Huge numbers of refugees could be forced to flee Ukraine for other eastern European countries if Russian troops invade, the UK’s defence secretary has warned, as he admitted that military tensions were still moving the “wrong way”.
Ben Wallace said it would be a “lose-lose” scenario if Moscow directed its soldiers stationed along Ukraine’s borders with Russia and Belarus to attack.
A trio of warnings was issued by senior UK government figures on Thursday, with Wallace suggesting a sanctions package against Russian leaders was being finalised to apply if there was an incursion into Ukraine, while Boris Johnson headed to Brussels and the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, was in Moscow.
Half of all Russia’s combat troops had so far been deployed to the Ukrainian border, Wallace said, adding that the country was also “planning to start a nuclear strategic exercise soon”.
“Despite the talking, the direction of travel is in the wrong way,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Wallace said UK defence chiefs expected moves from the “Russian playbook” that would give a “pretext for an invasion or some other activity”, such as a false flag operation whereby responsibility for an act is wrongly attributed. Cyber-attacks and further stoking of political division could also be used to fan the flames and increase the chances of war, he added.
Russia
Army: 280,000, including 2,840 tanks and 6,920 fighting vehicles; 150 Iskander ballistic missiles; 4,684+ artillery; 1,520 surface-to-air batteries.
Navy (just the Black Sea fleet): 6 submarines; 6 warships; 35 patrol ships.
Air force: 1,160 combat planes, 394 attack helicopters, 714 air defence systems.
Ukraine
Army: 145,000, including 858 tanks and 1,184 fighting vehicles; 90 Tochka ballistic missiles; 1,818 artillery; 75+ surface-to-air batteries.
Navy: 1 warship, 12 patrol and coastal ships.
Air force: 125 combat planes, 35 attack helicopters; 6 medium TB2 drones; 322 air defence systems.
Source: International Institute of Strategic Studies
Wallace said other eastern European countries such as Poland and Romania would “feel the heat” of an invasion of Ukraine. “I think we can expect very large movements of people as refugees,” he said. “And that in itself can be very destabilising to small and medium-sized states.”
After it was announced that 1,000 British troops would be deployed to Nato countries to provide support in case of a Russian invasion, Wallace said they would be able to help with any “humanitarian crisis”.
“Soldiers are able to deal with that and provide force multiplier to the allies that are on the frontline,” he told BBC Breakfast. “There is a cost, there’s a human cost. Russia will remember as the Soviet Union the human cost of Afghanistan. It will remember the human cost of the likes of the Chechnya wars.
“Just like Britain reflects on the cost of Afghanistan and Iraq and all those conflicts we are involved in.”
After Truss’s plan to put the UK’s “toughest sanctions regime against Russia” on the statute book in time for her trip to Russia fell through, Wallace insisted they were almost ready to present to parliament.
He said: “Energy supplies is one area to target; financial institutions is another one. And … individuals. It is important that the people in that regime or in the government feel the cost of their actions as well.”
In her meeting with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, Truss said a war in Ukraine would be “disastrous” and would “have massive consequences and carry severe costs”.
Meanwhile, Johnson is heading overseas as parliament prepares to go into recess. He will meet Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, in Brussels, before travelling to Poland for meetings with the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, and President Andrzej Duda.
