On Monday, Keir Starmer wrote in His Majesty’s Daily Telegraph that Britain was “ready and willing to contribute to security guarantees to Ukraine by putting our own troops on the ground if necessary”. Amongst an increasingly crowded field, this is the most ludicrous, unrealistic, and downright dangerous commitment that the Prime Minister has so far made.
Whilst the armchair cold warriors that read and write for that august newspaper might be longing for a crack at the Ruskies, the suggestion that Britain would put forces in Ukraine should receive more attention – and engender far more scepticism, horror, and hostility – than I have seen in Tory circles. As popular as Kiev’s cause might be, we should reject this act of charity.
What would these troops do? Emmanuel Macron has suggested that, after the end of the war, European troops could be sent to man an 800-mile border between the new Ukrainian and Russian borders, with a demilitarised “buffer” zone between them. Since “peacekeeping” forces are supposed to be impartial, describing these as such is unhelpful. These troops would be there to deter.
Since Ukraine is outside of NATO, it is not covered by Article 5. We have not had to treat an attack on the country as we would one on ourselves. As firm as government largesse and public support have been behind Kiev’s cause, we have been unwilling to involve ourselves in a direct war with Moscow. From Starmer’s comments, that is exactly what he now plans to threaten.
The Prime Minister says that “to guarantee Ukraine’s security is to guarantee the security of our continent and the security of this country”. Putting British troops “in harm’s way” would be intended to prevent any peace from being “a temporary pause before Putin attacks again”. The intention is clear: Russia invades, British troops resist, and we are hurtling into a Third World War.
Is this a realistic prospect? It depends on how willing one thinks Putin would be to restart a war that represents the core of his worldview, and how much of a deterrent any force would be. Without the United States willing to commit to it – which Donald Trump’s administration has already rejected – how would we cobble together the hundreds of thousands of troops we might require?
As our Deputy Editor has highlighted, Britain’s contribution would be paltry. We are “simply not materially equipped for such an expedition” with doubts around whether we even have “a single deployable Army division”. Decades of defence cuts have long since left us able to fight against a peer adversary. We have spoken loudly, carried a small stick, and given half of it to Kiev.
Of course, what remaining military we have remains committed, by NATO membership, to fighting a war for the various member states that border Russia. Supporters of providing a security guarantee to Ukraine would argue that a deal would only act as a tacit extension of that. But a war over Ukraine is far more likely than a war over any of those.
If Putin has been unable to win a war over a country with a quarter of a population and a tenth of the GDP, will he really be willing to go to war with NATO? I suspect not. His worldview is not the Soviet one. He is not aiming to spread an ideology worldwide, but to reclaim that territory he sees as historically Russian or within its sphere of influence. That project has stalled.
In short, Starmer’s warm words are an encapsulation of everything that has gone wrong with British foreign policy for decades: a willingness to posture on the international stage equally matched by an unwillingness to provide the blood and treasure that such a position requires. The Prime Minister’s new desire to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP would barely touch the sides.
Trump’s return has suddenly forced our politicians to confront the reality of our international impotency. We can either trim our commitments to match our depleted capabilities, or we can accept that playing the great power will require massive cuts to other areas of spending. We need to end the fantasy that we can threaten a new world war whilst the MOD remains a basket case.
If we want to have a realistic conversation about Britain’s commitments in eastern Europe, pulling out of NATO would be a more worthwhile discussion than indulging Starmer’s flights of fancy – the last spasms of a hubristic interventionism that is dying a swift and happy death.