Boris Johnson stated tonight that Vladimir Putin has threatened nuclear war more than 30 times since his invasion of Ukraine, and the prime minister promised to increase defense funding to thwart Russian aggression.
The prime minister declared that by the end of the decade, the UK would devote 2.5% of its GDP to defense at a news conference that concluded the NATO summit in Madrid.
As the government “invests for the long term” in order to counter the danger from Russia, Mr. Johnson insisted that budgets will rocket well over the alliance’s two percent target in the next years.
The PM later disclosed the scope of Mr. Putin’s “sabre-rattling,” but she issued a warning against the West becoming involved in what she described as a “Russia versus NATO” fight.
Sir Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US, cautioned this week that NATO needed to be prepared in case Russia launched a nuclear attack.
The PM responded to a question about how many nuclear threats Mr. Putin has made since the start of the Ukraine war by saying, “Well, there’s an analysis that I suppose has been done by somebody recently, a think tank.
“They’re looking at roughly 35 mentions of that issue,” or possibly “it’s a little bit more today.”
Mr. Johnson stressed, however, that it was “very, very important that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be sidetracked by this kind of sabre-rattling, because fundamentally, what Putin is trying to do is to reframe this,” in an interview with the station’s Nick Ferrari at Breakfast show.
The conflict pits Russia against NATO. He continued, “It’s about, you know, a stand-off of that sort.
“It isn’t. It concerns his use of conventional weapons, artillery, plane and shell bombardments, and other methods to attack a country that was completely innocent.
And it has to do with the Ukrainians’ right to self-defense. This is all about that.
Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has been pressing for increased military spending to meet the Russian threat.
At an RUSI think tank event, he cautioned that defense can no longer be sustained on a “diet of smoke and mirrors,” noting that governments have long been acting like “business raiders” by diverting funds to the NHS and other sectors.
Increasing spending to 2.5% of GDP by the end of the decade, according to senior Tory MP Tobias Ellwood, is “too little, too late.”
This is NOT the time to downsize the Army by 10,000, the head of the Commons Defence Committee wrote on Twitter.
And increasing defense spending to 2.5 percent by 2030 is too little, too late.