Britain Hosts Ukraine Summit as Submarines Sit in Port

Britain's defences were in the spotlight from two directions on June 7. At home, all five of the Royal Navy's Astute-class attack submarines are tied up in port at the same time, with none at sea -- a fleet that managed only around 300 days at sea between the boats in 2025, with just HMS Anson genuinely operational earlier this year after a spell being maintained in Australia under AUKUS. Because the Astutes carry Tomahawk cruise missiles and Spearfish torpedoes and screen the ballistic-missile submarines behind the nuclear deterrent, the gap leaves Britain unable to send that firepower or covert surveillance to sea at short notice, even as Russian submarine activity around Europe grows. The First Sea Lord, who warned in December that the allied undersea margin over Russia had become "uncomfortably narrow," launched a Submarine Maintenance Recovery Plan in January; the bottleneck is specialist dock space at Devonport, the sole UK site for the work, where a six-month stopgap deal with Babcock is propping up support while the longer-term Programme Euston floating-dock plan and the SSN-AUKUS programme of up to 12 new boats remain years away.

Abroad, Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosted Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz in London for a summit of the "coalition of the willing," focused on air-defence cooperation, security guarantees and the prospects for negotiations with Russia. Starmer used the meeting to commit Britain to raising defence spending to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2027, to press European partners to do more, and to reaffirm the UK's willingness to deploy troops to Ukraine as part of future guarantees -- ambitions that sit awkwardly against the empty submarine pens at home.

The day also exposed pressure from foreign intelligence services. Dr David Wilson, author of a Home Office-sponsored report on Chinese state-linked organised crime in the UK that was declassified in February, said a former British police officer, a naturalised citizen, invited him to a Chinese restaurant shortly after he had been warned about honey traps. Wilson said he also received 20 to 25 LinkedIn requests from women with empty profiles and was approached by a man claiming close ties to the Chinese government, approaches he believes bear the imprint of the United Front Work Department; he had interviewed officials from 14 UK law-enforcement agencies for the report.

In a separate standoff with Tehran, Joe Bennett, the son of Craig and Lindsay Foreman, called for a prisoner exchange involving an Iranian national held in Britain to free his parents, who remain on hunger strike. The Foreign Office denied any truth to the exchange claims, warning they risk hindering other efforts. The couple, from East Sussex, were arrested in January 2025 on a motorcycle trip and sentenced in February to 10 years on espionage charges they deny.