Sorry, Keir Starmer. Supporting Kyiv is more important than Britons’ summer holiday plans

Con Coughlin Defence and Foreign Affairs Editor

A leading expert on global conflict, international security and the Middle East. Con worked as a foreign correspondent for 20 years in the Beirut, Jerusalem, New York and Washington bureaux. More recently he covered the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. He is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the War Studies Department, King’s College, London.

Published 20 May 2026

In times of war, the best course of action when the enemy is on the ropes is to keep punching until they break. The military doctrine championed by General George Patton during the Second World War is just as valid for today’s conflict in Ukraine as it was for defeating the Nazis.

Yet, at the very moment that all the indications suggest Kyiv has the upper hand in its war with Russia, Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to effectively ease sanctions on some Russian oil sends the opposite message to Moscow. Far from being a staunch ally of Ukraine in its desperate fight for survival, which Starmer constantly claims is Downing Street’s official policy, the Prime Minister’s actions will confirm Vladimir Putin’s belief that the West is not serious about helping Kyiv achieve victory.

There is certainly an unedifying whiff of appeasement to one of Starmer’s more deplorable U-turns, after he tried to quietly issue a licence allowing imports of Russian oil refined in third countries.

The Government’s defence is that the measure is necessary to prevent jet fuel shortages ahead of the busy summer travel season, and that it actually represents a watering down of new sanctions rather than the cancellation of older ones.

This does not alter the fact that the announcement represents a complete volte face on Starmer’s previous position, when he committed the Government to blocking imports of Russian oil refined in third countries in order to deny the Kremlin funds for maintaining its military offensive against Ukraine.

The scale of Starmer’s betrayal of the Ukrainian cause is clearly evident when the likes of Dame Emily Thornberry, the veteran anti-war campaigner who chairs the foreign affairs committee, accuses the Prime Minister of letting down the Ukrainian people.

Starmer’s decision is all the more ill-judged because it comes at a moment when Ukraine seems to have turned the tide of the conflict in its favour, to the extent that Putin now finds himself very much on the defensive.

With Putin’s so-called “special military operation” – which was only supposed to last a matter of days – about to enter its fifth summer of fighting, Ukraine’s drone expertise has enabled it to seize the initiative, as demonstrated by last weekend’s massive drone strike on Moscow, one of its largest since the war began.

Apart from hitting a number of targets in and around the Russian capital, the drones also targeted the heavily defended Moscow Oil Refinery, which was reportedly forced to temporarily halt operations.

The attack was indicative of Ukraine’s increasingly dominant position on the battlefield, where its drone technology is denying the Russians the ability to conduct land operations, to the extent that Ukraine has even managed to make modest advances on the front line.

Moreover, Kyiv has continued to bring home the reality of the conflict to ordinary Russians, who are seeing for themselves the deadly consequences Putin’s military adventure in Ukraine is having on their daily lives.

In such circumstances, it is entirely credible that, as Chinese President Xi Jinping is said to have told Donald Trump at their recent summit, Putin may come to regret his decision to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The Russian leader’s increasingly paranoid disposition, where he is said to spend much of his time hiding in bunkers and has banned close aides from using mobile phones, suggests he may well be looking for an exit strategy to end the war. Putin has even resorted to referring to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, by name, something he had studiously refused to do as part of his efforts to belittle the Ukrainian leader’s status.

For Western countries such as the UK, which has committed itself to supporting Ukraine’s valiant fight for freedom, this should be the moment when, in the spirit of Patton’s wartime doctrine, they move in for the kill by maintaining the pressure on Russia to end the war.

Instead we have the unedifying sight of our Prime Minister, in effect, capitulating to the Russians at the very moment that the UK and its allies should be pressing home their advantage. It is certainly hard to argue with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s claim, made during PMQs, that the U-turn on Russian oil shows how Starmer has lost his “moral compass”, especially if the money the Kremlin receives is ultimately “used to fund the killing of Ukrainian soldiers”.

What Starmer and the rest of the Labour Government need to understand is that making sure Russia does not emerge victorious from the Ukraine conflict is far more important so far as our long-term national security interests are concerned than making sure there is enough jet fuel to take British holidaymakers to the Costa del Sol this summer.

If Putin is ever able to declare some form of victory in Ukraine, it will simply confirm him in the belief that military aggression pays, leading Moscow to launch more attacks on European soil that could ultimately lead to an all-out war between Russia and Nato.

The best way to prevent such an outcome would be, with Putin clearly on the ropes, for the UK and its allies to land the decisive blow that teaches Moscow, once and for all, that there is nothing to be gained from waging war in Europe.