Coalition of the willing / Britain will struggle to put 'boots on the ground' in Ukraine |
The current conflict in Ukraine has frequently been compared to the first world war. There is an echo of the same grimness and intensity: the huge artillery barrages, the sprawling network of trenches, the horrifying casualty rates. Amid all that, Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, clinging on to their ‘coalition of the willing’, are invoking another memory. If they can make The Big Push, we will reach a peace settlement monitored by their ad hoc European-led alliance.
The two leaders have made a genuine step forward. At a meeting in Paris with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and two dozen heads of state and government, they gave a formal commitment to deploy military forces to Ukraine to assist in implementing a potential peace settlement. Sir Keir Starmer claimed an end to the conflict was ‘closer… than ever’, while Kushner described the agreement as ‘a big, big milestone’.
The British army is the smallest it has been since the 1790s
The Paris declaration provides for the establishment of a ‘multinational force for Ukraine’, supplied principally by European nations but with some involvement from other members of the coalition of the willing (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan are all participants). Its mission will be to ‘support the rebuilding of Ukraine’s armed forces and support deterrence’, including ‘practical and technical support to Ukraine in........