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Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanks UK for intercepting Russian shadow fleet oil tanker
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has thanked the UK for intercepting a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in the English Channel, describing it as an “important step”.
“It was Russia’s hubris, fuelled by high oil and gas revenues, that paved the way for this war, and every decision by partners that deprives Russia of money also limits the war itself” he wrote in a post on X, in which he personally thanked the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and “all Britons”.
He added in his post: “And Europe urgently needs to take legislative steps to enable not only the detention of tankers and restrictions on oil shipments, but also the confiscation of the oil they carry. This will certainly help bring peace closer.”
Along with France, the UK is leading the so-called “coalition of the willing” initiative to carve out security guarantees for Kyiv as part of any future peace deal with Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected negotiation proposals and has so far been sticking to his maximalist positions.
Over the four years since the start of Russia’s full scale invasion, the more than 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line has remained largely static as drone warfare hinders advances. The US-Israel war on Iran has shifted critical resources and diplomatic attention away from Ukraine over the last few months.
Key events
Kemi Badenoch urges potential Labour leadership contenders to cut welfare and boost defence
The PA news agency is reporting that Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has written to Keir Starmer offering her party’s support to vote to cut welfare spending and redirect the savings to defence.
As we mentioned in a previous post, Andy Burnham, who could soon be the next prime minister, has said he would not be “squeamish” about cutting welfare to fund defence spending, although he has not said how.
In her letter, which was also sent to Burnham and other potential leadership contenders Wes Streeting, Al Carns, Catherine West, Darren Jones and Ed Miliband, Badenoch said:
It is time to get serious. We cannot have our military inadequately funded at a time of growing threats. The funding must also not be backloaded when the pressures are urgent.
I have made several offers to work with you in the national interest to reduce benefit spending so we can invest more in our defence. Sir Tony Blair, the longest-serving Labour prime minister, has urged you to accept them.
In the light of the warnings from John Healey and Al Carns, I repeat my offer again today, and ask you to meet with me to discuss defence funding. I am also making the same offer of support to reduce welfare spending to the contenders in the ongoing Labour leadership race.
Make platforms that promote violent content pay towards riot costs, Streeting says
Peter Walker
Wes Streeting has called for Keir Starmer to take urgent action against X and other online platforms that have helped whip up social tensions, suggesting they should be forced to contribute to rebuilding costs after the riots in Belfast.
The intervention by the former health secretary, who is seen as a likely challenger to Keir Starmer in any leadership contest, comes after Downing Street said any response would be left to Ofcom, the media regulator, meaning no action is likely for at least two months.
Condemning what he termed “the forces of darkness online and offline”, Streeting said this was an insufficient response to a mass of posts on X – including from the platform’s trillionaire owner, Elon Musk – calling for an angry response to a knife attack in Belfast.
It follows a similar pattern of incitement before disorder in Southampton in response to the case of Henry Nowak, who was handcuffed by police as he lay dying after his murderer falsely accused the teenage student of racist abuse.
As well as calls from far-right agitators, such as Tommy Robinson, for people to protest, X carried large numbers of posts incorrectly naming two people as being among the Hampshire police officers involved in Nowak’s arrest, with some showing addresses and messages such as: “Wanted: dead or alive.” You can read the full story here:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanks UK for intercepting Russian shadow fleet oil tanker
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has thanked the UK for intercepting a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in the English Channel, describing it as an “important step”.
“It was Russia’s hubris, fuelled by high oil and gas revenues, that paved the way for this war, and every decision by partners that deprives Russia of money also limits the war itself” he wrote in a post on X, in which he personally thanked the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and “all Britons”.
He added in his post: “And Europe urgently needs to take legislative steps to enable not only the detention of tankers and restrictions on oil shipments, but also the confiscation of the oil they carry. This will certainly help bring peace closer.”
Along with France, the UK is leading the so-called “coalition of the willing” initiative to carve out security guarantees for Kyiv as part of any future peace deal with Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected negotiation proposals and has so far been sticking to his maximalist positions.
Over the four years since the start of Russia’s full scale invasion, the more than 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line has remained largely static as drone warfare hinders advances. The US-Israel war on Iran has shifted critical resources and diplomatic attention away from Ukraine over the last few months.
Al Carns, who quit as armed forces minister earlier in the week and is now being tipped as a potential Labour leadership race contender, has been speaking on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday Politics programme.
“I’ve been told that the prime minister has got a bank account and also a company ready to fight a leadership contest, so he’s all set up and ready to go. Have you done that?” Kuenssberg put to the former minister.
Carns dodged answering the question directly and responded by saying: “What I would like to see, whatever happens in the future, is a really clear and concise policy debate about the big ideas and the courage to take those big ideas forward for the next three years.”
An open leadership contest would favour contenders like former health secretary Wes Streeting, although many in the party would prefer to avoid a lengthy and bruising inward facing contest. Instead, they are hoping Andy Burnham replace Keir Starmer in an orderly way if he wins the upcoming Makerfield byelection, one of the most consequential in British political history.
The shadow defence secretary, James Cartlidge, suggested that he “accepts” the Conservative party didn’t do enough on defence when they were in power between 2010 and 2024.
Referring to former Conservative defence secretary Ben Wallace saying his party left the armed forces “hollowed out” and underfunded, he told Sky News:
I accept we were part of that, but it was about successive governments since the end of the Cold War… since 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, defence spending has fallen year on year because we thought we had peace.
That is clearly not the case. We can all accept that. I am very proud of what we did in government to support Ukraine – we led the world on that.
The current government has committed to spending 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035. But the former defence secretary John Healey said the defence investment plan presented to him would prove too slow given growing and diversifying threats to UK security, with defence spending rising to just 2.68% in 2030 after hitting 2.6% next year.
It is understood the deal offered by the Treasury did not set a date for increasing spending to 3%, and had tried to force the MoD to plan to only reach that figure in 2034/35. Defence spending increased during the Cold War, peaking in the mid-1980s, but then successive governments oversaw a period of decline after the conflict ended, with the army, navy and air force contracting as strategic priorities shifted.
Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch has posted this on X:
I pay tribute to the brave Royal Marine Commandos who boarded a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker overnight in the English Channel. Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine is funded by their oil exports in defiance of sanctions. As Leader of the Opposition, I support the government in standing with Ukraine.
Here are some pictures from the operation:
My colleagues Mark Brown and Jessica Elgot have filed a full report on the British armed forces intercepting and boarding a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in the English Channel this morning. Here is an extract from their story:
British authorities say the Smyrtos is one of 700 vessels in a shadow fleet responsible for carrying 75% of Russia’s sanctioned oil. The fleet provides Russia with what analysts say is a critical lifeline, allowing oil to be sold and funds generated to continue its war against Ukraine.
The Sunday morning operation is the first time the UK has led on such an endeavour, previously providing support to the French military when it carried out something similar in the Atlantic…
Calling it a “blow to Putin’s war chest”, the MoD said the operation had been “conducted in close cooperation with the French”. It said the UK was a leader in tackling the shadow fleet, having already placed sanctions on more than 500 vessels.
“These sanctions are working,” the ministry said, with Russia’s oil and gas revenues falling by 24% year-on-year in 2025.
Nandy agrees with Burnham on cutting welfare in order to fund defence
Lisa Nandy said she agrees with Andy Burnham that cuts in welfare could be used to fund significant increases in defence spending. The culture secretary told Sky News: “We’re only spending £1 in every 25 through the welfare budget in helping young people to actually find work and that is a disgraceful situation that we inherited and we have got to change that.”
While a Labour leadership contest is yet to be officially launched, it is widely speculated that if he wins the Makerfield byelection on 18 June, which polls say is likely, Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, will seek to replace Keir Starmer as prime minister.
He is positioning himself as the only Labour party politician who has a chance at beating Reform UK – and said in a recent interview with The Times that he wants to reduce the welfare bill and make sure there is adequate funding for the military.
“I am not squeamish about saying that the plan would be to reduce the welfare bill,” he said. “Not at all.” “It is not the traditional Westminster way of just crude cuts, short-term cuts that then create a backlash and create more political turbulence. It is actually going to do things that will reduce the benefits bill, moving towards a more preventative state that makes the right investments to support people into work.”
As my colleagues report in this story, teenagers under the age of 16 are expected to be banned from accessing “high-risk” social media apps while safer platforms will be subjected to restrictions, under a sweeping government crackdown.
Under-18s will also be banned from using romantic or sexual AI chatbots after a consultation on keeping children safe online.
When asked on Sky News this morning about the plans, the culture secretary said banning social media for under-16s is on its own not “the silver bullet solution,” but has a “role to play” in protecting children online.
Nandy told Sky News:
I don’t want to get ahead of the prime minister’s announcement (expected on Monday). But when we launched the consultation, it was a question of how we better protect young people online, not if we do so.
And one of the things that a social media ban does and has been shown to do in Australia is that although it doesn’t stop all young people going online and onto social media apps, it does mean that you change the presumption at a very early age to stop the situation where kids as young as eight, nine, 10, 11 are going on to social media sites because all of their friends are on them at an age when, frankly, they’re not really emotionally equipped to be able to cope with it.
So the question of more regulation is – it’s a definite yes from the government, more enforcement action. I don’t think banning social media on its own is the silver bullet solution, but I do think Australia has shown very clearly that it has a significant role to play.
Culture secretary says she agrees with some of what former defence minister said in resignation letter
The UK’s culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said Keir Starmer’s top priority remains keeping the public safe, pointing to the government slashing the aid budget as a “tough decision” that apparently proved their commitment to properly funding defence.
She said government departments are looking at further cutting their budgets to help fund defence.
When pressed by Sky News presenter Wilfred Frost on whether Dan Jarvis, the new defence secretary, will be given more money for defence than what was offered last week, Nandy said: “I don’t know. I don’t know what stage the negotiations had reached when John Healey decided to resign.” She said that she likes and respects Healey and confirmed that the government will publish the defence investment plan ahead of the Nato summit scheduled for early July.
In what sounded like her urging the Treasury to give up more money for defence, Nandy said “we have to rise to meet this moment” as the “threat level” has risen and “we have got to be prepared to invest to the levels that are needed in order to do it”.
Despite being bound by collective cabinet responsibility, Nandy interestingly said she agreed with some of what the former defence minister, Al Carns, said in his resignation letter last week (as a reminder he quit because the defence plan had not been well enough funded and the government was planning to spend its money on outdated systems). Nandy told Sky News:
I think Al Carns though, who resigned as defence minister this week, put it very well in his resignation letter.
Because the challenge is both to transform the way that we do defence, it is to increase the levels of spending even further than this government has already done in order to meet this moment.
But it is also to invest more broadly in the national resilience of the country and that includes economic insecurity, as he pointed out in the letter, strong public services, strong communities – and we as a government have to do all three things at once.
So, I won’t pretend that this is easy and I won’t pretend that these negotiations sometimes aren’t quite tense and quite difficult.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Dan Jarvis said he had a “big responsibility” towards soldiers who risk their lives for the country.
Jarvis, himself a former soldier, said he was still working through the detail of the defence investment plan, which will lay out how much military equipment and infrastructure will be paid for over the next decade. The new defence secretary told the Sunday Telegraph:
The defence of our nation is a shared endeavour… I have a big responsibility in that regard now, but so do all of those people who expose themselves to risk tonight, tomorrow, next week, and we owe them a debt of gratitude.
I have a responsibility now to them to make sure that they get what they need, and people should be very clear about my determination to fulfil those duties, to make sure that they do (get) precisely what they need.
His comments come weeks before a crunch Nato summit in Ankara that will be attended by Donald Trump.
British forces intercept Russian shadow fleet vessel in English Channel
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of UK politics. The British armed forces intercepted a Russian shadow fleet vessel in the English Channel in the early hours of Sunday morning, the UK’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, has said.
Royal Marine commandos and specially trained law enforcement officers from the National Crime Agency boarded a sanctioned oil tanker during a six-hour operation, according to the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The vessel, Smyrtos, will be held and monitored for any environmental or safety concerns off the south coast of England as investigations continue, the MoD added.
In a statement, Starmer said: “This operation delivers yet another blow to Russia and reminds those fuelling (President Vladimir) Putin’s war in Ukraine that they cannot hide.”
The new defence secretary, Dan Jarvis, said:
Operations like this require skill, professionalism and courage. I pay tribute to our armed forces personnel and all those involved.
Russia relies on its shadow fleet to fund their conflict in Ukraine and our interdiction delivers a blow to Putin’s illegal war.
The incident comes days after the former armed forces minister, Al Carns, and defence secretary, John Healey, resigned their posts after a protracted row over the defence investment plan (Dip). They said the plan, which has faced repeated delays, is seriously underfunded and falls short of what the defence department needs to keep Britain safe at such a volatile time.
Healey said the government was only willing to give an extra £10bn in additional funding, a figure he said is well below what is needed amid the threat from Russia and other major security challenges.
