Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has denied his government has any plans in the “here and now” of sending British troops into Ukraine after his recently installed Defence Secretary suggested they could be deployed on training missions.
Following comments from Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, who suggested that British troops could be deployed to the west of Ukraine to train the nation’s soldiers “in country” rather than on NATO bases throughout Europe, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak denied that his government has any such plans, at least not in the immediate future.
In comments reported by the Press Association, Sunak claimed that there was “some misreporting”, although he did not deny that Shapps had made the comments.
“What the Defence Secretary was saying was that it might well be possible one day in the future for us to do some of that training in Ukraine,” the prime minister said.
“But that’s something for the long term, not the here and now, there are no British soldiers that will be sent to fight in the current conflict. That’s not what’s happening. What we are doing is training Ukrainians. We’re doing that here in the UK,” Sunak stated.
Defence Secretary Shapps, who assumed the top role at the MoD in late August, also said that the UK is considering an increased role for the Royal Navy in the Ukrainian conflict, saying that British maritime might could be used to protect commercial shipping lanes in the Black Sea from potential attacks from Moscow’s Navy.
The statements from Shapps drew a quick response from the Kremlin, with Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev writing on Telegram that the West was seeking to escalate the proxy war into a full-blown conflict between NATO and Russia, saying: “These morons are actively pushing us towards World War Three.”
Medvedev went on to warn that if British troops were placed in Ukraine, they would become a “legal target for our armed forces,” and that “they will be mercilessly destroyed. And no longer as mercenaries, but precisely as British NATO specialists.”
To date, over 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been trained on bases in the United Kingdom since the longstanding conflict with Russia broke out into full war last year as Putin launched an invasion of the former Soviet state.