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Keir Starmer resignation Starmer’s exit exposes dirty secret: UK can’t afford Ukraine War

By Ian Proud | Responsible Statecraft | June 24, 2026

Sir Keir Starmer bowed to the inevitable Monday and resigned from leadership of the Labour Party and, therefore, from his role as prime minister.

The resignation had been brewing for some time. While Starmer led the Labour Party to an astounding landslide election victory in July 2024, by September 2025, he was already being labeled the most unpopular prime minister since polling began; this followed a series of U-turns and poorly handled crises. After heavy losses of council seats in local elections in May, the Labour Party moved quickly to remove him.

Former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is expected to become prime minister after an internal Labour Party leadership contest. (Labour maintains a majority in parliament, so it maintains the right to form a government.) Burnham will quickly find that he doesn’t have the money to fix public services, double defense spending, and continue to fund an unwinnable war in Ukraine. He also faces an almighty struggle to convince his party that aligning with the Trump administration on peace in Europe is the right approach, both politically and fiscally.

Up until June 17, Burnham wasn’t a member of parliament. But after a sitting MP gave up their seat, he won the ensuing bi-election by a landslide. A cabinet minister under Tony Blair, he is by far the most popular Labour politician and the person viewed as most able to take on the surging right-wing Reform party. Having been out of frontline British politics for nine years in Manchester, Burnham has built up a reputation as someone who gets things done and is relatable, qualities Starmer appeared to lack.

To outfox Reform, Burnham will have to reinstall public confidence that the government is improving the lives of ordinary Britons in the face of an ongoing immigration surge, a cost of living crisis and a knife crime epidemic, typified by the at times violent street protests that followed the killing of Henry Nowak.

His biggest challenge? Finding the money to deliver real change with anemic growth and the national debt at 94% of GDP.

An obvious place to look would be the blank check approach Britain – under both Conservative and Labour governments – has taken to supporting the proxy war in Ukraine, which has so far cost $29 billion (£21.8 billion).

That might not sound like a huge proportion of government spending. But Starmer’s government faced stiff resistance and had to back away from making a much smaller cut of £5 billion to welfare spending. When your budget is so tight that you have to look at cutting winter fuel payments to the elderly, then it becomes harder to justify funnelling billions towards a distant war.

Aligning with the Trump administration to press for a peace settlement would be the rational and realist thing to do. But there’s a catch. The Labour Party and Burnham himself dislike Donald Trump. In 2025, for example, the putative prime minister accused Trump of “bringing instability to the world.”

Starmer had a troubled relationship with Trump throughout his mandate. The night before Starmer’s resignation, Trump had posted on Truth Social that Starmer was leaving after “failing badly on immigration and energy.” That was hopefully the last on a long list of snipes by the U.S. President. But Burnham will struggle to change the script in an anti-Trump Labour Party. Starmer’s cabinet was littered with ministers who had criticized Trump over the years, including one who called him an “odious, sad, little man.”

Further complicating relations was Starmer’s appointment of Lord Peter Mandelson as Britain’s Ambassador to Washington, which proved to be a catastrophic mistake after further revelations about the depths of his association with Jeffrey Epstein came to light.

To his credit, Starmer invested some effort into papering over the cracks. The visit of His Majesty the King to Washington in May offered a rare bright spot, focusing on the strong ties that bind the United States and the United Kingdom.

However, the flip-flopping of U.K. support for the U.S. war against Iran cast a shadow across the relationship. And it was on Ukraine policy where Starmer was most at odds with the U.S. President.

While Trump was and is able to surface some uncomfortable truths about the state of Ukraine — i.e. that it cannot win a war against Russia — Starmer remained a true believer in eventual victory.

Where Trump has met President Vladimir Putin in Alaska and spoken to him several times, Keir Starmer didn’t speak to the Russian President once during his two years in office.

Where Trump tried to orchestrate the skeleton of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, Starmer rejected its key aspect, on the complex issue of territorial concessions, out of hand.

The list is long and not distinguished. Starmer made himself one of the biggest obstacles to Trump’s aspirations to bring the war in Ukraine to a close, aligning himself with the Europeans who hold to the same view.

And yet Burnham will quickly find that something’s got to give. He can’t fix decrepit public services in Britain, double defense spending, and continue to support an unwinnable war in Ukraine. The math will never add up.

He should be aware that Reform Party leader Nigel Farage is close to Trump and spends most of his time talking about domestic policy challenges, which is clearly resonating with ordinary voters.

For much of my diplomatic career, my European counterparts regularly sniped about the depth of the United Kingdom’s relationship with the United States, and how this eroded European solidarity. Yet, right now, the British and the American position on the Ukraine war could not be further apart.

With Britain having left the European Union, Burnham will arrive in power with a brief window of opportunity to realign with America in the interests of European peace. The tides of British domestic politics suggest that this may help him to rebuild Labour popularity against an onrushing Farage while also delivering much needed savings. I doubt, however, that the Labour party will like this idea at all. Burnham’s honeymoon period may prove to be as truncated as his rise to power.

Ian Proud was a member of His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. He served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019. He recently published his memoir, “A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019,” and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute.

June 24, 2026 Posted by | Militarism | , | Comments Off on Keir Starmer resignation Starmer’s exit exposes dirty secret: UK can’t afford Ukraine War

Putin Warns the West: Russia Is Ready

By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | June 24, 2026

It has been a while since I have written about Russia and the war in Ukraine, but Vladimir Putin’s speech on Tuesday (23 June) to graduates of Russia’s higher military academies and security institutions (military cadets/officers) at the Kremlin merits attention because it carries an indirect but profound warning to the West.

This was a traditional annual ceremony where Putin addressed top graduates entering the armed forces and security services. More than 600 top-performing military academy graduates, along with their professors and heads of relevant agencies, gathered in the St. George Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. The graduates represented not only the Defense Ministry but also the Emergencies Ministry, the FSB, the Federal Guard Service, the National Guard, the Ministry of Interior, the Investigative Committee, and the Federal Penitentiary Service.

I am focusing on the Western threat section of the speech because it signals that Russia, in reaction to Western actions, is prepared for a wider war. The speech followed a consistent four-part structure: the West manufactures the threat; it then accuses Russia of creating it; this is a historically repeated pattern going back to 1941; and Russia’s response is both military preparedness and a principled alternative vision of world order. What made this speech most salient was the explicit statement that NATO has moved from proxy support to open preparation for direct war — an escalatory claim calibrated to remind the graduates, and the broader audience, of the stakes of their service.

Putin’s central argument was structural rather than event-specific. He described the West’s action plan as very simple: first they create threats for Russia, forcing it to take action necessary for defending and protecting itself, and then they immediately accuse Russia of all mortal sins to justify their continued aggressive policy and aggressive actions against Russia. This framing — Russia as perpetual reactor, never initiator — is the foundational claim on which all other arguments in the speech rest.

Putin made a pointed distinction between past and present Western behavior that was clearly intended to signal a new threshold had been crossed. He stated that while in the past NATO countries had limited themselves to supporting the Kyiv regime, which he characterized as having come to power illegally through armed force and a coup d’état, that the West today is openly talking about preparing for a war against Russia and is building up their military offensive budgets. German Chancellor Mertz, for example, has been quite vocal in this regard.

Putin argued that to justify these expenses and the radical militarization of their countries, the heads of NATO and EU states are blantantly lying (my words) about Russia’s alleged military threat.

Looming over the speech was the memory of the Great Patriotic War… The speech was delivered one day after the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa. Putin made the parallel explicit and unambiguous. He argued that even after the treacherous attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the West and Hitler’s Germany tried to accuse the Soviet Union and Stalin of aggression against what we currently know as the “collective West,” and that it is surprising that certain quasi-scientific quarters continue to seriously consider this. Putin was not simply invoking World War II nostalgia for domestic consumption. He was making a specific epistemological claim — i.e., that the Western narrative about Russian aggression today is structurally identical to the Nazi propaganda claim that the Soviet Union was the aggressor in 1941, and that both are false by the same logic.

Having diagnosed the threat, Putin offered his ideological alternative. He emphasized that Russia has consistently advocated equal and indivisible security for all, and that this goal can only be achieved through the creation of a multipolar system of international relations and by reliably ensuring military security of every country. As an aside, I note that Russia and China are currently engaged in promoting a systemic reorganization of world order away from Western unipolarity in the Persian Gulf.

Putin minced no words… He stated that Russia is ready to promptly and appropriately respond to any external and internal threats, and that in accordance with the State Armament Programme, Russia is focused on modernizing its nuclear triad and the Army, and strengthening the combat capability of the Aerospace Forces and the Navy. The explicit mention of the nuclear triad in direct proximity to the discussion of Western preparation for war against Russia was a pointed message to Donald Trump and the rest of NATO.

In discussing the Western threat, Putin indirectly chided the ineffectiveness of Western economic pressure. He stated that all technological and military achievements are being accomplished using Russia’s own domestic scientific and technological capabilities, and that all of it is being supported by steady funding made possible by Russia’s stable and resilient economy. He reminded the cadets that Western efforts to cripple Russia had failed and that Russia met that challenge head on by ramping up production, producing new weapons and modifying existing systems to confront new threats.

I believe that Putin’s speech was a warning to the West that Russia will not make the same mistakes that made Operation Barbarossa possible, and it is ready to confront and defeat NATO if it persists in facilitating attacks against the Russian people.

June 24, 2026 Posted by | Russophobia | , , | Comments Off on Putin Warns the West: Russia Is Ready