How Britain is Bankrolling the War in Ukraine

The US has dirty hands, too, but let's not forget who the real villains are.

There are many, including the author of this publication, who believe that all of Londongrad should be seized by the British government and used to house Ukrainian refugees. Photo by Vuk Valcic/Alamy Live News

It goes without saying that the biggest threat not only to democracy but the entire world right now is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But the unprovoked war he is waging in Ukraine is only the latest in a long list of crimes he has committed while the U.S. and Western Europe didn’t so much as bat an eye. The UK did nothing in 2006 when Putin murdered Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent critical of Russian corruption, with radioactive polonium. His assassins failed twice before succeeding, either leaving toxic trails of polonium themselves or causing it to be left all over UK hotel rooms, a taxicab, a sushi bar, the Millennium bar, a secondary automobile, a civilian’s home, and at last into the circulatory system of Litvinenko himself, effectively killing him. The UK’s reaction to this assassination on its own soil, one that put thousands of its people at risk of collateral contamination? An investigation wherein the “hot” polonium-tainted teapot was discovered at London’s Millennium hotel, the perpetrators identified and extraditions requested … and then a whole lot of nothing.

Putin’s reaction to Litvinenko’s death? “Mr. Litvinenko is, unfortunately, not Lazarus.”

Then there were the Skripals, a former Russian military officer and double agent for the British Intelligence agency, and his civilian daughter, Yulia Skripal, who were brazenly poisoned in Salisbury, England, on March 4, 2018. This time, the KGB nerve agent Novichok was used to dispatch them. Both father and daughter fell critically ill and were hospitalized for several weeks, but an innocent bystander, Dawn Sturgess came into contact with the nerve agent and died an agonizing death within 15 minutes. The UK’s response was to forbid Prince William from attending the World Cup in Moscow that year.

Let’s pretend for a minute that it wasn’t Putin who engineered these hits, but Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. What would our collective reaction have been? Not this. But there’s a reason these outrages are met with a shrug, and that reason is stark, dire, dramatic, and horrifying in the light of day: the UK, at this point, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Russia.

It was Putin’s agenda all along to use the UK’s rapacious greed against it. He’s been engineering this for over twenty years. First, with a racist disinformation campaign exploiting England’s long-standing hatred of foreigners that resulted in Brexit, and now with an astonishing infusion of dirty Russian money. England is, in fact, the money laundering capital of the world. Make no mistake—the US is, too, but the US is a far bigger country with a far more diversified economy. The UK exports cars, machinery, and electrical equipment, such as computers, but their over-reliance on “financial services” has had an outsized impact not only on its own economy, but the entire world.

In the UK, you can buy property anonymously (i.e., through an untraceable chain of offshore shell companies), which is why 87,000 homes were snatched up by anonymous millionaires. A majority of those are owned by Russians who have direct links to the Kremlin. To add injury to insult, most of those enormous “Moscow-on-Thames” (aka “Londongrad”) homes sit vacant, serving their sole purpose, which is to spin-cycle millions in dirty cash.

But Putin’s oligarchs haven’t stopped there. Russian tycoon and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev owns British newspapers The Independent and The Evening Standard. Putin toady Roman Abramovich owns the Chelsea football team. The only reason laws have not been effected to stop this hemorrhaging of British capital is because Britain’s conservative party, the Tories, accepted almost 2 million pounds in Russian donations in recent years. Fourteen members of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government welcomed Russian cash in 2020 alone. With the rise of cryptocurrency (which is called “crypto” for a reason), it is likely millions more.

Woman fleeing war-torn Ukraine. Photo by OpenDemocracy.

While thousands of hard-working and qualified foreign nationals were denied visas post-Brexit, the UK has handed out hundreds of Golden Visas to the highest bidders, in this case Russian oligarchs and their families. Meanwhile, the empty houses in Londongrad remain untouched because seizing them would cost the British government far more than they can afford to lose at this point. Just as Putin was counting on.

It’s true that the invasion of Ukraine caught Europe flat-footed, which is why the EU continues paying Russia 350 million euros per day for gas, despite sanctions. But this has to stop. Every cent that is poured into Russia’s coffers is funding its war against Ukraine, and very probably Poland, Lithuania, and whatever other country puts the next gleam in Putin’s predatory eye.

The problem is, of course, doing the right thing, the humanitarian thing, the only thing that will put an end to this war, short of Putin’s kleptocratic oligarchs poisoning his underwear, spells economic disaster for Britain. It allowed itself to be swallowed whole by the Russian python and slowly squeezed to death over a period of two decades. The US has the same problem. Putin owns key members of the Republican Party, including a former president who not only has a raft of bank loans coming due, but depends on dirty Russian money to fund his faltering real estate “empire.” How Donald Trump will avoid defaulting on those loans remains to be seen, but with more evidence surfacing of a secret backchannel to sources of illicit funds while he was in office (i.e., Russia’s Alfa Bank), and with the ruble in the toilet, it’s little wonder The Donald keeps vacillating on whether he supports his Dark Lord or the Ukrainian people. Paying your vig comes in myriad ways, from the proverbial pound of flesh to throwing your support behind a vicious mass-murdering despot.

The bottoming out of the Russian economy is likely going to take the UK with it, or at least significantly impact its bottom line. Even the US won’t remain unaffected, largely because of its economic ties to Europe. With its unhealthy reliance on Russian oil and gas, to say nothing of its gluttonous appetite for dirty cash, the EU has a long road ahead to full economic post-Covid, post-Brexit, post-war recovery. All of this was how Putin envisioned it. What he didn’t count on (his invasion of Soviet Georgia and the Crimea elicited nary a peep from anyone) was the world’s collective horror at the atrocities his army is perpetrating against women and children in Ukraine.

It is Ukraine’s brave stand against Putin that has captured the world’s attention, sympathy, and outrage. Had the country lain down its arms and accepted its fate, would we care so greatly about the outcome?

Hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake now. According to former Ukrainian ambassador Fiona Hill, “We’re already in the middle of War War Three, whether we’ve grasped it or not.”

That’s why the US must put an end to the opacity of all real estate transactions within its borders, and the UK must do the same. And we must sanction all British and American firms that continue working with Russian oligarchs, including the seedy underworld of art auctions, which is a wildly successful method of laundering cash.

To beat Putin, we must starve him. His personal fortune of 200 billion dollars won’t be enough to keep Russia afloat while he wages war against democracy. Lop off the head, and the rest will follow.

I’m sure you have thoughts about the war in Ukraine. If so, I’d like to hear them. Leave your comments below.