LATIKA M BOURKE: Deploy Coalition of the Willing troops to Ukraine NOW, says former UK PM Boris Johnson

Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called on the Coalition of the Willing to deploy to Ukraine now, and not wait for any US-brokered peace deal.

And without directly naming President Donald Trump, Mr Johnson warned that Ukraine should not be forced to give up any territory Vladimir Putin had not won on the battlefield and that no amount of red carpets would appease the Russian President.

Mr Johnson was one of Kyiv’s earliest allies at the start of the full-scale invasion and is credited with rallying both British and European support for Ukraine in 2022.

In a rare public appearance in Britain, where Mr Johnson served as Prime Minister between 2019 and 2022, the former Conservative Party leader told the Borderlands Foundation Ukraine Defence Forum in London that the Coalition of the Willing should not be waiting for any ceasefire.

“And my question to European leaders now, UK — everywhere, is if immediate membership of NATO is off the table now and I very much regret that it is but why don’t we not only assemble the Coalition of the Willing but also begin the deployment of that Coalition?” he said.

“This thing, this entity, whatever it is — peacekeeping force, boots on the ground, whatever they do, they are not going to engage Russians in war fights, that is just not going to happen.

“That being so, there is nothing to stop them going now.

“That’s what we should do. We should deploy them now.

“They’re there for political purposes, they’re there to show that the ultimate destiny of Ukraine is part of the Western security architecture, get them in now.”

The Coalition of the Willing was first proposed by France and the UK amid fears Europe would be cut out of any peace deal being brokered by the Trump Administration and Russia.

While more than 30 countries, including Australia, are part of the talks, the concept remains amorphous.

26 countries have agreed to some sort of military contribution, but governments are cagey about what they would deploy and where.

Vice Admiral Justin Jones, chief of joint operations for the Australian Defence Force, who has never been to Ukraine but coordinates Australia’s support for Kyiv, said in London that he was involved in the planning.

“We will wait until there is a peace deal of some sorts and then wait for our government’s direction on how it wants to handle it,” he said before Mr Johnson gave his speech.

“We would have a range of options from which the government can choose and I’m going to disclose that before the government has a chance to consider those options.”

Europe also wants the reassurance force ultimately backed by the Trump Administration and US military assets in some way.

Michael Kofman, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment, said that waiting for Russia to wait for a ceasefire out of fears Western troops could be harmed was the wrong starting point.

“It’s not that often when a ceasefire is made that the ceasefire doesn’t in some way also break down,” he said.

He said the deterrence force would be a “useful backstop” and believed it would help deter President Putin.

“There is a degree of deterrence offered by the ambiguity and I know folks always worry about what if they’re attacked by Russians and my immediate answer as a military analyst is if people are so afraid that any casualties would be lost in this kind of deployment, then we have a larger credibility problem,” Mr Kofman said.

“Lastly, I don’t think Russia is going to necessarily be that eager to tackle this force either.

“There are potential consequences and uncertainties for them as well.”

Sergii Vysotskyi from the National Association of Defence Industries said such a force would give Ukraine a “huge advantage.”

“We have 2000 kilometres of the border with Russia and Russian allies such as Belarus,” Mr Vysotskyi told The Nightly.

“So the input for controlling at least the northern border when we are forced to deploy tens of thousands of troops to control the border of Belarus would be very helpful.

“Believe me, we know our dictators, we know our neighbours.”

Mr Johnson hit out at Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “frail” and weak leader who blows babies out of windows.

He said that he was not a hater, but the scenes of a two-month-old and its young mother being blown out of their Kyiv apartment on the weekend, during Russia’s largest-ever drone and missile strike on the capital, had moved him to hatred.

“Perhaps my feelings were sharpened because, you may not believe it, but I actually have a baby of about that age myself,” the 61-year-old said.

“I gave way to absolute hatred and contempt for what the Russian president is doing.”

He said that the President was making battlefield gains at a pace slower than a garden snail.

“An all-out war since 2022, he’s still only captured less than 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory at a cost of a million Russian casualties,” he said.

“And I think it has been calculated that if a common or garden snail had set out to cross Russia at the same time as Putin dispatched his 115 battalion tactical groups in February 2022, the snail would now be in Poland.

“So Putin is not only morally inferior, he’s actually slower than the average slug.”

Mr Johnson said the Russian leader appeared “notably frailer” in public.

“There’s something a bit odd about his gait these days,” he said.

“The way he holds himself, and this isn’t the bad chested bareback riding Putin who used to go off chasing … whatever they are … and fooling around with snow, leopards, and so on.

“This is an ageing leader who knows he has made a terrible mistake but cannot find the way out, and it is therefore time to show him the way out and to show what I think subconsciously knows to be the truth, that he has lost.”

In a subtle dig at President Trump’s negotiating tactics, which included a red-carpet welcome to Alaska last month, Mr Johnson said no amount of schmoozing would work.

“There’s only one set of arguments that he understands and it isn’t flattery,” he said.

“You can’t schmooze Putin. You won’t change his calculations by red carpet treatment or flypasts right?

“That’s not going to cut the mustard.

“It’s frankly insane to think there’s some deal to be done by offering Putin the chance now to gain land in Donbass that he currently does not even occupy and has never occupied throughout the conflict.”

President Trump has threatened more sanctions on Russia, which would be the first he would impose alongside the EU since coming to power.

Mr Johnson backed this as well as expanding secondary sanctions to China as well as India.

He also called for the frozen Russian assets, the bulk of which are being held in Belgium, to go to Ukraine.

Currently, Western leaders have used the profits from those assets but have not moved to taking the assets themselves.