The “appetite” in the UK for supporting Kiev is waning, Boris Johnson has said
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he is “quite sad” about what he describes as waning interest in the UK in supporting Ukraine.
Speaking to The Telegraph at the Ukrainian embassy in London on Saturday, he lamented that support for Ukraine in the UK is declining.
“The interest in Ukraine and the appetite is so low nowadays. I find it quite sad,” Johnson said.
When asked to evaluate how well current Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration has handled the Ukraine conflict, he responded: “There are a lot of domestic issues that are very difficult right now, and you can see why they’re distracted.”
Support among the British public for aid to Ukraine has fallen in recent years, polls suggest.
A YouGov poll from February 2023 showed that nearly three-quarters of respondents believed the UK was not providing Kiev with enough aid, whereas only 3% thought it was giving too much.
However, an Ipsos survey from this past February indicated that just over half of Britons supported the current level of aid, whereas nearly one in five said too much support was being provided.
The UK has committed £18.3 billion ($24.5 billion) in total aid to Ukraine, including £13 billion ($17.4 billion) in military assistance.
London has increasingly lobbied to deploy “peacekeeping” troops to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire as part of a so-called “coalition of the willing.”
Last week, Starmer’s government announced that the coalition would set up permanent headquarters in Paris to coordinate with Kiev to “regenerate land forces” for Ukraine and “secure” its skies with fighter jets if there is a cessation in the hostilities.
Moscow has stressed that it views the initiative as preparation for a military intervention and warned that it views any NATO troops – under the guise of peacekeepers or not – in Ukraine as hostile.
Johnson resigned as UK prime minister in 2022, a few months after the escalation of the conflict. He torpedoed the first peace talks between Moscow and Kiev in Istanbul that year by convincing the latter to withdraw from the negotiations, according to the Ukrainian head negotiator at the time, David Arakhamia.
