Boris Johnson has warned that Britain may have to send troops to Ukraine if Donald Trump cuts funding to the war torn country when he takes over as President.
The former prime minister told GB News that if Russia gains the upper hand in the conflict, the UK may have to do more to defend Kyiv.
He warned that the US president-elect was listening to some pro-Putin figures in the Republican party with “bonkers” ideas on the war.
Johnson said the decision by the US and its allies to spend billions on helping Ukraine was an “investment” against future expansionism by Russia and China and could prevent the UK having to send ground troops.
If Ukraine goes down, then we face an even bigger threat on our borders, the borders of the European continent wherever the democracies butt up against Russia,” he said.
“So, it’ll be the Baltic states. It’ll be in Georgia. You’ll see the impact of a Ukrainian defeat in the Pacific theatre. You’ll see it in the South China Sea.
“What I’m saying is for people watching, thinking ‘why are we supporting the Ukrainians?’
“It’s because otherwise our collective security will be really degraded by a resurgent Russia threatening all sorts of parts of Europe, and we will then have to pay to send British troops to help defend Ukraine.”
“There’s a front of the Republican Party, quite a lot of them actually, who take the wrong line on Ukraine and who are, frankly, a bit entranced by Vladimir Putin and they have a kind of weird sort of fanboy thing about Putin,” he said.
“You know, taking his shirt off. And it’s creepy, It’s bonkers, it’s wrong. He’s listening to some of those people… he’s hearing all that.
“On the other hand, this is the same Trump who made a huge difference to the fortunes of Ukraine when he authorised the supply of the Javelin shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons.
“If Trump hadn’t done that, then the battle for Kyiv might have been very, very different.”
The former Conservative leader said Trump won the election on the issue of the economy.
“A lot of people looked back to the time of Donald Trump and remembered that things were not only stable, but also quite prosperous and he had a clear and incredible economic message about growth, about tax cuts, about deregulation,” he said.
Johnson said Britain should emulate the Republican’s plan to deport illegal immigrants, saying: “I agree, and I looked at that and I thought we should.
“We’ll see how he gets on because, be in no doubt, the lawyers will be all over it, as they were all over our various projects.
“It’s like I said in April 2022, when I launched the Rwanda scheme, you’ve got to get the legal ducks in a row. And I said to the people, I said to the country that when we launched, that it would only work if we could get the lawyers to back down.
“We live under the rule of law, and we try to protect human rights, but sometimes that protection of rights is done in such a way as to be, I think, unreasonable and against the clear manifesto commitments that the Government has.”
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