Ben Wallace warns: Putin targets UK for Russian failures
According to Ben Wallace, former head of the UK Ministry of Defence, Vladimir Putin "irrationally blames the UK for a series of historical and current failures of Russia." Among these is the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Kursk region. "Someday he will want to get revenge for this," said the politician.
In an article published in the "Daily Telegraph," Wallace, who headed the Ministry of Defence from 2019 to 2023, revealed that even before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he was convincing security advisors that Putin was not acting out of logic or a desire to modernise Russia, but out of revenge and caring for his own legacy.
On this occasion, Wallace recalled Putin's essay 'The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II'.
"In trying to reshape Russia's role in World War II, Putin blames the UK and France and completely distorts the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. He doesn’t mention the massacre of 20,000 Poles in Katyn by the Red Army and secret police in 1940, nor that before the invasion of Poland, Russia was training with the Wehrmacht and selling them tanks. His essay is worth reading just to understand the kind of man he is," he continued.
"We must be prepared." Wallace warns
He mentioned a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoygu and the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, General Valery Gerasimov, 10 days before the invasion, during which they stopped maintaining any pretence, and Gerasimov told him that Russia would never allow itself to be humiliated again.
"These people at the top of Russia believe they are rewriting history, fixing the humiliation they felt at the end of the Cold War and settling scores for hundreds of years. While Russia is doing a very good job of humiliating itself once again with its actions, we should realise that in Putin's version of history, it is the UK, not the United States, that is at the heart of Russia's failures," Wallace wrote.
"In Putin's distorted worldview, we were behind the Crimean War and the defeat of the Tsars, we were behind the rise of Hitler, we were behind the counterrevolution, and our spies were behind the end of the Soviet Union. The UK is in Putin's crosshairs. One of the highest-ranking members of the Russian siloviki recently said: 'We know that the UK is behind the invasion of Kursk'. We weren't. Let's have no illusions; Putin is coming after us. We must be prepared for the inevitable," the former defence minister warned.
