Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the UK “supports Ukraine 100%” after Moscow issued a warning to Britain amid a wave of cross-border strikes and drone attacks. The comment came as fighting and reprisals continue to cause civilian casualties on both sides.
The UK has been one of Ukraine’s largest international backers since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Ministry of Defence says Britain is “committed to providing the equipment Ukraine needs to defend itself” against what it calls President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion. Two British companies are known to have produced drones supplied to Kyiv, and a military source told the BBC that UK-made drones have been used in recent attacks on Russian territory that have been reported to cause more than £35bn in economic damage.
Western support, and Britain in particular, has long been singled out by the Kremlin alongside the United States for arming and politically backing Kyiv. London supplied highly effective anti-tank weapons early in the war under Boris Johnson, which helped blunt Moscow’s advance on Kyiv, and has since provided more modern weaponry and training for Ukrainian troops. Burnham’s first international trip as prime minister in July was to Kyiv, a visit his office said underlined Britain’s ongoing commitment.
Anti-UK rhetoric has intensified on Russian state television in recent weeks, with commentators and some lawmakers publicly calling for strikes against Britain. That tone has hardened against a backdrop of largely static front lines: Russia currently controls roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory, but its forces have made little forward progress in months.
Casualties are nevertheless mounting. UN officials reported 437 civilian deaths in Ukraine last month, the highest monthly toll since May 2022. Russian news agency Tass quoted a foreign ministry spokesman saying 69 people, including three children, had been killed in Russia in the past week.
In the latest Russian strikes on Ukraine, 17 people were killed, including 10 civilians in the north-eastern village of Pechenihy where private homes, a café and a post office were struck. Other fatalities included three people in Sumy, two in Zaporizhzhia and two in Kherson.
Those Russian strikes follow a series of Ukrainian attacks on targets inside Russia. Five people were killed in a residential area of the Rostov region at the weekend, and regional authorities said hundreds of drones had been launched toward the Moscow region over two days; the governor, Andrey Vorobyov, reported a 10-year-old girl injured and damage to a Wildberries warehouse. Ukraine has used both imported drones and increasingly home-grown systems in recent weeks, including the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile.
Separately, the UN atomic watchdog, the IAEA, said it had been informed that a drone exploded at a bus stop used by staff travelling to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. The Moscow-installed plant director told the IAEA one person was killed and three were seriously injured; the agency said no nuclear safety or security damage was reported and did not identify who carried out the attack.
Burnham’s declaration of full support for Ukraine came amid growing concerns that the tit-for-tat strikes and heightened rhetoric between Moscow and Western backers could further escalate the conflict.