London: Russian naval vessels have been showing increased activity along Britain’s coastline, UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in an interview with The Telegraph.
“We’re regularly visited by nosy Russian ships, and we are regularly visited now by a number of Russian warships,” Wallace told the newspaper, adding that the UK has “tried de-escalation, we have tried methods but at the moment until Russia changes its attitude, it’s quite hard to see where we’re going to go.”
Wallace said that a Russian kilo class submarine was spotted in the Irish Sea at the end of 2020.
The British defense secretary named Moscow as the United Kingdom’s “number one adversary threat,” saying that it has been a “very, very long time” since a Russian sub was seen in the Irish Sea. “It might have been for the first,” Wallace told The Telegraph.
In March, the UK released an integrated review of its post-Brexit foreign policy, defense and security, in which the Conservative government labelled Russia as “the most acute threat to our security.”
The 100-page document re-examined London’s strategic priorities and objectives and defined the country’s place in the world, following the departure from the European Union. Within the strategy, the UK pledged to deter and defend against the “full spectrum of threats” emerging from Russia and China.
