UPDATED: Britain to hike funds for Ukraine to buy drones, Sunak visits Kyiv
3583 Mins Read
LONDON, Jan 12 (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak travelled to Kyiv on Friday to announce an increase in military funding to help Ukraine purchase new military drones, including surveillance, long-range strike and sea drones.
London has been one of Kyiv’s staunchest supporters since Russia’s invasion and Sunak said Britain would increase its support in the next financial year to 2.5 billion pounds ($3.19 billion), an increase of 200 million pounds on the previous two years.
Britain said it would provide the largest delivery of drones to Ukraine from any nation, with most of them expected to be manufactured in Britain.
“The Ministry of Defence will work with international partners to significantly scale up the number of drones provided for Ukraine’s defence,” the government statement said.
Sunak’s office said the two countries would also sign a historic UK-Ukraine Agreement on Security Cooperation, following on from an agreement by the Group of Seven nations to provide Ukraine with bilateral security assurances.
Britain said the agreement “formalises a range of support the UK has been and will continue to provide for Ukraine’s security, including intelligence sharing, cyber security, medical and military training, and defence industrial cooperation”.
Sunak said Ukraine had been fighting for the principles of freedom and democracy for two years.
“I am here today with one message: the UK will also not falter,” Sunak said in a statement. “We will stand with Ukraine, in their darkest hours and in the better times to come.”
A senior ally of President Vladimir Putin warned on Friday that Moscow would regard any move by Britain to deploy a military contingent to Ukraine as a declaration of war against Russia.
Russia’s Medvedev says any UK troop deployment to Ukraine would be a declaration of war
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, made the comments in response to a visit by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to Kyiv to announce an increase in military funding to help Ukraine purchase new military drones.
“I hope that our eternal enemies – the arrogant British – understand that deploying an official military contingent to Ukraine would be a declaration of war against our country,” Medvedev wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
Medvedev, whose frequent and harsh public statements diplomats say give an indication of hawkish thinking at the top of the Kremlin, also asked how the Western public would feel if Sunak’s delegation came under fire from cluster munitions in the centre of Kyiv, something he said had recently happened to Russian civilians in the city of Belgorod.
Belgorod, in southern Russia, is located close to the Ukrainian border and has been targeted by Ukrainian rockets and drones in recent months.
In the incident referred to by Medvedev on Dec. 30, Russia said at least 20 people had been killed, including two children, and 111 injured in what it called an “indiscriminate” Ukrainian strike using cluster bombs.
