There are no plans right now for the U.K. military to train Ukrainian troops in Ukraine, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said this weekend, shortly after the defense minister indicated it was a possibility.
Ukraine's Western allies have provided it with billions of dollars of military equipment and training on the more advanced weapons, but those allies have refused to send troops in a formal fighting capacity to reduce the possibility of the conflict expanding, likely bringing NATO into it.
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"What the defence secretary was saying was that it might well be possible one day in the future for us to do some of that training in Ukraine," Sunak told reporters at the start of the governing Conservative Party's annual conference in Manchester on Sunday, according to Reuters. "But that's something for the long term, not the here and now. There are no British soldiers that will be sent to fight in the current conflict."
Hours earlier, Defence Minister Grant Shapps, who had met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the war-torn country earlier in the week, acknowledged the possibility that future training missions could occur in Ukraine to lessen the reliance on the NATO members' military bases. The Defence Ministry has said the program, which has the support of a number of allies, is on track to have trained more than 30,000 soldiers by the end of the year.
“I was talking today about eventually getting the training brought closer and actually into Ukraine as well," Shapps told the Sunday Telegraph. “Particularly in the west of the country, I think the opportunity now is to bring more things ‘in country’ — not just training, but also we’re seeing BAE [the U.K. defense firm], for example, move into manufacturing in country, for example."
Russia currently occupies Ukrainian territory in the south and eastern parts of Ukraine, hence Shapps's reference to the Western part of Ukraine, though Russia has occasionally targeted areas outside the front lines and further west aerially.
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev responded to Shapps's comments, arguing that training Ukrainian troops in the country would make their British trainers "legal targets."
Shapps also indicated the U.K. could help Ukraine with Russian forces' targeting of cargo ships in the Black Sea. Russia and Ukraine had a year-long agreement in place from July 2022-July 2023 to allow Ukrainian grain exports. Prior to the deal, signs indicated a threat to the global food supply, while Russian troops began targeting those shipments, Ukraine's ports, and infrastructure once Moscow withdrew from the agreement this summer.
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“We’ve seen, in the last month or so, developments — really the first since 2014 in the Black Sea, in Crimea — and Britain is a naval nation so we can help and we can advise, particularly since the water is international water," he said. “It’s important that we don’t allow a situation to establish by default that somehow international shipping isn’t allowed in that water. So, I think there’s a lot of places where Britain can help advise. [I] did discuss it with President Zelensky and many others this week.”
The U.S. has a handful of service members at the embassy in Kyiv in connection with the Defense Attaches office, and they are not fighting against Russian forces. President Joe Biden has repeatedly affirmed that the U.S. would not send troops into Ukraine to see combat.