Britain needs war: Why London can’t afford peace in Ukraine

By Oleg Yanovsky, lecturer in the Department of Political Theory at MGIMO, member of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy

When The Guardian reported last week that the British Army is preparing for operations in Ukraine, it was easy to treat it as another piece of saber-rattling. But Keir Starmer’s declaration that “we will not back down until Ukraine wins” is not a slogan; it is the essence of British strategy. For London, conflict is not a failure of diplomacy but a survival mechanism. War conceals economic stagnation, fills political vacuums, and restores an international relevance the country has been losing for years.

Britain emerged from Brexit in a weakened state. The EU market was largely gone, economic growth barely existed, inflation ran above 8%, the National Health Service buckled under pressure, and more than 900,000 people left the country annually. A political system built on confidence and inherited prestige was now running on fumes. Yet while domestic life sagged, the British state was hardening.

Unlike continental powers, Britain is not structured around a single center but as a horizontal web of institutions: intelligence agencies, bureaucracies, military commands, banks, universities, the monarchy. Together they form a machine designed for strategic survival. When crises come, this network does not collapse. It feeds on instability, turns adversity into leverage, and converts decline into opportunity. After empire came the City of London. After colonies came offshore accounts and loyal networks. After Brexit came a new military cordon around Russia in northern and eastern Europe. Britain has always known how to turn disaster into capital.

The Ukraine conflict, which London helped provoke, has become its biggest opportunity in decades. Since 2022 the country has lived, politically and institutionally, in wartime conditions. The 2025 Strategic Defense Review openly calls for readiness for “high-intensity warfare” and proposes lifting defense spending to 2.5% of GDP, around £66 billion ($87 billion) a year. Military spending has already risen by £11 billion. Orders to defense firms have jumped by a quarter. For the first time since 1945, a British industrial strategy describes the military-industrial complex as an “engine of growth.”

Thirty years of deindustrialization left Britain dependent on redistribution. Where manufacturing once stood, only finance remained. Now the financial sector can no longer sustain the government’s ambitions. Into that vacuum steps the arms industry. BAE Systems and Thales UK have secured contracts worth tens of billions, insured by London banks through UK Export Finance. The fusion of “guns and pounds” has produced an economy where conflict, not commerce, becomes the measure of national success.