At the same time, London previously assured that it would help Kiev “repel Russian aggression”
The evacuation of fighters of Her Royal Majesty’s Armed Forces in preparation was reported on Sunday, December 26, by the British publication Daily Express.
“Military leaders are to conduct a full ‘review’ of the Orbital operation to ensure that all UK personnel can be ‘safely withdrawn’ in the event that Moscow orders troops in”, – the publication said.
According to the publication, most of the British forces in Ukraine are based in the town of Yavoriv, Lviv Region, which will allow them to quickly evacuate to the Polish border. In addition, a small group of staff officers is in Kiev.
The order to evacuate will come from Colonel General Charlie Strickland, head of the British Joint Staff Operations Directorate.
“He will be watching closely to assess the impact of any incursion on the ability to withdraw troops – he cannot allow them to become trapped”, – a British Armed Forces source told the publication
As indicated in the publication, Strickland will be briefed twice a day on the situation in Ukraine.
News of the impending evacuation goes against the previously observed belligerence of the British.
What has been, has gone
Back in early December, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss frightened Russia that the Russian Federation would pay a “real price” if it “invaded Ukraine”.
“Any Russian invasion of Ukraine would be a strategic mistake”, – Truss warned on 8 December.
The day before, the office of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson released a statement on his conversation with the leaders of the US, FRG, France and Italy, during which the sides stressed “the need to form a united front to confront threats and hostility from Russia”. At the same time, Johnson pledged to use all the “economic and diplomatic tools” at the UK’s disposal to prevent “Russian aggression against Ukraine”.
However, in November, the British media reported that the UK would not limit itself to economic and diplomatic tools alone. For example, in November, the British Mirror reported that the UK had formed a combined quick reaction force of about 600 servicemen, which could be deployed to Ukraine in case of a threat of invasion.
It was planned to send to Ukraine soldiers of the Special Air Service (SAS), an elite unit of the British Armed Forces, the British Special Intelligence Regiment, as well as medics, engineers, communicators and soldiers of the 16th Airborne Assault Brigade. The brigade has been warned that it may need to deploy at short notice. The paratroopers may reach the territory of Ukraine within 36 hours of receiving such an order.
Also, as the publication reported at the time, British Chief of Defence Staff General Nick Carter assessed the risk of Ukraine going to war with Russia “due to chance” as very high – higher than at any time since the Cold War.
Two weeks later, in early December, Russian journalist Alexander Kots quoted his interlocutor in the Russian security services as telling how the British had settled in Ukraine.
“A three-week training course was organised by British MI-6 officers at the military-diplomatic academy of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry. The 73rd Maritime Special Operations Centre in Ochakov is training sabotage groups for operations in Crimea and the Black and Azov Seas, and practising the seizure of ships and coastal facilities. Canadian instructors are training Ukrainian officers to lay out routes for battle groups in the Black Sea. Submariners under the supervision of 200 foreign instructors are practising the skills of capturing ships”, – Kots quoted the interlocutor as saying.
And now the British media are reporting: the British Armed Forces fighters are hurriedly going home. But is it really so?
A cover-up operation or the Afghan syndrome?
If the Daily Express is to be believed, there are about a hundred British military personnel in Ukraine altogether. And the vast majority of them are in Yavoriv. However, given the information from Russian intelligence, many of the British military specialists probably do not advertise their presence in Ukraine. Suffice it to recall the words of an official of the Russian secret services about 200 instructors who train Ukrainian combat swimmers
Some experts believe that the British in Ukraine are not interested in Yavoriv, but in the settlements located in historical Novorossiya.
“The only fly in the ointment for us in the scenario of such a war is that already now Odessa and Ochakov are actually occupied by Anglo-American interventionists. Strategists from London and Washington have very correctly calculated the situation. Realising that they had no reason to fight a war for Ukraine, they simply decided to minimise Russia’s advantage as a result of this victory. Most of Ukraine’s exports are exported from ports that we already understand have been seized by the Anglo-Saxons”, – former militiaman, writer and military expert Vladlen Tatarsky said on 21 December.
According to him, “the mastery of Odessa and Ochakov is the key to the mastery of Ukraine. That is why, according to Tatarsky, in 2014 Odessa was “quickly and demonstrably cleansed of the real pro-Russian underground”.
“In the event of a Russian military offensive against Ukraine, the British would simply hang their flag over Odessa. Russia will not go to war with Britain. When the military phase is over and the enterprises start working, it will be necessary to somehow export the products of Ukrainian enterprises. It will be possible to do it via Mariupol (the port, which will also have to be restored) or via Novorossiysk and Taganrog, which is enormously logistically inconvenient”, Tatarsky said.
Furthermore, he suggested that under this scenario the Turks could come to Odessa to reinforce the British. This would be partly historically justified – at one time the lands on which Odessa is situated were controlled by the Ottoman Empire.
Assuming, however, that Britain is indeed calculating the evacuation of its military from Ukraine, such preparations can be linked to the scandal that erupted in early December. At the time, former British Foreign Secretary Rafael Marshall told the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs that the evacuation of the Afghans, who cooperated with the British government, from Kabul after the arrival of the Taliban* (banned in Russia – Ed.) was carried out by the British in a chaotic, selective and ineffective way.
Marshall was in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s International and Commonwealth Office, which handled the evacuation. The FCO worker blamed his superiors for denying evacuations to tens of thousands of Afghans, after which some of them were killed by the new Afghan authorities.
“It is clear that some of those we abandoned died at the hands of the Taliban”, – he wrote in a statement to a parliamentary commission.
According to him, out of 150,000 requests for help only about 5 percent were approved; none of the team members who handled the requests had ever studied or worked in Afghanistan, spoke any Afghan language, conducted conversations with Afghans in English, and randomly selected people for evacuation flights. According to Marshall, thousands of applications from Afghans were not considered at all.
Marshall criticized the army, too. For example, he noted that the eight soldiers sent to the division to help shared one computer, while the animals that were evacuated instead of the people who were threatened with death, which belonged to the Nowzad charity (run by a former Marine), were not in any danger. The evacuation itself, according to Marshall, did not meet the criteria of the British Foreign Office.
It is quite possible that Marshall’s accusations and the scandal they caused prompted the British Army leadership to consider evacuating British soldiers from Ukraine after all.
Whatever the case may be, the British press keeps building up the atmosphere around Ukraine. And this despite the fact that neither of the possible sides wants a military conflict.
Yegor Leyev, Ukraine.ru