LONDON, May 23. /TASS/. UK Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace described Russia as his country’s "number one adversary threat" in an interview to Sunday Telegraph.
"We have tried de-escalation, we have tried methods but at the moment until Russia changes its attitude, it’s quite hard to see where we’re going to go," he said.
Wallace also claimed that Russian warships were increasingly active in the vicinity of UK borders.
"We’re regularly visited by nosy Russian ships, and we are regularly visited now by a number of Russian warships," the UK defense chief said, adding that a a Russian kilo class submarine was detected in the Irish Sea late last year, which the UK had not seen "for a very, very long time.
The UK Navy said last December they had been observing significant presence of Russian warships near the kingdom’s territorial waters. According to Sunday Telegraph, a total of 150 Russian warships have been spotted by the UK Navy since 2013.
Earlier, the Russian Embassy to the United Kingdom has repeatedly noted that UK political and military officials often cite the alleged Russian threat in an attempt to justify their country’s growing military budgets and increased military presence in other regions.