Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said Boris Johnson was “wrong” saying the UK had not offered enough military support to Ukraine, iNews reported.
It came after former Prime Minister Boris Johnson criticised Rishi Sunak, claiming that the UK had not provided Ukraine with enough support.
According to The Spectator magazine, Mr. Johnson stated this week that the country was “dragging our feet” over providing Kyiv with “weaponry to finish the job” in its fight against Russia.
How can we look these men in the eye, and explain the delay? Throughout this war, we have underestimated the Ukrainians and overestimated Putin, and we are doing the same today.
Mr. Cleverly told a Sky News host Trevor Phillips that the former Prime Minister was “wrong” in his assessment.
“Under [Mr Johnson’s] tenure, and I always pay tribute to his leadership on this, we supplied those NLAW anti-tank missile systems that were so instrumental in the defence of Kyiv, we supplied training.”
Under Rishi Sunak as prime minister, we were the first in the world to commit main battle tanks, other countries in the world then followed our example.
He also noted that the UK was the first country to train pilots to operate fast jets. Mr. Cleverly acknowledged that the UK was the first to commit to long-range missiles, which had been instrumental in helping the Ukrainians in their fighting in southern and south-eastern Ukraine.
I speak to the Ukrainians very regularly on this. They remain incredibly grateful, not just for our donations but our leadership on this issue.
In a Spectator article, Boris Johnson called on the UK and the US to supply weapons systems to destroy Russian helicopters, as well as drone technology and missile systems. He called the armaments Zelensky is asking for “a relatively trivial outlay for such extraordinary potential rewards.”
“If Putin wins in Ukraine, if he holds even a fraction of what he has taken, then the lesson will be clear: that aggression pays, that European borders can once again be changed by violence where Putin fancies a revanchist and domestically rabble-rousing military operation.”
The former PM also criticised the G20 summit for failing to deliver a compelling message to Putin to end the war.
Mr. Johnson visited Ukraine earlier this month to receive an honorary degree from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. He was welcomed by the Mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, who, according to local media reports, described him as “a great friend of Ukraine.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also attended the ceremony. He called Ukraine not just “a country in Europe that is defending itself against Russian aggression”, but “a symbol of a standard of freedom in which people from different countries recognise their own standards.”
