Luke Markham: How Britons have taken the largest responsibility for guarding European interests | Conservative Home

Luke Markham is a final-year student in Classics at the Sorbonne Université.

‘London today, like on the eve of both World Wars of the last century, is acting as the main global warmonger’.

This would be a perplexing judgement to pass on a country which was in 1914 and 1939, and is again today, unprepared for a world conflict. Nevertheless, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service did so in March this year. Perfidious Albion, the new target of Russian threats, such as its Poseidon torpedo, is ‘public enemy number one’.

This belligerence is shared not only among Britain hawks in the FSB.

A survey undertaken by Statista of residents across Russia found that 70 per cent of Russians had a negative opinion of the UK in 2024. This represented a 150 per cent increase since 2008. In parallel, the UK views Russia with similar hostility. The British Foreign Policy Group’s annual survey has consistently found Britons to consider ‘Russian aggression’ to be the top threat to the UK, with 91 per cent of those surveyed in 2022 agreeing that they distrusted Russia.

The proposition offered by the former head of MI5 in September that the UK may already be at war with Russia appears to be less theoretical than its analysis suggested. More materially than state-sponsored grey-zone warfare, the idea of the ‘enemy’, and the combat against him, has already entered the British public consciousness. This common perception is steering a British civilian effort to conduct a proxy campaign against Russia in Ukraine.

I observed this myself earlier this month when I drove the family Volvo XC90 to Lviv, where it was donated to the Liut Brigade. My contact there reported that he and his colleagues “work with various organisations in Britain and Europe, but especially in Britain as people there are more responsive, friendly, sincere, and motivated to help.”

This involves more than official humanitarian organisations, which include 569 British NGOs operating in Ukraine. There are a large number of community groups not registered on the UK charity database which coordinate unofficial aid operations. Their volunteers communicate on dedicated WhatsApp group chats in order to organise donations and deliveries not handled in government arms shipments or humanitarian packages.

These groups maintain agreements with the Ministry of Defence in order to secure surplus military equipment such as combat uniforms and rifle slings. They purchase Starlink satellites from retailers like Currys which provide internet access where Russian strikes on power plants have disabled local receivers. They also organise deliveries of thick socks and snow boots to the front line to protect soldiers against the cold temperature, which is below freezing in the winter. They additionally provide protein bars and adult nappies for those who are posted in trenches for several weeks. Behind the front line, they supply headsets and monitors for conducting training in drone usage.

All aid is transported in British cars which are also donated to soldiers. These are preferred to cars manufactured in mainland Europe because Russian marksmen are not accustomed to targeting the driver side of right-hand drive vehicles. They are given humanitarian aid priority access at a dedicated checkpoint in Poland and are de facto exempt from EU customs as they are regularly recorded as non-exports. Although non-exports should be returned together with their driver, Polish border guards do not investigate non-return and permit driver re-entry without issue.

The vehicles which are donated are modified by the Ukrainian military for combat purposes. The two largest groups which donate British cars, Ukrainian Action and Pickups for Peace, have completed 1174 deliveries. Cars4Ukraine, the largest Ukrainian organisation for donating vehicles, has received mostly British contributions.

Personal British civilian involvement in the war has also characterised the housing of Ukrainian refugees, who have in the UK, more than in other European countries, benefited from family-provided accommodation rather than state-led solutions. By December 2024, the Homes for Ukraine scheme had accommodated 139,800 arrivals in British homes. According to the UN Refugee Agency, the equivalent hébergement citoyen programme in France had received just 17,000 arrivals by February 2024. In London alone, there had already been 16,757 Ukrainian arrivals by March 2023.

Where there have been large civilian contributions made by the populations of other countries to Ukraine, they have not demonstrated a similar personal investment in the war effort. In the first month of the launch of the United 24 application, the official Ukrainian Government platform for private donations to Ukraine, German citizens contributed the most after British and American donors. However, their contributions have typically been directed to non-combat funds. By August 2022, 42 per cent of donations from Germany on United 24 had been allocated to defence compared to 52 per cent to medical aid. By contrast, 76 per cent of those from the UK had been granted to defence (the highest figure among the most active donors) compared to 21 per cent to medical aid.

Unlike in other European countries, British civilians have engaged themselves in an active role in defending Ukraine. The network of British donors and the nature of their donations, uniquely among civilian aid programmes, have ensured that dual-use equipment provided to the Ukrainian military has tangibly armed it where government shipments have been insufficient in doing so. This has directly involved British civilians in the war. The organisation which coordinated my donation to the Ukrainian military, Aid Ukraine UK, reported to me that they constitute the majority of its volunteers. Where large charities from mainland Europe, such as the Red Cross, operate in similar zones near the front line, they employ local Ukrainian volunteers.

For all the sneering of diplomats in Brussels about the UK’s status as a ‘third country’, it is striking that its people have taken the largest responsibility for guarding European interests. As the EU attempts to charge the UK €6.75 billion for participation in the SAFE rearmament programme, it ought to reflect on whether it should continue to wage its political war on Britain or collaborate on continental security in order to prevent a real one with Russia.

British civilians are clear on whom they are fighting – the ‘continental Europeans’ not so much.