RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT – JUNE 27, 2021Written by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Stunning find includes MoD plot to provoke Russia in Ukrainian waters last week and U.S. request to leave troops in Afghanistan.
In what sounds like a plot turn in one of those Britbox crime-thriller series, a tranche of soggy Ministry of Defence documents ranging from “Official Sensitive” to “Secret UK Eyes Only” were found behind a bus stop in Kent Tuesday morning, according to a breaking story by the BBC today.
The 50-page bundle of doc provides an unbelievably candid insight into a “wide range of important areas.”
“This is a major embarrassment for the Ministry of Defence, which is currently carrying out a detailed investigation into how the papers came to be lying on a street corner, in the rain, in the early hours of Tuesday morning,” writes BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, who does not say how they were found or what tipped the news service off, since the finding was several days ago.
But the find is an explosive one. Not only to the docs reveal that the Brits knew very well that the Russians would respond aggressively (and they did, the extent to which is in dispute) when they sailed the HMS Defender 12 miles off the coast of Crimea in the Black Sea this week, they did it deliberately — a case that British officials have been acknowledging in the last few days.
According to the “Official Sensitive” documents, the case was made to avoid confrontation by taking an alternative route through non-contested waters but that would run the risk of looking “scared/running away.” The Russians said they fired warning shots and dropped bombs in reaction to their “freedom of navigation” operation, a detail the Brits deny.
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