The threat of Russian missiles hitting the UK is one we need to get used to

The British government is finally recognising the growing threat of a direct attack from its foreign enemies – and the country’s huge gaps in its defences when dealing with such threats. It has been steadily dawning over the last few years that war is no longer something that only happens to other people a long way away, and that will never directly affect British people at home.

In a speech today, Sir Keir Starmer said money would be made available for all plans laid out in the new strategic defence review, which includes extra attack submarines, £15 billion on nuclear warheads and thousands of new long-range weapons.

The government has promised to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2027, and has an ambition – but no firm commitment – to hike it to 3 per cent in the next parliament.

Adversaries like Russia have spent years pouring resources into ways of striking targets at immensely long distances – not only missiles with ranges of thousands of kilometres but also covert and semi-deniable means of attack, such as cyberstrikes and recruiting proxies to carry out arson, sabotage and assassination.

And the warnings have been coming through loud and clear from both inside and outside government that the UK is ill-prepared to defend itself against these attacks, or to deal with the consequences if its defences fail.

In April, a senior RAF officer was among the first in his position to be explicit about the inadequacy (or, by some accounts, close to non-existence) of the UK’s air and missile defences – and this after decades of Russia sending its long-range bomber flights towards British airspace.

Defence Secretary John Healey warned this weekend that Russia is conducting daily cyber attacks on the UK.

And the heads of both MI5 and MI6 have been increasingly blunt in their warnings of Russia’s “staggeringly reckless” campaigns of sabotage, with MI5 chief Ken McCallum describing Russia’s mission of triggering “sustained mayhem” on British streets.

The cyberattacks, sabotage, and assassinations have until now been isolated pinpricks and test runs across Europe, but could have devastating effects if delivered in a mass, coordinated fashion. Russia’s reported test runs planting incendiary devices on aircraft show just how willing Moscow is to cause mass casualty events well beyond Ukraine – including, in a dramatic escalation, practising for attacks against flights to the US and Canada.

People in Britain might reasonably ask why Russia would attack them at home, and what Moscow would stand to gain from it. The answers lie not only in the wild verbal onslaughts on the UK by Russian propagandists on television, whose fever dreams are haunted by mythical “Anglo-Saxons” whose historical mission has been to thwart Russia’s every ambition.

There’s also a very real sense in which the UK has been a problem for Russia. It was Britain that, in the early stages of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, galvanised European and even American resolve to support Kyiv, pouring weapons into the country when others had written off Ukraine’s chances of survival.

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And now, it is the UK, together with France, that still seems to nurture the ambition of leading a “coalition of the willing” to insert itself into Ukraine in order to frustrate Russian plans to restart the conflict there if any form of ceasefire is agreed. Whether those plans are realistic or not, Russia wants to deter them and ensure they never become a reality.

And that’s where Russia’s military theories of deterrence and coercion come in.

Critics of the idea that Russia might want to “attack Nato” like to dismiss it with nonsensical caricatures of Russian paratroopers appearing over the South Downs, or Soviet-style armoured divisions rolling forward across the plains of Europe. That’s a far less likely form of attack than the doctrine Russia has been developing of coercion rather than invasion – delivering sufficient damage against a target country at a distance that they change their political course without necessarily having to move tanks across its border.

We know from the experience of Ukraine, and of Syria before it, what this looks like. It doesn’t mean strikes on military facilities, it means attacking those targets that cause the maximum human suffering among the population. That is critical infrastructure, hospitals, power generation and distribution, and other facilities that keep people alive, in order to target the most vulnerable in society so as to demonstrate the costs of opposing Russia.

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The idea of Russian missiles landing in London or Liverpool without war or warning still seems far-fetched for most people. And for decades, it was, while there was no doubt over the solidarity of Nato, including the certainty that any such attack would trigger the support of the United States in retaliating against Moscow.

But sadly, the fact that Britain’s defence planning has also treated the idea as far-fetched paradoxically makes such a scenario more likely by increasing the chances that Russia might think it would be successful. And that’s a problem in a new world environment where Moscow might think – rightly or wrongly – that it could get away with attacking the UK and not bringing on a devastating US response.

All of this explains why defence commentators who have been awake to the issue have castigated the refusal by successive British governments to make any plans or preparations for the possibility of major disruption at home due to enemy action.

Last week, the Commons defence committee heard once again how the threat to the British homeland has evolved far faster than British willingness to do anything about it.

This week’s announcement of government plans to finally consider the issue is long overdue. We have to wait and hope that they will lead to meaningful action.

Keir Giles is the author of ‘Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent’