A few days after Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Vladimir Putin and the slight rapprochements between Russia and the West that it has generated, the tension goes up a notch. The United Kingdom stands ready to deploy an additional 1,000 troops in the event of an escalation in the Ukraine crisis, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday evening.
This British proposal to strengthen NATO’s defenses includes, in particular, the doubling of the number of British troops in Estonia (about 900 military personnel currently in this Baltic state), the deployment of fighter jets in southern Europe and the sending of two ships to the Eastern Mediterranean. The United Kingdom also announced this week the deployment of 350 additional troops in Poland, which are in addition to a hundred military personnel already present on its territory.
The military will stand ready to support NATO and allies in the event of a “humanitarian crisis,” Downing Street has said. Indeed, London points out that any Russian incursion into Ukraine would result in a “humanitarian disaster”, which would probably lead to forced displacement of populations at the borders of Europe, especially to countries such as Lithuania and Poland.
“Coercive diplomacy”
“The alliance must draw lines in the snow and be clear that there are certain principles on which we will not compromise,” the British leader said in a statement, citing “the security of every ally (within) NATO and the right for any European democracy to aspire to NATO membership”. Banning Ukraine from joining the Alliance is indeed one of the main security demands of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the current crisis, where the West accuses Moscow of preparing to invade this country.
The British prime minister is due to meet NATO secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels on Thursday, followed by Polish President Andrzej Duda and his Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in Warsaw. Boris Johnson, who visited Kiev this week, launched at the Moscow address: “what we need to see is real diplomacy, not coercive diplomacy”.
Meanwhile, his Foreign Secretary Liz Truss arrived in the Russian capital on Wednesday to meet her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and “strongly” encourage Russia to engage on the diplomatic track. The Russian Foreign Ministry responded by calling for a “change of tone” on the British side, without which “any productive interaction is impossible, be it to solve bilateral problems or international problems”.