Wednesday, November 13, 2024 - Boris Johnson has warned that Britain may have to send troops to Ukraine if Donald Trump cuts funding to the war torn country when he takes over as President.
The former prime minister told GB News that if Russia gains
the upper hand in the conflict, the UK may have to do more to defend Kyiv.
He warned that the US president-elect was listening to some
pro-Putin figures in the Republican party with “bonkers” ideas on the war.
Johnson said the decision by the US and its allies to spend
billions on helping Ukraine was an “investment” against future expansionism by
Russia and China and could prevent the UK having to send ground troops.
If Ukraine goes down, then we face an even bigger threat on
our borders, the borders of the European continent wherever the democracies
butt up against Russia,” he said.
“So, it’ll be the Baltic
states. It’ll be in Georgia. You’ll see the impact of a Ukrainian defeat in the
Pacific theatre. You’ll see it in the South China Sea.
“What I’m saying is for
people watching, thinking ‘why are we supporting the Ukrainians?’
“It’s because otherwise our
collective security will be really degraded by a resurgent Russia threatening
all sorts of parts of Europe, and we will then have to pay to send British
troops to help defend Ukraine.”
“There’s a front of the
Republican Party, quite a lot of them actually, who take the wrong line on
Ukraine and who are, frankly, a bit entranced by Vladimir Putin and they have a
kind of weird sort of fanboy thing about Putin,” he said.
“You know, taking his shirt
off. And it’s creepy, It’s bonkers, it’s wrong. He’s listening to some of those
people… he’s hearing all that.
“On the other hand, this is
the same Trump who made a huge difference to the fortunes of Ukraine when he
authorised the supply of the Javelin shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons.
“If Trump hadn’t done that,
then the battle for Kyiv might have been very, very different.”
The former Conservative leader said Trump won the election
on the issue of the economy.
“A lot of people looked back
to the time of Donald Trump and remembered that things were not only stable,
but also quite prosperous and he had a clear and incredible economic message
about growth, about tax cuts, about deregulation,” he said.
Johnson said Britain should emulate the Republican’s plan to
deport illegal immigrants, saying: “I agree, and I looked at that and I thought
we should.
“We’ll see how he gets on
because, be in no doubt, the lawyers will be all over it, as they were all over
our various projects.
“It’s like I said in April
2022, when I launched the Rwanda scheme, you’ve got to get the legal ducks in a
row. And I said to the people, I said to the country that when we launched,
that it would only work if we could get the lawyers to back down.
“We live under the rule of
law, and we try to protect human rights, but sometimes that protection of
rights is done in such a way as to be, I think, unreasonable and against the
clear manifesto commitments that the Government has.”
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