Boris Johnson, if Trump withdraws backing, British troops might have to travel to Ukraine

Boris Johnson has threatened that if Donald Trump reduces aid to the war-torn nation when he becomes president, Britain would have to deploy troops there.

The former prime minister told GB News that the UK could have to take further action to protect Kyiv if Russia wins the war.

He cautioned that the US president-elect was hearing “bonkers” views on the war from some Republican party officials who supported Putin.

Johnson claimed that the US and its allies’ choice to spend billions on aiding Ukraine was a “investment” against China’s and Russia’s future expansionism and would spare the UK from having to commit ground forces.

The boundaries of the European continent, where the democracies stand up to Russia, pose an even greater threat to us if Ukraine falls, 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.”

Trump won the election on the basis of economic issues, according to the former Conservative leader.

“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 replied, “I agree, and I looked at that and I thought we should,” in reference to the Republican Party’s intention to deport illegal immigrants.

“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.”