(AmericanProsperity.com) – United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on October 1 that his government has no plans to send troops to Ukraine anytime soon. Sunak delivered these remarks even when the recently appointed UK Defense Minister Grant Shapps said that British troops could be sent to Kyiv to train Ukrainian soldiers.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, London has yet to send troops to this country. Different reports have said that while former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss supported Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, they didn’t want to take this step to prevent a direct conflict with Moscow. According to some media outlets, Sunak shares the same view of his predecessors.
During an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Shapps said he wanted to send some military instructors to Kyiv and train the Ukrainian forces in the United Kingdom or any other Western nation. He explained this could help Ukraine gain more victories in its counteroffensive operation.
A couple of hours after Shapps delivered these words to the British newspaper, Sunak told reporters during the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester there were no plans to do this. The prime minister explained that what Shapps said was that it would be possible for the UK to send troops to Ukraine “one day in the future.” When asked when this could take place, Sunak told reporters it would be “for the long term,” and emphasized that not a single British soldier “will be sent to fight” in Ukraine.
Sunak’s comments came a couple of hours after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that any British troop that trains Ukraine’s forces in this country would automatically become a target for the Russian military. Despite Sunak’s words, the UK has been one of the Western nations that have shown more support to Ukraine since the invasion started. London has so far trained nearly 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers and is planning to train a similar number in the near future.
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