British Defence Secretary John Healey has ruffled the feathers of the Kremlin after saying that he would like to capture Russian leader Vladimir Putin and put him on trial for war crimes.
In the wake of the stunning display of military prowess by the Trump administration’s pre-dawn operation that saw the toppling and capture of Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, UK Defence Secretary John Healey openly pined for the ability to exact the same fate on the President of nuclear power Russia, Vladimir Putin.
During a visit to Ukraine on Friday, the Labour politician said in comments reported by the Kyiv Independent that if Britain had the capability to kidnap any world leader, he would “take Putin into custody and hold him [to] account for war crimes.”
Secretary Healey pointed to the mass graves discovered in Bucha following the Russian occupation of the city in the early days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and reports accusing Moscow of kidnapping hundreds of Ukrainian children and bringing them back to Russia as examples of alleged war crimes committed by Putin.
He said that it “tells you all you need to know about President Putin and his determination not just to wage a war on Ukraine, but to target civilians, cities, the infrastructure that people absolutely critically depend on in the middle of winter.”
“This is a man who must be stopped. This is a war that must be stopped. And our mission is to support Ukraine in its fight today and to help work to secure the peace for the moment,” Healey added.
A similar suggestion was made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the immediate aftermath of the capture of Maduro, saying earlier this month: “If dictators can be dealt with like this, then the United States of America knows what it should do next.”
Healey’s comments came shortly after British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer signed a “declaration of intent” to deploy UK troops to Ukraine alongside the French in the event of a peace agreement between Kyiv and Moscow.
Questions have been raised about Britain’s ability to project such power given the dilapidated condition of the UK Armed Forces, which saw its numbers decline to the lowest level since the early 1800s last year.
Despite it being highly unlikely that the United Kingdom could actually replicate a Maduro-style capture of Putin, the Kremlin nevertheless reacted with rage to the suggestion from the British Defence chief.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that Healey’s comments were an example of “the wet fantasies of British perverts.”
During the nearly four-year war in Ukraine, Moscow has frequently attempted to cast Britain as a nefarious power broker pulling the strings behind the scenes of the “Anglo-Saxon” effort to undermine Russia, a revival of the Victorian era trope of “Perfidious Albion”.
The hostility towards the British has perhaps been best typified by top Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev, who has previously described the UK as the “eternal enemy” of Russia and threatened to send the country into the “abyss” with nuclear weapons.
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