UK troops could be sent to Ukraine for training as defence secretary calls on NATO allies to ‘step up’

19 December 2024, 06:11

British troops could be sent to Ukraine for training as the UK looks to take a lead in the country’s defence.

Defence Secretary John Healey said the UK must “make the training a better fit for what the Ukrainians need” as he hinted British troops could be sent to Ukraine.

Speaking on a trip to Kyiv, Mr Healey said we are at “one of the most critical periods of the war” as he urged Ukraine’s allies to “step up on every front.”

He told the Times: “Anyone who thinks that fight [to] talk is going to be a simple switch, misses I think the likely reality that you may have talking and still fighting.

Read more: Zelenskyy admits Ukraine can’t defeat Russia on the battlefield, as Starmer urges Trump to ‘stand by Kyiv’

“And whether or not you have got talking that may or may not be successful in reaching an agreement.”

The Defence Secretary refused to confirm if British troops would be sent to Ukraine for training.

He said: “We will look wherever we can to respond to what the Ukrainians want. They are the ones fighting.”

He added: “We can’t take our eye off the ball.”

It comes as Volodymyr Zelenskyy has admitted that Ukraine cannot overpower Russia militarily to beat it back from the territories it has annexed.

The Ukrainian president said that the only way that Crimea and eastern Ukraine could be brought back under Kyiv’s control was via diplomacy.

His comments mark a change from his previous stance, in which he had declared that Ukraine could reconquer the territory ceded in 2014 and since the 2022 invasion.

It came as Keir Starmer urged Donald Trump not to go back on US support for Ukraine, as the president-elect prepares for power in January.

Mr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday: “We cannot give up our territories. The Ukrainian constitution forbids us to do so.

“De facto, these territories are now controlled by the Russians. We do not have the strength to recover them,” he told Le Parisien, a French newspaper.

“We can only count on diplomatic pressure from the international community to force Putin to sit down at the negotiating table.”

Russia took Crimea, a prized peninsula jutting from the south of Ukraine into the Black Sea, via a dubious referendum ten years ago.

Kremlin-linked forces also took much of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and most of the area is now under Russian control.

Russia has also conquered much of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, without seizing the main cities in either. The Kremlin has said that both regions are legally Russian, a claim that Ukraine and its Western allies reject.