The Secretary of Defense of the United Kingdom, Grant Shapps, said this Sunday in the British newspaper The Telegraph that he was working on a plan “to send British instructors to Ukraine” to train its military. This announcement, which represented a great novelty in the approach that Ukraine’s allies had given to military aid to the invaded country, was later qualified by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who stated that there were no immediate plans to deploy military instructors in Ukraine. .
“What the defense secretary was saying is that it may well be possible that one day in the future we will carry out some of that training in Ukraine,” Sunak told reporters at the start of the ruling Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester.
To date, Britain and its allies have avoided a formal military presence in Ukraine to reduce the risk of direct conflict with Russia. The support had translated into the training of soldiers and officers on British soil and the sending of war material. According to the plans Grant Shapps was talking about, it would be the British who would go to Ukrainian territory to train the Ukrainians in their bases, even at the risk of causing casualties due to possible Russian attacks.
Shapps also expressed his desire to involve the British Navy in protecting commercial ships in the Black Sea and encouraged British defense companies to establish operations in Ukraine, although at no point did he specify how he would do this. Since the beginning of the war, there has been a constant arrival of former military personnel and Western instructors as volunteers to Ukraine, especially from the United Kingdom and the United States. If this future scenario qualified by Sunak were to occur, it would be the first time that they act under the mandate of a state allied to Ukraine, with the risks that this entails.
Although the front has seen few changes in recent weeks, both contenders are sending the best they have to the trenches as the bloodiest battles of the war take place at a decisive moment in a context of traffic jam for both opponents.
Although Russia has prepared its industry for a long war, Western support for Ukraine has not ceased and this latest British decision goes in that direction. Yesterday France sent another six Caesar self-propelled guns and Germany seems very close to approving the delivery of the powerful Taurus missiles to kyiv, capable of hitting targets 500 kilometers away.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev suggested on Sunday that British soldiers training Ukrainian troops in Ukraine would be legitimate targets for Russian forces, as would German factories producing Taurus missiles if they supply Kiev, Reuters reported.
Medvedev is vice president of the Russian Security Council and noted that such steps by the West were bringing World War III closer.
“(This) will make their instructors a legal target for our armed forces,” Medvedev wrote on Telegram. “Understanding perfectly well that they will be destroyed without mercy. And not as mercenaries, but specifically as British NATO specialists.”
