Corbyn, Russia has had few friends in Britain at the highest levels of politics. The general view of foreign office officials is that no peace deal with Putin is worth the paper its written on.

So, the expulsion of six British officials, while troubling, doesn’t change all that much. It’s unclear what useful work British diplomats can even do in Russia at the moment – making the Kremlin claims of espionage even more ridiculous. And for the two countries to reach a point where good relations could make a difference in bringing peace to Eastern Europe, considerably more than restoring normal diplomatic relations would need to happen.