Britain’s former chief Brexit negotiator Lord Frost has warned that direct military confrontation between the UK and Russia must be avoided.
In an exclusive video interview with Brussels Signal on March 18, Frost compared what could happen if the UK became militarily involved in Ukraine with the situation the British Army was left in during the Balkan crisis in 1992.
At the time, British forces ended up being “more hostages than real peacekeepers”, due to a lack of power to engage.
Frost said another reason for the UK not to engage in military confrontation was that British citizens were unlikely to take up arms to fight. What people “say in polls and what they say in a real threat situation … may be different”, he said.
A former diplomat, Frost became Chief Negotiator for Exiting the European Union from 2019 to 2020 and was Europe Advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson from 2019 to 2021.
Speaking at the Brussels Signal studio, he said the West had become “very casual” about the risk of escalation of the military confrontation with Ukraine.
Amid current geopolitical events, such as US President Donald Trump creating military ambiguity for European countries, the general weakness of the British armed forces and the country’s flat economic growth, the war in Ukraine “seems to carry that sort of risk”, Frost said.
Trump did not “change sides” regarding Ukraine, he said. Referring to what is known as the international relations theory of hegemonic stability, which states that the capacity of one country to handle every potential threat was key to a stable international order, Frost said the US was not able to endorse that role fully anymore.
European countries were now starting to realise that they cannot rely on a weaker world leader and that they needed to increase defence spending, he added.
The full Brussels Signal video interview will be available shortly on our web page and YouTube channel.
