Defence Secretary Says Ultimately "Only The US" Can Deter Russia From Attacking Ukraine Again
UK and US defence secretaries John Healey and Pete Hegseth (Alamy)
3 min read
Only the United States can deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again if peace is negotiated, Defence Secretary John Healey has said, as the UK tries to convince the Trump administration to provide security guarantees in the region.
Healey said that while Europe has a "leading part" in protecting countries from Russian aggression, a US "backstop" will ultimately be required to deter future attacks.
Any negotiated settlement in Ukraine must deliver "durable peace" through a "security guarantee", Healey told the Institute for Government think tank on Tuesday morning.
He was speaking the morning after European leaders, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer, met in Paris to discuss how they would respond to President Donald Trump commencing peace talks with Russia without Ukraine.
There is general agreement among European leaders that governments on the continent must increase their efforts on defence as the US changes its foreign priorities.
While Starmer had said that the UK would be willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine to help protect any peace agreement, other European leaders have expressed reservations about sending personnel.
Healey this morning said durable peace in Ukraine required "an end to the Russian attack and no repeat of that in the future".
"The European countries have to play a leading part in that guarantee, but require a backstop with from the US, because in the end, it is only the US that can provide the deterrence to Putin that will prevent him attacking again, and the detail of that is being developed."
He added that Starmer would discuss the details with Trump shortly.
The Prime Minister is set to hold talks with the new US president in Washington next week.
The Cabinet minister said that the decisions made over the coming weeks "will define the security of the world for a generation to come".
But Healey warned that the country does not currently secure value for money in its armed forces, and defence is "currently mired in process and procedure".
"We must rearm Britain," he said, adding that a new national armaments director (NAD) will be given a £20bn budget to "build and sustain our national arms arsenal" and "fundamentally change how defence works" in the UK.
He added that a nation's armed forces "are only as strong as the industry that stands behind them, and we've allowed ourselves to forget that...and we can't do that any longer".
PoliticsHome reported on Monday that Starmer faced growing calls from within Labour to speed up the increase in defence spending.
Two Labour MPs, Laura Kyrke-Smith and Melanie Ward, argued that plans to raise spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP were no longer sufficient and that the UK should look to Poland, which plans to reach 4.7 per cent this year.
But despite the concerns over defence spending, the British public is reluctant to finance extra defence spending via tax rises, according to a YouGov poll.
PoliticsHome Newsletters
PoliticsHome provides the most comprehensive coverage of UK politics anywhere on the web, offering high quality original reporting and analysis: Subscribe
