Ever since the beginning of March, when Sir Keir Starmer chaired what was called the ‘leaders meeting on Ukraine’, I have felt as if I have been occupying some kind of parallel universe. The summit was the genesis of what has become known as the ‘coalition of the willing’, a loose alliance of 31 countries pledged to provide a peacekeeping or ‘reassurance’ force in Ukraine, with the United Kingdom and France making most of the running.
Now, disaster! The Times reports that Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the Defence Staff, asked his European counterparts whether collectively they could generate a force of 64,000 to deploy to Ukraine in the event of a peace settlement. The response was that there was ‘no chance’ of that and that assembling even 25,000 troops would be extremely challenging.
Military assistance to Ukraine also means we are now extremely under-equipped
I could have told you that months ago. In fact, I did: even before the meeting in London, I described the notion of the UK committing 20,000 troops to a much larger force as obviously fanciful and said the then-emerging plans gave the strong impression of displacement activity by European governments. A month later, when the potential size of the force had been scaled down to 30,000, I called the plans weirdly back-to-front and based on extremely dubious assumptions.
My point is not that I am uniquely perspicacious and far-sighted, but that it has always been clear to anyone willing to be honest with themselves that the coalition of the willing was performative. It has been a bizarre exercise in wish-fulfillment from start to finish, thinking about a military force we cannot provide to perform a mission of which we have no details to enforce a peace settlement which does not exist. I have often had to stop and ask myself, ‘Am I the only one who can see it?’
The UK would struggle to muster more than a brigade-sized unit of 5,000 soldiers or so because we have seen the army shrink to its smallest since the Napoleonic Wars, standing at 71,151 at the beginning of this year. Given that a deployment of 5,000 troops would require the commitment of 15,000 to account for training, rotation and recovery, that would represent a huge chunk of the force’s overall strength.
Military assistance to Ukraine also means we are now extremely under-equipped: for example, we have gifted more than 50 AS-90 self-propelled guns and half a million rounds of ammunition, leaving the British army with a deployable strength of maybe a dozen guns. There are also major shortages in engineering, logistics and air transport, the vital support that any significant military formation relies on.
Of the other members of the coalition of the willing, Estonia, Finland and Poland are understandably reluctant to commit forces if there is any danger it will weaken their capability to defend their own borders, Spain and Italy have opposed contributing ground forces and the German position is at least sceptical. Simply, plainly, obviously, the numbers are not there to support a deployment of tens of thousands.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the United States is unwilling to participate in any kind of peacekeeping force. Starmer has repeatedly said that the coalition of the willing needs an American ‘backstop’, as if that was somehow an option. The message from Washington, however, has been absolutely explicit: the only guarantee President Trump regards as necessary is the potential presence of US private sector employees exploiting the agreement on mineral extraction he demands of President Zelensky.
Where does this leave us and where does it leave Ukraine? In a sense, we are back where we started, with an ongoing and bloody conflict, but it may be that we have done ourselves harm. Rather than concluding that it was far too early to contemplate any kind of peacekeeping force, we have rehearsed the process in the full glare of public scrutiny, and we have been forced to conclude we are incapable of fulfilling the initial grand plans.
We have, like the Grand Old Duke of York, marched our men up to the top of the hill, only to march them down again. In doing so, we have exposed some of our weaknesses and capability gaps. The duke, however, had 10,000 men at his disposal – our service chiefs must wish they had those kinds of numbers.
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