Sunak promises Zelensky jets – but not the UK’s
Rishi Sunak has promised to spearhead a “jet coalition” to secure aircraft for Ukraine and pledged “hundreds” of air-defence missiles and long-range attack drones for Kyiv’s war effort.
Sunak made the remarks at his country residence, Chequers, where he hosted President Volodymyr Zelensky for a surprise visit. Sunak said the UK was “steadfast” in its support for Ukraine, telling Russia: “We’re not going away”.
However, Zelensky dropped his request for British fighter jets, making clear that he was focussing on American F-16s instead, amid reluctance from the UK to commit its own aircraft.
After greeting Zelensky with hugs when he landed, the PM took his “friend” into the same room at Chequers from which Winston Churchill made his wartime speeches for their meeting, saying that the Ukrainian President’s fight for freedom was equally inspiring. He added that while the training of Ukrainian pilots on Western fighter jets would begin “relatively soon”, the provision of aircraft was “not straightforward”.
Zelensky came and went in a camo-green Chinook, its rotors rippling the bucolic Chequers pasture. His trip to the UK is the last destination in a hectic weekend tour of European countries. In Italy, Germany and France, Zelensky repeated the case he’s been making for 15 months, pushing for more weapons to be delivered more quickly.
Speed, Zelensky says, is vital. Ukrainian officials have complained of delays in the arrival of promised weapons and kit. The President suggested last week that the decision to push back the much-anticipated spring offensive was because the army was waiting for equipment, including armoured vehicles, to arrive in Ukraine.
Zelensky knows the offensive must appear to bear fruit. A multiplier effect is at play. A successful Ukrainian assault is good in and of itself, but it will also prove to Kyiv’s Western partners that their billions of dollars of investment is getting results, and make it easier for Zelensky to make the case for continued support. Failing to make tangible gains will have the opposite effect.
The backdrop to Zelensky’s chopper touching down at Chequers is the emergence of fresh and fascinating details from a US intelligence leak earlier this year, reported by The Washington Post.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group, offered to reveal Russian troop positions to the Ukrainian government in exchange for a Ukrainian withdrawal from the besieged city of Bakhmut, the paper reported.
Ukrainian officials were said to have been suspicious the offer was not genuine, and rejected it. Yet this extraordinary overture is at least plausible. Wagner troops have been thrown into the Bakhmut meat grinder for months, and an expletive-strewn rant by Prigozhin threatening to withdraw his troops from the city because of a lack of kit from Moscow chimes with the idea that he and Vladimir Putin are increasingly at odds over the war.
The second revelation is that President Zelensky raised the possibility of Ukrainian troops occupying Russian villages in a meeting with his staff in January, with the aim of gaining bargaining chips that Kyiv might use in future talks with the Kremlin. He is also reported to have suggested Ukraine should blow up Russia’s Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline that runs to Hungary, a NATO member.
It suggests Zelensky has been far more hawkish in private than in public. Britain only supplied its long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Kyiv on the condition that Zelensky would not attack Russia. He has vowed not to.
It’s a reminder of the tension at the heart of Western support for Ukraine. For all the hugs at Chequers, the lengths Ukraine and its sponsors would go to to push Russia out of Ukraine are drastically different.
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