Britain is in no position to act as Ukraine’s peacekeeper

By volunteering to put British troops on the ground to help guarantee Ukraine’s future security, Keir Starmer has stepped into a minefield, says Mark Almond

Since the Munich Security Conference broke up in disarray, Keir Starmer has been in crisis-management mode. The prime minister has been trying to get transatlantic minds focussed back on Russia’s war in Ukraine, rather than the war of words between Washington and Europe.

By making a firm offer of British troops to patrol a ceasefire line, Starmer hopes to mollify Donald Trump’s dismissive attitude to underperforming Nato allies and put Britain at the heart of any Allied peace mission. The big question for us is whether our armed forces are numerous and well equipped enough to provide a serious contingent to any peacekeeping force along the ceasefire line.

Starmer might want to charm Trump back into the Nato corral, but he has no obvious policy for dealing with Vladimir Putin – apart from repeating the mantras of British backing for Ukraine’s war effort.

Britain’s record as a peacekeeper in recent years has been poor. Remember the confident predictions that the army would be able to carry out its peacekeeping role in Afghanistan’s Helman province “without a shot being fired”!

Those worst-case scenarios shouldn’t veto action – but refusing to plan with them in mind is an invitation to disaster or at least, as in Afghanistan, humiliating retreat.

Starmer sees a “generational challenge … Not just about Ukraine”, but even Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, is “not thinking” about sending troops to Ukraine, even in the event of a peace deal. This suggests Warsaw, usually so hawkish on Russia, sees any ceasefire as a pause, not an end, to fighting – and that it doesn’t want penny-packets of its forces in the firing line when war resumes.

Let’s also not forget Washington’s pre-emptive rejection of any US boots on the ground in Ukraine.

Whereas Kyiv will be anxious for as many European armies as possible to police a peace deal to guarantee it against any renewed aggression by the Kremlin, Russia might well refuse to agree to Nato peacekeepers, seeing them as an advanced guard for a future Western war against it.

For the Russians, keeping the Americans out of Ukraine and any EU role there a token at best, are key aims. In fact, Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Riyadh that there should be no place for the Europeans at the negotiating table.

More dangerously, the Russian armed forces in Ukraine are a mixed bag. In addition, to the formal Russian army, a number of special units operate there, including ex-Wagner Group fighters, the Donbas region’s own forces, but also the Chechen Republic, for instance, has deployed thousands of its own fighters there, too – where they face anti-Putin Chechen volunteers on Kyiv’s side. Ukrainian nationalist militias have been officially incorporated into the Ukrainian army, but retain their own identity.

These “hardliners” could seek to derail a ceasefire. In Russian propaganda, Britain has been second only to the United States as the “main enemy”. With Trump now seen as a “positive” factor by Putin, Britain has become the central object of Russian bile.

That may be an honourable position – but it will expose any British ceasefire mission to the kind of attempts at humiliation that the Bosnian Serbs routinely imposed on the ex-Yugoslav ceasefire monitors before 1995, and it needed US-led intervention to bring the Serbs to heel as in Kosovo in 1999.

Without confidence that the Pentagon will act to back British and European peacekeepers, the incentive for troublemakers to “have a go” will be enormous.

Talking “big” about Britain’s leadership when our forces cannot put more than a tiny contingent into Ukraine and lack reinforcements if things go wrong is a recipe for disaster. Peacekeeping should be a continuation of an effective policy, not a substitute for it.

Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford