Rishi Sunak Quickly Backtracks, Guarantees UK Is NOT About to Send Troops to Ukraine

The new UK Defense Minister, Grant Schapps, caused a lot of tension with his statement to British Sunday Telegraph that he wanted to deploy ‘military instructors’ to Ukraine, in addition to training Ukrainian armed forces in Britain or other Western countries.

You read it right – British troops in Ukraine.

After the enormous controversy and expected furious reaction from Moscow, the Prime Minister came to ‘clarify’ the situation.

Mere hours after Schapps interview, Sunak said there are no ‘immediate’ plans to deploy military instructors to Ukraine.

Reuters reported:

“‘What the defense 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’, Sunak told reporters at the start of the governing Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester.

‘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’.”

Britain trained around 20,000 Ukrainians over the past year, and hopes to train a similar number going forward.

New Minister Shapps said UK would offer military training within Ukraine.

“‘I was talking today about eventually getting the training brought closer and actually into Ukraine as well’, he was quoted as saying. ‘Particularly in the west of the country, I think the opportunity now is to bring more things in country’.”

One is left wondering if all that was not a ruse to distract from the fact that UK sent British Typhoon fighter jets to Poland this weekend, which is in itself quite the escalation.

The possibility that British troops would be training enemy forces inside Ukraine caused inflamed reaction in Russia, as one would expect.

These troops would be legitimate targets for Russian strikes, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned.

Newsweek reported:

“If British soldiers were deployed in this capacity, this would turn them into a ‘legal target’ for Russia’s military, Medvedev said in a post to Telegram on Sunday.

These personnel ‘will be mercilessly destroyed’, said Medvedev, who currently serves as the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council.”

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