Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is saying Britain will have to send troops to Ukraine if President-elect Donald J. Trump reduces U.S. aid to the Eastern European country. “[F]or people watching, thinking ‘Why are we supporting the Ukrainians?’ It’s because otherwise, our collective security will be really degraded by a resurgent Russia threatening all sorts of parts of Europe, and we will then have to pay to send British troops to help defend Ukraine,” he insists.
Johnson, who has honored Ukrainian neo-Nazis in London, argues Western support for Ukraine is an “investment” against potential Russian and Chinese expansionism. “If Ukraine goes down, then we face an even bigger threat on our borders, the borders of the European continent wherever the democracies butt up against Russia,” he argues. “So, it’ll be the Baltic States. It’ll be in Georgia. You’ll see the impact of a Ukrainian defeat in the Pacific theatre. You’ll see it in the South China Sea.”
The U.S.-born Briton says there are anti-war factions in the Republican Party close to Trump “who take the wrong line on Ukraine and who are, frankly, a bit entranced by Vladimir Putin and they have a kind of weird sort of fanboy thing about Putin.”
“You know, taking his shirt off. And it’s creepy, It’s bonkers, it’s wrong. [Trump is] listening to some of those people,” Johnson said—although he acknowledged that Russian forces may have overrun Kiev in 2022 if Trump had not authorized Javelin missiles for Ukraine.
Direct British military intervention in Ukraine, while a serious escalation of the conflict, would likely make little difference on the battlefield. Britain’s armed forces faced sustained cutbacks under Johnson’s Conservative Party over the past 14 years and the prior Labour government. There are fewer than 20,000 British infantrymen and fewer than 160 operational British main battle tanks in service—forces that would likely be insufficient to defend any frontline town in Ukraine.
