UK to provide additional £1 billion for Ukraine and defence spending to rise, while Truss rallies West over Taiwan

The UK has pledged to provide Ukraine with a further £1 billion in military aid, while foreign secretary Liz Truss has urged Western allies to support Taiwan in ensuring it can defend itself against an incursion by China.

The latest support package for Ukraine means that Westminster has now pledged £2.3 billion in military aid to the Eastern European country, alongside a further £1.5 billion in economic and humanitarian support.

Only the US has now aided Ukraine with greater resource, with the Biden administration having recently approved a $40 billion (£33 billion) support package.

The UK’s latest aid will help provide Ukraine with air defence systems to stave off Russian missile attacks, including “drones, electronic warfare equipment and “thousands of pieces of vital kit.”

The support comes in response to Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky’s plea for NATO leaders to do more to help Ukraine in the war against Russia.

Zelensky said that it cost around £4.12 billion per month to defend Ukraine, which was suffering from a “multibillion dollar deficit” compared to Russia’s “billions” with “oil and gas to cover it.”

Dialling in to NATO’s summit in Madrid this week via video link, Zelensky said that Ukraine needed more modern weapons systems to counter Russian artillery.

Answering Ukraine’s calls, the UK government said that its support package would bolster Kyiv’s “valiant defence” and help Ukrainian forces recover ground lost to the invaders.

In excess of 450 Ukrainian troops have been training in the UK over recent weeks to be able to operate the weaponry that the UK is providing.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson said that aid provided by Westminster was “transforming Ukraine’s defences” and helping turn the tide of the war.

He said in Madrid: “As (Russian president, Vladimir) Putin fails to make the gains he had anticipated and hoped for and the futility of this war becomes clear to all, his attacks against the Ukrainian people are increasingly barbaric.

"UK weapons, equipment and training are transforming Ukraine's defences against this onslaught."

However, foreign secretary Liz Truss (pictured) has warned that the UK will not be providing Ukraine with limitless resources.

She said: “It's not a blank cheque and we are providing specific amounts of funding... we've been very clear with them we will not let them down.

“We will continue to support them in the long term in whichever way we can, in a way that we can afford.”

Truss also said that UK aid would be directed toward helping Ukraine revive its economy and rebuild vital infrastructure following the war.

The UK has also been active in training the Ukrainian Armed Forces over the last seven years through Operation Orbital which ran from 2015 until the Russian attack in February 2022. In excess of 22,000 Ukrainian troops are alumni of the programme.

The PM also announced earlier in June a new programme for training Ukrainian forces overseas, which the Ministry of Defence says could train up to 10,000 troops every 120 days.

Meanwhile at this week’s NATO summit, member states have agreed on a new decade-long strategy to address future threats to security in Europe and across the globe, alongside which the US has opted to increase its military presence in Europe.

Prime minister Boris Johnson has separately committed to increasing the UK's defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by the end of the 2020s, above the NATO target of two per cent. This comes after defence secretary Ben Wallace urged domestic defence spending to increase in response to the growing Russian threat to European security.

Truss has also called on the West to “learn lessons” from the Ukraine war and be ready to support Taiwan against any looming threat from China.

The US and China are at odds over the self-governing island, which China sees as a breakaway region and claims sovereignty over, under the “One China” principle. 

Meanwhile, the US enjoys cordial relations with Taiwan and has committed to assisting it in the event of an invasion. The US is also the main supplier of arms to the island. 

The People’s Republic of China has never formally controlled the island of Taiwan and, contrary to the views of the Chinese government, Taiwan sees itself as a de jure sovereign state and has its own democratically elected leadership.

The People’s Republic of China has advocated the use of force to lay claim to Taiwan if doing so via peaceful means cannot be achieved, and so Truss has talked-up the need to ensure that the island has the “defence capability it needs”, following what she called the consequences of failing to arm Ukraine in time against Russia.

She said: "Collectively, we (the West) need to do more, and this is a discussion I'm having with my G7 colleagues.

“We need to learn the lessons of Ukraine. We didn't do enough early enough. By ‘we’, I'm talking about the free world, the collective West, to make sure that Ukraine was able to defend itself, so-called deterrence by denial.

“That enabled Putin to think that he could stage an easy invasion that he could win within days, so we need to make sure that we protect peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits. We also need to make sure that together, the free world are ensuring that Taiwan has the defence capability it needs.”

Truss also warned that the West needed to ensure that it was not “overly economically exposed to China” or “end up in a position of strategic dependency” upon Beijing.

Speaking at this week’s NATO summit, Truss also said it was important that the People’s Republic of China did not make a “catastrophic miscalculation”, such as mounting an attack on Taiwan.

More widely at the summit, NATO member states singled out the “coercive policies” of the People’s Republic of China as being a challenge to Western interests and warned that the East Asian economic power posed “systemic challenges” to Western security.

Another major concerns among NATO states around China is its “deepening strategic partnership” with Ukraine’s aggressor, Russia, which NATO says is looking to “undercut the rules-based international order”.

US president Joe Biden recently stated that the US would intervene to defend the island in the event of any incursion by the People’s Republic of China and like Truss made parallels to the situation between Russia and Ukraine.

Biden’s comments came after the US defence secretary Lloyd Austin highlighted record Chinese aircraft activity in the vicinity of Taiwan, which he said threatened to undermine peace and stability in the region.

The People’s Republic of China dismissed Biden’s comparisons as “absurd” while the country’s foreign ministry hit out at the UK foreign secretary for “hyping up” the “so-called China threat.”

China has also accused the US of hypocrisy, pointing out that a US Navy plan had recently passed through the Taiwan Strait, a move which the Chinese government said threatened regional stability in itself. 

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons