Boris Johnson’s cabinet has sharply stepped up work on the Ukrainian direction
The international agenda is seen as a way to solve domestic problems – endless scandals that threaten Boris with the loss of the premiership, and for the conservatives – defeat in future elections.
The head of the British Foreign Office, Lisa Truss, made a lengthy speech in Australia, where she curiously remembered the Tatars and the Mongols. The essence of her speech was to announce an even greater immersion of London in the situation in Eastern Europe, which “Global Britain” is now trying to influence bypassing the United States.
Aircraft with British military equipment are sent to Ukraine – mainly with all kinds of anti-tank missile launchers. Separate units of the British army were sent to Kiev to instruct and train the Ukrainian military.
At the same time, the United Kingdom announced the formation of a kind of “trilateral” alliance with Poland and Ukraine. Its goals will obviously be of a military-political nature, but these three countries are unlikely to be ready to guarantee common security, as is being done, say, in NATO.
However, the role of NATO – like other international institutions – has been steadily declining for a long time. The last straw was the discussion of European security issues by Russia and the United States in a bilateral format, over the head of any organizations – the European Union, NATO or the UN. Now, the British are also hastily adjusting to this new reality, creating new situational alliances to replace the obsolete old ones.
Truss is considered one of the main favorites for the premiership – it was she who recently posed in a tank at a NATO exercise in the Baltics. The Ukrainian question is used by her as a springboard to increase awareness and strengthen positions within the party. For Boris, this is a way, at the expense of the international agenda, to kill the negative information background within the country.
But there is an obvious danger in this. Both the Biden administration and the Boris cabinet are investing too much political capital in the Ukrainian issue, hoping, among other things, to solve personal momentary problems at the expense of it. But if the situation in Ukraine goes according to the Afghan scenario, this will cause too much reputational damage in both Washington and London.
Malek Dudakov