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    Declassified: UK military figures warn ministers about Ukr Archived Message

    Posted by t on June 13, 2023, 8:40 pm

    https://declassifieduk.org/uk-military-figures-warn-ministers-about-ukraine/

    British ministers are fanning the flames of conflict in Ukraine, ratcheting up their aggressive rhetoric aimed at Putin’s Kremlin. But senior figures with personal experience of combat are responding more thoughtfully, as they often have over UK military interventions.

    Shortly before his retirement this month, Air Chief Marshal Mike Wigston, head of the RAF, warned that defeat in Ukraine would leave Russia “brutal” and “vindictive” even if Putin “disappeared”. Russia may pose an even greater threat to Nato countries, including Britain, he said.

    “When the Ukraine conflict is over and Ukraine has restored its borders, as it must, we will have a damaged, vindictive, and brutal Russia, whose means of harming us is through air attack, missile attack and subsurface attack”.

    Wigston added: “This is more than about just one person. There is a whole structure and a hierarchy behind Putin. So even if Putin was to disappear off the stage, there are countless others that could replace him that could be as equally as brutal and vicious to their own people and to neighbouring states”.

    His warning came as Rishi Sunak and foreign secretary James Cleverly enthusiastically praised the Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow, even egging on Kyiv to launch further strikes on Russia.

    Cleverly said Ukraine has “the right to project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia’s ability to project force into Ukraine itself”. In response, the deputy chair of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, said British public officials were a “legitimate military target”.

    Tobias Ellwood, a senior Tory MP and chair of the Commons defence committee, went as far as telling BBC2 Newsnight viewers on May 30 that the West must “rekindle Cold War skills”.

    Such rhetoric swirling around Westminster was in marked contrast to the response to the drone strikes on Moscow in Washington where the Biden administration insisted the US did not approve of Ukrainian attacks on targets in Russia.

    Wigston is not the first former top military figure to counsel caution, in effect telling their erstwhile political masters to cease indulging in dangerously provocative interventions and empty threats.

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