All Johnson’s warnings to Russia about Ukraine
Because the UK sides with Ukraine against Russia. The article by Daniele Meloni
"Moscow risks a new Chechnya". "Our intelligence was clear: Russia has 60 battalions on the Ukrainian border and would like to start a blitzkrieg with Kiev." The words of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson leave little room for doubt: the escalation between Russians and Ukrainians worries Western capitals and moves international diplomacy. The United Kingdom, which has spoken of "disastrous consequences in the event of an invasion", is particularly active in the defense of Kiev. Not only in words but also in deeds.
After the Foreign Office accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of wanting to install a "puppet regime" in Ukraine in place of the current one, an expression of the popular vote that led Volodymir Zelenskiy to the presidency of the nation, London has acted accordingly, announcing the '' dispatch of short-range anti-tank missiles and a small contingent of military personnel to train the Kiev army. Defense Minister Ben Wallace also added that the "source of concern is legitimate and concrete". Similarly, the owner of the Foreign Office, Liz Truss, engaged in Australia to strengthen bilateral relations between the UK and Canberra, has shifted the assessment of the facts to the ideological level, arguing that "the goal of increasingly assertive autocracies is to to export the dictatorship to the world ". Thatcherian echoes from “Empire of Evil” for Truss or the real realization of a commitment on the ground for London aimed at supporting an English Ostpolitik?
Since 2015, London and Kiev have intensified relations. British troops are already present in Ukraine to train the local army and Cameron's government already undertook to rebuild the Ukrainian navy after the Crimean war. The British government has a threefold goal. The first is to stop the advance of an enemy state, made responsible – according to the British – for murders through poisoning on British territory (Litvinenko and Skripal cases above all). The second is to support the containment action of the United States against Putin in the area that is most dear to Russia for historical-ideological reasons. The third is to show that, while the European Union – an entity without a state and, therefore, without an army – is limited to words of support for Zelenskyi and Ukraine, looking out the window at what is happening on the ground, the United Kingdom is still able to deploy its force in direct support of an ally, giving full value to that "defense of democracy and international order" that was exposed by Johnson in the House of Commons in March 2021 and is contained in the Integrated Review, the basic document of the new British foreign policy.
The nations closest to Russia – the Baltic states, Poland, Finland, Ukraine and Georgia – look more to the Anglo-Saxon world than to Brussels for the defense of the integrity of their territory. Washington and London have pressed for the entry of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the EU with the dual purpose of integrating these nations into the Western economy and removing them from Russian influence. Once inside the EU, divisions over how to deal with Russia among the 27 – just think of Germany and the Nord Stream 2 issue – have pushed states that once were beyond the Iron Curtain to lean more on the US. and to the UK rather than a union to be built.
The case of Ukraine is different, a "red line" that Putin does not intend to sacrifice and a middle ground that the West cannot abandon but does not even want to integrate into its military defense system (NATO). Johnson's Ostpolitik therefore aims to consolidate the privileged position of the Anglo-Saxon world as defender of the countries bordering Moscow and to bring out all the shortcomings of the European construction. It is no coincidence that in November 2021 London announced a new phase of collaboration in defense with Ukraine and with Poland (with the latter in particular in anti-missile air defense).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/regno-unito-russia-ucraina/ on Tue, 25 Jan 2022 09:00:38 +0000.