A Russian invasion of Ukraine would end in a humanitarian, political and military disaster for Russia and the world, Boris Johnson warned as he stood alongside the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in Kyiv, saying the UK would be judged by the level of help it gave to Ukraine.
On a flying visit to the Ukrainian capital, he denied the US and the UK were exaggerating the scale of the Russian threat, saying they were not trying to “big up” the intelligence.
“The grim reality was that Russian troops were massing on Ukraine’s border. This is a clear and present danger,” he said.
He added that “the troop concentration was perhaps the biggest demonstration of hostility to Ukraine in our lifetime”, and warn ed it dwarfed the Russian forces mounted before the invasion in 2014.
He said that by holding a gun to the head of the Ukrainian people Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, was trying to get the west to dismantle the security architecture set up after the fall of the Berlin wall. He said the UK was trying to bring the west together, and this crisis was about something bigger than Ukraine.
This story is from the February 02, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the February 02, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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