Brexit Freedoms Enable UK to Lead on Ukraine

In 2014 Russia invaded and annexed the Crimea, and fomented the creation of a pro-Russian separatist republic in a portion of the Donbas region, namely in the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. Apart from some mild sanctions, Russia’s actions went unchallenged.

The background to this failure was the dependency of German industry on imports of cheap Russian gas. This dependency was brought about by Gerhard Schröder as German chancellor, who decided upon the closure of Germany’s system of nuclear power stations. To replace this source of energy supply, Schröder instigated the gas arrangements with Russia and then, after leaving office, became a member of the Supervisory Board of Rosneft, one of the main Russian gas suppliers.² Schröder only left this position in 2022.

Angela Merkel, German chancellor in 2014, resisted any attempt at EU level to mete out a commensurate punishment to Russia for its actions, thereby protecting the gas supplies upon which Schröder had made Germany’s economy dependent.

Merkel was able to hamstring any attempt to mobilise a meaningful response at EU level, and the UK was in turn hamstrung from mounting its own response due to our subjection to EU processes. David Cameron, the UK prime minister, was unable to carry the day against the power of Merkel, a defeat that was repeated in Cameron’s attempts in 2015/6 to negotiate changes to EU processes in the hope of forestalling Brexit. Cameron’s defeat at the hands of Merkel in 2014 hamstrung the USA’s response, had Barak Obama – pivoting towards the Asia/Pacific region – been minded to undertake one.

Such appeasement was the fruit of the internationalist approach – as opposed to one launched by nation states – and acted as an encouragement to an expansionist dictator, to come back for more.

In 2022 Russia attempted to conquer the remainder of the Ukraine by force. The Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk were already under Russian control. Luhansk and Donetsk were then formally annexed, together with two neighbouring regions captured by Russian forces in 2022 (Kherson and Zaporizhzhia), on the back of fake referenda organised by the Russia-imposed leaders of these four provinces.³

Putin reckoned without the impact of Brexit, though. The UK led a robust international response. The UK was no longer subordinated to EU processes and no longer in thrall to self-interested German control over those processes, whose aim was to dampen the nature of the Western response and to appease Putin and Russia. The UK could act.

Events in 2014 paralleled the infamous Munich peace conference in September 1938 at which Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler by allowing the annexation of the Sudetenland, in which much of Czechoslovakia’s raw materials, industry, and defences were located.⁴

The sell-out to the expansionist dictator Adolf Hitler emboldened him to come back for more, and quickly. Czechoslovakia was occupied in full in March 1939.⁵ Britain and France failed, at Munich, to give the type of unmistakeable, irrevocable, and unconditional defence guarantees to what remained of Czechoslovakia, which would have triggered a European war upon Germany’s invasion.

This supplementary sell-out further emboldened Adolf Hitler to come back for even more, and within only six months. It was to Poland that Britain and France gave their defence guarantees. Hitler, in invading Poland on 1st September 1939, demonstrated his belief that Britain and France had so lost their ‘moral health’ that they would not honour their guarantees. Instead the UK government delivered a final note on 3rd September 1939 through our ambassador in Berlin that unless we heard from the German government by 11:00 am that day that Germany was prepared at once to withdraw its troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between the UK and Germany.⁶

The Soviet Union perfidiously invaded Poland from the east on 17th September 1939, in line with the agreement struck in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.⁷ Arguably Britain’s and France’s defence guarantees to Poland should have led to war with the Soviet Union as well. This awkwardness was resolved in 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, who became the UK’s ally-of-convenience until 1945.⁸

Under the common interpretation we are not at the point where UK defence guarantees have been triggered necessitating war with Russia. The common interpretation is that this only occurs when Russia invades a NATO member state – which Ukraine is not - and invokes Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty: that an attack on one is an attack on all.⁹

However, this interpretation overlooks the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances for Ukraine of 1994, which was ‘a key part of the settlement under which Ukraine gave up what was then the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal’.¹⁰ In exchange, the UK, USA, and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Russia has ‘grossly violated the commitments that it made in the document’. It already did this in 2014, and all the more so in 2022.

That constitutes a ‘casus belli’ for the UK and the USA, but the UK was unable to act to fulfil its commitment in 2014, because its response was perforce subordinated to the EU’s response, which was non-existent.¹¹ USA was unwilling to act unilaterally under Barak Obama and required the UK to act with it, which it was hamstrung from doing. That was internationalism in action, in a crisis of the gravest importance. International bodies got in the way, and hamstrung their members - nation states – from taking the lead. Everyone was left looking at everyone else. The response degenerated into appeasement, and resulted in a diplomatic disaster of the first order.

The disaster was curated by the EU, which has a legal person without being a nation state, and is thus able to act as the fulcrum of international actions, or, in this case, inactions.¹² It was the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 which finalised the EU’s status as such, the European Union having only been founded by the Maastricht Treaty of 1993.

This awkwardness around the UK’s and the USA’s failure to live up to their commitments under the Budapest Memorandum persists and neither nation is now hamstrung: they could invoke Russia’s infringement of the Budapest Memorandum as a ‘casus belli’. One could hardly contend that the criteria for a just war have not been met. The reference point for a definition of a just war remains St Augustine of Hippo.¹³ All avenues for peace have been exhausted: what negotiations have occurred have been conducted by Putin in bad faith, to buy time either to complete his invasion or to see the resolve of his opponents (and/or their backers) crumble.

Churchill made one of the finest speeches in the House of Commons directly after Munich.¹⁴ There are several parallels to the events in Ukraine in 2014.

He stated that, in the Munich sell-out, ‘we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat’. The tolerance of Russian actions in 2014 was similarly a total and unmitigated defeat for the international diplomatic template whereby the European Union presents itself as an actor on the world stage.

For all the involvement of the EU in placing itself at the centre of events in 2014, Churchill’s words aptly apply to it: ‘I believe the Czechs [aka Ukraine], left to themselves and told they were going to get no help from the Western Powers [aka the EU], would have been able to make better terms than they have got after all this tremendous perturbation; they could hardly have had worse’.

The EU failed utterly with regard to Russia/Ukraine (as it did before with regard to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s), to maintain peace through ‘the accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor, coupled with a sincere effort to redress grievances’.

Can we deny that Ukraine in 2014 – like Czechoslovakia in 1938 – ‘suffered in every respect by her association with the Western democracies’, acting in their guise as the EU?

Now we have Starmer going back on the approach that, in 2022, enabled the UK to take the lead, to Ukraine’s benefit and the UK’s credit.

Instead of formulating a UK line, he is helping to fashion a ‘European’ stance towards Ukraine in collaboration with ‘our European partners’, hoping to reforge the ‘old alliances’ – the alliances that let the Ukraine and Western security down in 2014.

As then, the UK approach is being dovetailed into an EU’s stance that failed Ukraine, and undermined European and UK security in its wake. The EU, now as in 2014, has no valid place at the table. The salient reference document is the Budapest Memorandum. Only the UK and USA have a valid place at the table. The EU never had a strong resolve to stand up for the Ukraine: Angela Merkel was acting under a fatal conflict-of-interest, and was disposed to crumble. The EU did crumble, and is likely to do so again. Hence the EU’s involvement was and is a false device to enable that crumbling to take place without its instigator being in full view.

Brexit did not undermine European and UK security: it enabled the UK to strengthen both. What occurred in 2022 was the reckoning from the failures of 2014, the sips from, as Churchill put it, ‘the bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time’.

Starmer, in his desperation to put Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’, takes us backwards, and participates in the crumbling.

Instead of moral health and martial vigour, we now cannot mobilise a single ship to defend our bases in Cyprus, we give up the Chagos Islands, we permit Spain a veto over what arms can be stored in or shipped through Gibraltar, we allow China an enormous new embassy in London, we entertain the involvement of Gerhard Schröder and/or Angela Merkel in the peace talks about the Ukraine, and we ease the restrictions on the importation of Russian oil and gas and derivative products.

Such is the nature of the failed domestic Prime Minister whom his PR office has attempted to rebrand as an international statesman.

Starmer is in the throes of going back on existing commitments in order to make sure the UK’s stance is acceptable to the EU.

In March 2026 a bilateral loan was announced, with great fanfare, from the UK to Ukraine for defence equipment.¹⁶ Now Starmer changes his mind and lobbies for the UK’s contribution to become part of the EU loan package.¹⁷ The Guardian reported on 4th May 2026 on the terms for the UK to join this scheme (with a reported £400 million contribution to the EU to be permitted to participate).¹⁸

The 2014 pattern starts to repeat itself: the UK can no longer act independently, and put the needs of the Ukraine and the willingness of the British people to support Ukraine first. Instead the primary driver for Starmer is that our subjection to the EU’s loan scheme will improve UK relations with the EU: as the BBC reported on 3rd May 2026, ‘UK joining Ukraine loan scheme would be good for EU ties, Starmer says’.¹⁹

There was nothing in the 2024 Labour Party general election manifesto about subordinating the needs of the Ukraine to improved relations with the EU, or about recommencing our involvement with EU loan schemes.

Starmer has stated that Brexit has damaged the UK’s security, but cannot provide proof for that beyond referring to powerful enemies. That is not good enough. The EU’s adoption of a foreign policy role has twice delivered not security but disaster – in the Balkans War and Ukraine. Our security is being further compromised by unilateral actions of Starmer and his regime, not included in his mandate from the British people, and undermining the UK’s security position around the globe.

And are the British people willing to back Ukraine, and not just with a loan that has no repayment date and upon which we ourselves pay the interest on the money borrowed from international investors to fund the loan?²⁰ Would the British people be willing to provide financial support through the more honest mechanism of a gift or a grant, or even a version of Lend/Lease?²¹ Are the British people willing, to paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, to act as the ‘arsenal of freedom’ for the Ukraine?²²

Churchill was convinced that the British people would be willing to do what needed to be done against Hitler, albeit that he did not, upon the dispelling of the immediate prospect of war in 1938, ‘grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost, who never flinched under the strain of last week – I do not grudge them the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment’.

He went on, though, with words that apply now to the actions of Starmer and the inactions and backsliding of the EU: the British people ‘should know the truth. They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged’.

Starmer’s claim that Brexit damaged UK security is a falsehood. In the case of the Ukraine it was our involvement with the EU that led to a diplomatic disaster in 2014 - a defeat without a war.

The EU’s placing itself at centre stage and then permitting the national interests of Germany to result in the appeasement of Putin displaced what should have been the real discussion – did Russia’s actions in 2014 constitute such a breach of the Budapest Memorandum that the USA and UK should have gone to war?

Instead the EU inserted itself into the process, and ‘took the lead’, serving not to mobilise a meaningful response, but to smother both the response and the discussion on the applicability of the Budapest Memorandum, to Putin’s benefit and in Germany’s presumed ‘national interest’.²³ Thus emboldened, Putin came back for more in 2022.

The consequences of the defeat in 2014 travelled ‘far with us along our road’: Russia’s all-out attack on Ukraine in 2022 was part of that road, and was another sip from ‘the bitter cup’.

From 2014 to 2022 there was gross neglect and deficiency in our defences, belatedly recognised but not in the form of higher defence spending. In Starmer’s world the response is to participate in EU loan schemes, and to use that to curry favour with the EU.

The UK’s response to the all-out attack by Russia in 2022 was enabled by Brexit, and demonstrated a degree of ‘recovery of moral health and martial vigour’. Starmer, a Merkelesque individual with minimal geopolitical understanding, possesses neither of these qualities and threatens to cut off that recovery at its root.