Vladimir Putin is “coming for us”, a former Defence Secretary has warned.
Ben Wallace, who held the frontbench role under three Prime Ministers, said the UK is in the Russian President’s “crosshairs” and said the Government “must be prepared”. He said it is “inevitable” that Putin will turn his war machine on this country.
Mr Wallace wrote in The Telegraph that the warmonger is driven by “revenge, legacy and romance” rather than logic. He said: “In Putin’s warped worldview, we were behind the Crimean War and defeat of the Czars, we were behind the rise of Hitler, we were behind the counter-revolution and our espionage was behind the end of the Soviet Union. Britain is in Putin’s crosshairs.”
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He said Russian ministers have wrongly claimed Britain is behind Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk, and added: “Make no mistake, Putin is coming for us. We must be prepared for the inevitable.”
He said he’d sounded the alarm with the “national security establishment” about the danger Putin posed for years. Essays written by the Russian President demonstrate that he blames the UK for his country’s failures, Mr Wallace wrote.
The former MP, who held the cabinet role from 2019 to 2023, said on his last visit to Moscow before the invasion, General Valery Gerasimov told him: “Never again will we be humiliated. We used to be the fourth army in the world, now we are the first or second.”