Not only did UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak back away from Defense Minister Grant Shapps’s plan to send British troops to Ukraine to training Ukrainian troops, but Shapps, himself, also was forced to back away from any plan to send Royal Navy ships to the Black Sea, both of which he had suggested during an interview with the Sunday Telegraph. Guardian journalist Dan Sabbagh reported on the X platform that Shapps told the Conservative Party conference that he does not anticipate deploying any Royal Navy ships to the Black Sea to open up Ukrainian grain exports.
Former British MP Matthew Gordon-Banks, a senior research fellow at the Armed Forces Defense Academy in Oxfordshire and also a Conservative, said Shapps’s comments to the media were a “complete PR disaster.”
“Shapps gave an interview, possibly over-stating his intentions as a new defense secretary ahead of a speech to the Conservative Party conference. The Telegraph wrote it up as a certainty,” Gordon-Banks told Sputnik. “I suspect it horrified the prime minister, security and intelligence sources and the wider government.”
Gordon-Banks said Shapps’s suggestion of sending British troops into the warzone was simply unthinkable. “His idea was absolutely mad. Only this week, Russian leaders like [State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav] Volodin, [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov and [Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry] Medvedev have made it clear about how the conflict in Ukraine will end and what they would see as unnecessary escalation by NATO,” Gordon-Banks said.
