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There will be no British troops in Ukraine if there is conflict with Russia, said UK Armed Forces Minister James Heappey while speaking to Sky News on Saturday.
Heappey said that although there have been “British troops involved in a training mission in Ukraine for many years,” there will be no UK forces sent to the country “if there is any conflict with Russia.”
In a separate interview with BBC Radio 4, Heappey announced that all British military trainers would leave Ukraine “over the course of the weekend.”
His comments follow a visit by UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace to Moscow this week during which the United Kingdom “urged dialogue as a way through to address any concerns that Russia” has, according to Wallace.
“It’s important that I made the point about British and indeed Western involvement in Ukraine because I think the Kremlin would like there to be a pretext that there was Western aggression in Ukraine to which they were then responding,” Heappey said.
NATO’s borders “do need reinforcing at a time of crisis like this,” he said, adding this is why the UK and United States have ramped up their commitments to send troops to NATO’s eastern border.
Some context: Ukraine is not a NATO member, and therefore doesn’t have the same security guarantees as NATO members.
But NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has left the possibility of Ukraine becoming a NATO member on the table, saying that Russia does not have the right to tell Ukraine that it cannot pursue NATO membership.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for specific legal agreements that would rule out any further NATO expansion eastwards towards Russia’s borders, saying the West has not lived up to its previous verbal assurances.