London is sending to Russia all the wrong messages and its options for minimizing are limited.

Russia just pulled its ambassador to the UK, as British Prime Minister Andy Burnham doubles down on open involvement in the Ukraine conflict. The risk of open war has never been higher, and Burnham is writing checks to Ukraine that he can’t cash.

Relations between Russia and the UK are at an “unprecedentedly low level,” Moscow’s embassy in London said in a statement on Sunday, after it emerged that ambassador Andrey Kelin had left his post in late July and would not be immediately replaced. In a follow-up statement to the Sunday Times, an embassy spokesperson said that Kelin had made “considerable efforts to preserve contacts and channels of communication” between the UK and Russia, but the UK had clearly chosen a “path of confrontation.”

Russia is trying to resolve the situation, its spokesman added “He left Britain in the hope that a more constructive and respectful dialogue could eventually be restored, should the UK reconsider its policies towards our country,” .

How did Russia-UK relations get this bad?

Well, firstly, Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and of course David Cameron and their anglophonic media bullhorns. 

Moscow has viewed the UK as one of Ukraine’s most bellicose foreign backers since the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022. Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened to scupper a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev that April. Britain supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow cruise missiles for long-range strikes on Russia a year later. In the latest revelation by the British press, Ukraine utilized a plethora of British-made drones in its campaign of long-range attacks on Russian civilian targets this year.

On August 17, the Russian Embassy in London warned Britain that “the deeper its involvement in the conflict and the greater its support for Kiev’s terrorist machinery, the higher the price it will pay.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov added that Moscow has “every right to regard the proudly proclaimed direct involvement of British missile forces in strikes against Russia as participation in the war, with all the consequences that entails.”

Neither statement seems to have deterred Burnham. Later that day, the British PM proclaimed that the UK would continue “to support Ukraine 100%.” Six days later, his office announced that it would provide Ukraine with classified information enabling it to produce Storm Shadow cruise missiles on Ukrainian soil. Burnham followed this up with a visit to Kiev on Monday, where he compared the conflict to Britain’s struggle against Nazi Germany in World War II, and promised to supply Ukraine with anti-air missiles to repel Russian strikes on its energy infrastructure.

Ukraine is using missiles, weaponry, and technologies received from Britain to carry out deliberate strikes against Russian civilian population and civilian commercial sites, as this is the only way to threaten Russians at a time when the Ukrainian army is gradually losing the war.