Like all private military companies, the Wagner Group is officially outlawed in Russia. That minor detail, however, has not stopped Vladimir Putin from sending Wagner mercenaries across the world to further his foreign policy goals: propping up the Assad regime in Syria as it starves and gasses its citizens into submission, supporting the Libyan rebels in their attacks on the UN-backed government, and assisting the illegal invasion of Ukraine.

The group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was sanctioned by the UK Government in 2020 for the crimes he orchestrated in Libya and last week, after years of explicit denials, President Putin admitted that his government had “completely financed” the Wagner Group – to the tune of around £1 billion in the past 12 months alone.

I do not doubt that the UK Government knew this already. But Putin’s revelation makes HMG’s decision to give British lawyers official dispensation to bypass the sanctions on Prigozhin and assist him with his vexatious attempt to sue a British investigative journalist in British courts for “distress” and “reputational damage” all the more baffling. As the journalist himself pointed out, it looked uncomfortably like one arm of the UK Government had become “embroiled in a scheme to undermine the very sanctions they were responsible for governing”.

This, however, is far from the first time that the UK Government’s foreign policy has been dangerously disjointed: a 2020 report from the House of Lords Select Committee on International Relations described, somewhat generously, a “tension” between different parts of the UK Government when it comes to foreign policy, with different government departments routinely working in ways which contradict or undermine each other.

Indeed, just a few months after that report was published, different arms of the UK Government: called for a global ceasefire; authorised the export of almost £1.4bn of weapons to Saudi Arabia; and announced a raft of sanctions against senior Saudi government officials and their “blood-drenched ill-gotten gains” – all in the same week. Such a capricious approach to foreign and security policy must end.

Nowhere is this lack of coherent policymaking more dangerous than when dealing with Russia. Modern Russia, writes Peter Pomerantsev in his book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, “had seen so many worlds flick through in such blistering progression – from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich – that its new heroes were left with the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable”.

Pomerantsev’s chronicle of Russia’s modern history was published in 2014 but reads like it was written yesterday. In showcasing Moscow, a city that “can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime”, in all its complexity and chaos, Pomerantsev reminds us how difficult it can be for governments to approach a regime as fickle and protean as Putin’s. The shifting, shadowy nature of the hybrid threats emanating from Moscow, like the regime itself, tiptoe along the frontiers of acceptable state activity and often involve a dense web of proxies which makes attribution and accountability difficult. But it sometimes feels like the UK Government is not even trying.

When writing the long-suppressed Russia Report, the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee noted that, despite the long-standing and credible threat that Russian influence operations represented to the UK’s political institutions, they were unable to identify one specific government department or official who was responsible for countering these attempts. The issue of defending the UK’s democratic processes, the ISC wrote, has been “something of a ‘hot potato’, with no one organisation recognising itself as having an overall lead”.

For years, the SNP has called for the UK Government to take a more robust and coherent approach to its Russia strategy and close the loopholes that the Kremlin so willingly exploits. When I was my party’s defence spokesperson, I called for the UK to follow our allies in Finland, Lithuania and Poland and appoint an official whose job it would be to track these hybrid threats and ensure government departments are working in sync to tackle them.

I was reminded of this during recent a conversation with Marcel Plichta, an academic at the University of St Andrews who has studied the Wagner Group’s activities in Africa. Plichta pointed out there is no one UK Government official responsible for overseeing policy regarding the Wagner Group and suggested ministers create a position to coordinate diplomatic, economic, and security efforts to counter the group. Sound familiar?

I find myself wondering if I should keep suggesting that the UK Government establish officials for a range of policy issues to ensure joined-up working, or if the fact that this issue is so frequently raised by academics, politicians and parliamentary committees highlights the existence of wider, more urgent structural issues in the UK policy machine. I suspect it is the latter.

These same issues affect parliament too. I wrote recently about the prohibition on discussing members of the Royal Family and the damage that does both to a democracy and a constitutional monarchy. The same rules, however, also forbid discussion of “matters relating to the conduct of members of either House”, except in specially arranged debates. This represents a de facto ban on elected parliamentarians discussing the allegations made in a recent Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, “Boris, the Lords & the Russian Spy” regarding a member of the British legislature.

While I make no allegations of impropriety regarding the subject of that documentary, the issues raised above make one thing clear: the machinery of the British state is simply not made for the challenges of the modern world. As long as these self-evident problems continue to be waved away as part of British democracy’s ancient charm, hostile actors will simply continue to exploit them.

Stewart McDonald is SNP MP for Glasgow South

UK democracy's outdated rules are a gift to hostile actors like Russia and sinister Wagner Group – Stewart McDonald

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