Britain’s armed forces minister has pledged that the UK will do everything it can to help Ukraine but warned that the months ahead will be “bloody” and “brutal”.
James Heappey said on Saturday that he feared Vladimir Putin had “backed himself into a corner” and gone “all in” on Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
“Nobody should think that this is anywhere near over. What stands in front of Ukraine, its armed forces and, very tragically, its people is days, weeks, months more of what we have seen over that last 48 hours,” he told BBC Breakfast.
“President Putin, if you listen to his speeches, look at his press conferences over the last two or three days, there has been a fanaticism in the language that he used, a fervour in the tone of his voice. He has gone all in on this. I am afraid that that means that what is in front of Ukraine is bloody, brutal.”
He said the UK would do “everything we can” to help Ukrainians resist, but added that it would be “a long slog”. “We are going to see some horrendous things on our TV screens,” he said.
In another interview, Heappey said the UK and other western allies would support Ukraine “in every way we reasonably can” but that there would be “utterly brutal fighting” ahead.
“He has put a huge proportion of the Russian armed forces into this campaign in Ukraine and I am very concerned that he has backed himself into a corner,” he told ITV.
Heappey praised the “incredible” Ukrainian resistance and said that as a result fighting in Kyiv had so far been confined to “very isolated pockets of Russian special forces and paratroopers”.
So far, he said, Ukrainian resistance was thwarting the Russian plan to take the Ukrainian capital, and Russian forces were “nowhere near running to schedule”.
He told Sky News: “I think that will be a great cause of concern for President Putin and rather points to the fact that there was a lot of hubris in the Russian plan and that he may be awfully advised.”
He said the UK was looking to continue to supply weapons to Ukrainian armed forces and that on Friday some of the 25 nations that took part in a donors conference chaired by the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, pledged to send arms and other aid.
“We know what the Ukrainians want. We are doing our best to get it to them,” he told Sky News.
He also said the government was working on plans to support a resistance movement and a Ukrainian government in exile if Kyiv falls, but that it would be a decision for the National Security Council.
Heappey said the UK was continuing to push for Russia to be excluded from the Swift international banking payment system, which he said would be the “ultimate economic sanction”, but more diplomacy would be needed to reach an international agreement.
“Swift is not a unilateral decision that the UK can take,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “That really is the ultimate economic sanction. It is the one that the UK government wants to see enacted. It is just clear that there is more diplomacy required before that is going to happen.”
