AINEWS
A former Russian deputy foreign minister named a British Ukrainian drone plant beside RAF Mildenhall and a UK missile firm as 'legal targets' for sabotage or arson, not a military strike.
Andrei Fedorov, a former Russian deputy foreign minister, has publicly named a British-Ukrainian drone factory beside RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk and a separate UK missile company as "legal targets" for a Russian "hybrid attack": sabotage, arson, or covert action rather than a military strike. The interview with the Mail on Sunday arrives as the latest in a string of public Russian signals aimed at British defence suppliers, and the operation is the naming itself.
The site Fedorov singled out is the West Suffolk premises of Ukrspecsystems, a British-Ukrainian firm that builds drones for Ukraine's war effort. The factory sits on land next to RAF Mildenhall, a Royal Air Force base in Suffolk that also hosts United States Air Force units. The location of the Ukrspecsystems plant was made public in April 2026 alongside five other European companies that make weapons and drones for Ukraine. Fedorov's intervention adds a Russian name to a list that was already public, and gives that list a coercive wrapper: "legal targets."
Fedorov is a former deputy foreign minister, not a current Russian official. His interview is one named source's account, not a Kremlin policy statement. He told the Mail on Sunday that the "highest levels of the Russian government" are considering a hybrid attack on British soil, framed as sabotage or arson, and that the UK is "evil number one" in Moscow's view. He distinguished that approach from an outright military strike, which he said Moscow wants to avoid because it would trigger a NATO response. A pro-Kremlin war channel had previously named a NATO base in Estonia hosting at least 900 British troops as a target, and British defence company bosses have been warned that they could be targets of Russian hybrid operations.
The UK government's public response is dismissal, not alarm. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting, quoted in the same coverage, said: "The reckless rhetoric and attempts at intimidation we have seen from the Kremlin in recent weeks reflects the weakness of Putin's position and we will not be intimidated." A cold reader can read that reply two ways. The literal reading is that the threat is real and the UK is standing firm. The mechanism reading is that the rhetoric is the operation, and the public refusal to be rattled is the point. If naming a UK defence supplier as a "legal target" makes the firm raise its security spend, its insurance, or its workforce screening, and if it makes other suppliers reassess the cost of taking Ukrainian defence work, the signalling has done its work without any arson, sabotage, or strike.
The April 2026 public naming of Ukrspecsystems and five peer firms was the first move. The UK's August 2026 authorisation of MBDA to share classified Storm Shadow data with Ukraine is the trigger that likely prompted the renewed Russian commentary, because it moves the UK from a supplier of finished weapons to a partner in Ukrainian missile production. Fedorov's "legal targets" framing lands on top of that operational change. The Al Jazeera wire on 27 August 2026 carries the same Russian warning in straight wire language, with no former-official filter: Russia "could target the UK in response to Kyiv firing British-made missiles."
The unanswered question is whether the named UK firms have visibly shifted defensive posture since the interview. The BBC has reported that the Suffolk MP for the Mildenhall area has called for transparency over protection arrangements at the drone factory. If the firms publish new security partnerships, insurance disclosures, or visible perimeter changes in the weeks after Fedorov's interview, the "naming is the operation" thesis gains support. If they do not, the public designation may be a one-cycle coercive move rather than a sustained campaign, and the Streeting dismissal will read as the right call. The next test is the firms' next quarterly filings and any UK Ministry of Defence statement on protective measures around named defence suppliers.