Dispatching British Typhoon fighter jets to police the skies over Ukraine could be as “dangerous and difficult as it gets” if Russian and Western forces do not agree on “rules of engagement”, a former military commander has warned.
President Donald Trump’s overt move to end three years of conflict in Ukraine in rapid fashion has led leaders to scramble to work out how to respond.
Britain and France are said to be drafting plans for a “reassurance force” of 30,000 troops to help protect Ukraine, amid heightened tensions between Kyiv and Washington.
The plan is expected to be presented by Sir Keir Starmer to Trump when the pair meet in Washington next week, the Telegraph reported.
The strategy, which was drafted amid fears the US President would abandon Ukraine, was shown to European leaders at an emergency meeting in Paris this week.
The proposals also include using spy planes, satellites and drones to monitor the border and provide a “complete picture of what’s going on,” the paper said, quoted a Western official.
But with military officials warning that Britain’s Armed Forces have been wiped out by defence spending cuts, ministers have been discussing other ways to provide guarantees without the need for large numbers of personnel, The Times reported this week.
“Air policing” has been another one of the proposed possibilities, a senior government source said, potentially requiring the UK to roll out its Typhoon fighter jet fleet.
Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, warned there were “lots of ideas going around at the moment”, and any proposed peacekeeping idea would need to be approved by Russia.
Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, already warned Moscow would not allow the deployment of “troops from Nato countries” or those carrying out missions “under a foreign flag”.
Freedman said there was still the potential for “so many different outcomes” to the talks, including airborne peacekeeping missions once negotiations get fully underway.
“The issue with the land force is that you need other people (countries), the Russians won’t like it, it’s difficult, it’s expensive, it lasts a long time,” he said.
Explaining the benefits of air policing missions, Freedmen added: “We’ve mounted no-fly zones over Iraq and no-fly zones over Bosnia in the past. It’s not that difficult if nobody’s trying to shoot you down.
“It’s less of a practical problem, I would have thought, than trying to sustain a land force in the middle of Ukraine – which would be much more logistically demanding than this would.”
The professor said British forces had a good supply of Typhoons, the RAF’s highly agile, multi-role combat aircraft used to perform air-to-air and air-to-surface missions. The military’s fleet comprises 137 Typhoons, according to the most recent figures given to parliament in May last year.
Greg Bagwell, a former RAF Air Marshal who has flown missions over no-fly zones in Iraq and commanded British aircraft in Libya, said a proposed peacekeeping mission could be “relatively simple and painless, or extremely difficult and probably quite dangerous, and everything in between”.
The pilot said it would depend on the outcome of the negotiations as to whether a peace deal specifies “a demilitarised zone” – such as the one established between North and South Korea – or “a hard line where you stay on your side, I stay on mine”.
“If peace is fragile and potentially needs to be enforced, or a reignition of the war needed to be deterred, then you’re talking about quite a substantial effort, either on the ground or in the air.”
This would involve forces having to “police extremely vigorously” with a “very strong physical, deterrent presence, both airborne and on the ground,” he said.
Bagwell explained under this circumstance, the policing force “would need to be capable of surveying the ground and striking, if necessary, ground incursions very much the way Ukraine did when [Russia] came into the north of their country three years ago”.
Such an operation would require “a substantially bigger force” and involve multiple air forces from various nations working together.
“What you’re effectively doing is you’re providing Ukraine with an Air force,” he said. “That very quickly blurs into a reignition of the war. And then there’s a question of do you stay and fight with all the complication that brings, or does the peacekeeping force have to extract itself and let the war go back to where it was at the beginning?”
Bagwell said such a peacekeeping mission was “as difficult as it gets” as it involves “potentially putting Nato forces – albeit they might be a coalition of the willing without the Nato badge – in near direct confrontation with Russian forces.”
But the RAF does have experience with similar peacekeeping missions, he said, most recently in Syria, where “coalition forces were flying in very close proximity to Russian forces, albeit in a third nation”.
He also warned against a 2015 incident in Syria where its neighbour Turkey shot down a Russian warplane for violating its border for a total of 17 seconds and warned to change its heading ten times before entering the airspace.
“This is when it’s as dangerous and as difficult as it gets,” he said.
Conversely, Bagwell said such a mission could be “relatively simple and painless” if both sides were committed to peace – acknowledging current negotiations appeared not to be headed in such a direction.
“If this was a relatively stable, peaceful ending where both sides backed away, where there were sufficient security guarantees”, and the US enforced the equivalent to Nato’s Article 5 agreement – where an attack on one is an attack on all – then such missions would be relatively simple, he explained.
“That would give whoever was going to be the peacekeeping force, the confidence to put in a relatively light force that could just police it by observing to maintain an airborne watch,” the former Air Marshall added. He likened this scenario to the missions currently carried out by the RAF in the Baltic states.
This would involve: “a few radars and a relatively modest footprint on the ground of anything between one and two squadrons worth of aeroplanes from whoever” – whether it be a combination of UK, US or European forces.
Bagwell added that for the peace deal to work “both sides would need to agree on rules of engagement” and “what are the consequences of breaching it”.
“We are miles off getting to the point where you can put peacekeeping troops on the ground – otherwise you’re talking about peace enforcement where you go between two protagonists and push them apart.”
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