Britain is “ready and willing” to deploy peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, Keir Starmer has said, but experts have questioned whether the UK’s military is prepared for such an undertaking.
Starmer stressed, in The Telegraph, that “securing a lasting peace in Ukraine that safeguards its sovereignty for the long term is essential” to deter Vladimir Putin from “further aggression”.
Ahead of an emergency security meeting in Paris with European leaders today, Starmer has for the first time explicitly indicated the UK is ready to put British troops “in harm’s way” in Ukraine.
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European leaders are considering deploying troops to Ukraine as a “reassurance force” behind a future ceasefire line, officials told the Financial Times.
Britain “would be expected to play a major role” in any peacekeeping force, said The Telegraph. Its military has experience in managing buffer zones in Cyprus and Bosnia, but former tank commander Hamish de Bretton-Gordon warned that Ukraine presents a greater challenge. There are “two heavily armed, heavily capable armies” and it would require “a viable organisation” to enforce a ceasefire along a potentially 800-mile-long buffer zone.
An effective peacekeeping force would need around 100,000 troops, said Lord Dannatt, former head of the British Army. The UK would have to supply “quite a proportion” of that number, he told the BBC, “and we really couldn’t do it”.
“Our military is so run down at the present moment, numerically and as far as capability and equipment is concerned, it would potentially be quite embarrassing,” he said, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s “The Week in Westminster”. “If we were to deploy 10,000 troops, each rotation for six months, that would effectively tie up 30,000 or 40,000 troops and we just haven’t got that number available.”
Uncertainty remains over what shape US involvement would take, said the FT. Although Trump has ruled out boots on the ground, “European officials say the US has not excluded providing external support” to any peacekeeping force.
What next?
The British Army has consistently missed its recruitment targets since 2010-11, raising concerns about whether the UK has the capability for a major peacekeeping mission.
Nonetheless, Starmer will use the emergency summit in Paris today to urge Europe to shoulder more of the burden for the continent’s defence, in response to demands from the US. Europe, he said, will need to demonstrate that it is “truly serious about our own defence and bearing our own burden”.
