European nations would have to send at least 100,000 troops to keep the peace in Ukraine and “none of them can do it”, a former head of the British armed forces has warned.
General Lord Richards called for Nato countries to be “very grown up” and “live within what is physically and militarily possible”, rather than “what our political leaders sometimes would aspire to do”.
The former chief of the defence staff warned it is “inevitable” that Russia will seek to test any defence force placed in Ukraine in the event of a deal to end the war. “If we send troops, they will be tested, and they have to robustly be able to defend themselves,” Lord Richards told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
He said given the size of the border between Russia and Ukraine a force of 100,000 to 200,000 troops would be needed. He added that these troops would need to be rotated, which could singificantly increase the number number that would be required to maintain the presence.
“The idea you are going to send a few peacekeepers with berets to reassure the Ukrainians is crass,” Lord Richards said. “We are talking, to do it robustly, 100,000 troops overall, drawn from European nations. None of them can do it,” he added.
He instead called for Britain to put the Ukrainians in a position to defend themselves after any peace deal with a “massive increase in support”.
And, amid a growing rift between Europe and the US under Donald Trump over the future for Ukraine, Lord Richards warned “you have to keep America close if you want to be genuinely credible in terms of deterring a potential aggressor”.
“There is no way that Europe, at the moment, could worry Russia,” he told the programme.
Sir Keir Starmer has said he is prepared to put British troops on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force if a deal to end the war is reached, even if it puts them “in harm’s way”.
But Lord Richards said that unless Britain and Nato allies “could somehow magic up and army that is three times the size in terms of capability… we just couldn’t sustain it”.
He also lashed out at the degradation of Britain’s armed forces since he led a brigade in Germany in the mid 1990s.
“The whole army has got less artillery pieces, for example, than I had in my one brigade in the mid-90s,” he said.
And he said in 1981 there was an outcry when former defence secretary John Nott suggested cutting the destroyer and frigate fleet down to 55.
“Today, sadly, the Navy is lucky to get 12 such ships out to sea. The RAF is much smaller and hasn’t got some key capabilities, so we are very hollowed out indeed,” he added.
Lord Richards said that as a result, Britain’s military would currently be unable to fight the conventional stage of a war and would be forced to turn immediately to using nuclear weapons.
He welcomed Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to hike the UK’s defence budget from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, with a further commitment to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2034.
“But I would like to do it a lot quicker,” Lord Richards added.
Responding to Lord Richards, defence secretary John Healey said Labour was overseeing the biggest increase in defence spending since the Cold War, delivering on a manifesto commitment “three years before anyone believed we would do it”.
Mr Healey told Today that his first task as defence secretary is to stop the long-term fall in troop numbers and reverse a crisis in recruitment and retention.
“What the defence spending increase does is allows us, on a long-term basis, to strengthen our armed forces and build an industrial base in Britain, which reinforces our British jobs and technology,” he added.
But he brushed off questions about how many troops the British army should have, citing an ongoing defence review which will assess what form the military should take going forwards.
