UK Govt Trains Hundreds of Ukrainian Soldiers in Britain, Pledges Another £1bn in Aid

Britain
Ukrainian Presidency/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Jack Montgomery

Boris Johnson’s government has confirmed that hundreds of Ukrainian soliders are being trained in Britain and pledged an additional £1 billion ($1,213,635,000) in militray aid to the country.

“Putin’s brutality continues to take Ukrainian lives and threaten peace and security across Europe,” declared Prime Minister Boris Johnson at a NATO summit in the Spanish capital of Madrid, according to the BBC.

“As Putin fails to make the gains he had anticipated and hoped for and the futility of this war becomes clear to all, his attacks against the Ukrainian people are increasingly barbaric,” the British premier accused, further insisting that “UK weapons, equipment and training are transforming Ukraine’s defences against this onslaught.”

British forces are training around 450 Ukrainian soldiers to operate Multiple Rocket Launcher System (MLRS) on British soil, with Ukraine’s President  Zelensky having told Western leaders in Madrid that that they need to provide his country with more long-range weapons to “break the Russian artillery advantage”.

Vitaliy Kim, a governor in eastern Ukraine, warned earlier in June that the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is now “a war of artillery… and we are out of ammo.”

Separately, President Zelensky complained that “Russia still receives billions every day [in energy payments] and spends them on war,” noting that his own country has “a multibillion-dollar deficit, we don’t have oil and gas to cover it”.

The Johnson administration has therefore pledged that, alongide the MLRS training and a donation of newly-purchased howitzers, the British government will be granting the Ukrainian governmnet a further £1 billion in aid — despite a worsening cost of living crisis and budget deficit at home — making it the second-highest international contributor to Kyiv’s coffers behind the Joe Biden administration in the considerably wealthier United States.

At a G7 summit just days ago, Prime Minister Johnson appeared to discourage Ukraine from striking a peace deal with Russia, warning that “sometimes the price of freedom is worth paying” — although he has not actually committed British forces to the conflict.

He also made the ahistorical observation that “it took the democracies in the middle of the last century a long time to recognise that they had to resist tyranny and aggression” and that while “[i]t took them a long time [to do so] what it bought in the end, with the defeat of the dictators, particularly of Nazi Germany, [was] decades and decades of stability [and] a world order that relied on a rules-based international system.”

In fact, dictators in the Stalin-led Soviet Union and what would become the People’s Republic of China were strengthened by the war, and much of the latter half of the 20th-century was marred by destabilising proxy conflicts and the threat of nuclear war.

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