Starmer sending British troops to Ukraine makes little military sense… but is concentrating minds

Keir Starmer’s offer of sending peacekeeping troops to the war-torn country is a non-starter – but it will have a strategic effect on peace discussions in Saudi Arabia, says world affairs editor Sam Kiley

The British offer for troops to keep a peace that doesn’t exist in Ukraine is a grandiose gesture of strategic importance that makes little military sense.

However, it might concentrate minds on a much better idea of arming Ukraine to win its war.

Over the weekend, Keir Starmer reacted to America’s backing away from support for both Ukraine and its European allies by stepping up with an offer of boots on the ground.

On Monday, he explained why: “This isn’t just about the front line in Ukraine. It’s the front line of Europe and of the United Kingdom. It’s our national security.”

He said that Ukraine’s security was “existential for Europe”.

“I’m prepared to consider committing British forces on the ground alongside others if there is a lasting peace agreement,” he continued. “But there must be a US backstop because a US security guarantee is the only way to effectively deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again.”

There is another way, to guarantee Russia won’t invade anywhere again and that’s to beat them out of Ukraine.

Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, but Vladimir Putin signalled that he wanted to do so many times before he eventually ordered his troops in.

He has since said that Ukraine and Poland are not real countries and that he would like to see the return of many former Soviet bloc eastern European nations to the Russian imperial fold. Putin is dangerous because he has threatened in the past – and then carried out those threats.

The administration of Donald Trump, meanwhile, appears determined to negotiate a peace deal with Putin, over the heads of Ukraine and Europe. His envoys are meeting in Saudi Arabia to discuss normalising bilateral relations with Moscow and start talks about Ukraine.

Trump’s only clear strategic interest in Ukraine appears to be in its rare earths and other resources which he has demanded as a form of back payment to recoup US spending on the defence of Kyiv already undertaken.

The demand has been rejected – but it shows that Trump just isn’t interested in Ukrainian sovereignty and may see it as a natural colony of the Kremlin anyway.

Step forward Sir Keir, carrying the banner of the British armed forces to meetings in Paris with his European counterparts. It’s a rallying point for leaders on the continent who have been rattled by Trump’s abandonment of Nato – and the principles that have ensured peace in Europe for 80 years.

But Britain, on its own, isn’t a military power to be reckoned with. The US has encouraged Russian intransigence in any peace talks by ruling out a US presence in any future security force in Ukraine – and then insisted that if one ever did exist, it would be outside of Nato entirely.

The UK could only field about a division of about 20,000 soldiers. Its air force is tiny and its aircraft carrier groups don’t have planes to fly on carriers that are brand new, but broken most of the time.

A peacekeeping force would have to number between 100,000 and 200,000. It would need the full complement of arms, total aerial dominance, a naval superiority that ruled the Black Sea and a determination to kill Russians in industrial quantities in Ukraine, Moscow and Vladivostok.

It would also have to accept that Russia might, as it has threatened, use a tactical battlefield nuclear weapon if it came under pressure in Ukraine.

None of these conditions exist – even if the huge force could be mustered by Europe, Canada, and other non-US parts of Nato and beyond. Europe doesn’t have the industrial capacity to support the keepers of a fake peace either.

But it is also not fair, as one former Nato general suggested, to say that Starmer has been “naive” in offering troops and warning of the strategic importance of Ukraine.

Unlike Tony Blair’s support for the US-led invasion of Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a real threat to Europe and to Britain. It is not the absurd lie that was used to justify the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The US has taken the Russian position that Ukraine won’t get back all the territory it has lost to the Kremlin.

So if there was a “peace deal”, which froze the front lines, relieved Russia of sanctions, cut Nato out of the picture entirely, and under which tens of thousands of European troops and British soldiers were deployed – Russia would still have the upper hand.

Putin could rearm, retrain and resupply his forces and invade again. He could produce forces that make up for in sheer mass what they lack in technology.

Starmer is, perhaps, signalling that Europe needs to butch up, wean itself away from the US immediately, and recognise that it would be much cheaper to arm Ukraine with the capacity to win rather than with just enough to hold the Russians where they are now.

In the present, though, Russia could be beaten, not merely held back.

Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen put it very clearly when she said: “We need to increase military support to Ukraine, we need to produce more, and we need to do it faster.

“And then we must remove the restrictions on the Ukrainians’ use of weapons so that they can actually defend themselves against the Russians without having one arm twisted around their back. A ceasefire must not lead to Russian rearmament, which is replaced by new Russian attacks.”

Starmer’s offer of troops he probably won’t send has already had a strategic effect. He has concentrated the minds of fellow Europeans on what the alternatives should be to a terrible peace deal cooked up between Washington and Moscow.

The alternative to foreign troops on the ground is to give the Ukrainian troops on the ground what they need to win.