Wallace agrees deal to supply warships and missiles to Ukraine

Poland and Germany will suffer as pipeline operator announces ‘unscheduled’ maintenance programme

BRITAIN will sell warships and missiles to Ukraine after the Defence Secretary signed a new deal with the country amid tensions with Russia.

Ben Wallace has agreed to enhance Ukraine’s naval capabilities in light of increasing Russian aggression which has seen thousands of migrants camping at the Polish border with Belarus for a second week. Warsaw has accused Vladimir Putin of orchestrating the crisis along with the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

Last week the UK signed a treaty with Ukraine for British military exports to go to Ukraine to enhance its maritime presence. The deal will include the procurement of two mine counter-measures vessels, the joint production of eight missile ships as well as the delivery of and retrofit of weapons systems to existing vessels. There will also be the joint production of a frigate and technical support to the country for the building of naval infrastructure.

It comes after a week of growing tensions in which Russia claimed that it had diverted an RAF reconnaissance aircraft over the Black Sea when it was in international airspace.

The RAF was then forced to scramble a quick-reaction alert to track two Russian nuclear-capable bombers over the North Sea, while earlier this week Russia tested an anti-satellite weapon in space.

Boris Johnson yesterday warned that it would be a “tragic, tragic mistake for the Kremlin to think there was anything to be gained by military adventurism” in Ukraine.

Appearing before MPS at the liaison committee, the Prime Minister was asked what military assistance the UK was prepared to offer Poland and Ukraine to deter Russian aggression. Mr Johnson distinguished between the two “very different” cases. “Poland has a Nato security guarantee and under Article 5 we’re committed to the defence of Poland,” he said.

“Ukraine, sadly for historical reasons, does not have the same guarantee from Nato powers. Ukraine doesn’t even have a membership action programme,” Mr Johnson added. He said that “what we’ve got to do is to make sure that everybody understands the cost of miscalculation on the borders of both Ukraine and Poland would be enormous”.

Earlier this week, Michael Fallon, the former defence secretary, wrote in The Daily Telegraph that he had made the case as far back as 2014 to arm the Ukrainian Army, but had been denied the chance by the cabinet who did not want to “provoke” Russia”.

‘We are all preparing for the fact that it may end in a war’

‘Poland gets the bulk of its crude oil from Russia through Belarus so any halt of supplies is a disruption for Poland’

BELARUS has moved to stifle Russian oil deliveries to Europe through the “Friendship Pipeline” with operators announcing “unscheduled maintenance” on the network.

With Poland still at loggerheads with Minsk over migrants camped on their shared border, the pipeline operator said the Belarusian stretch of the world’s longest oil pipeline would undergo work for at least three days.

The move will limit the supply of Russian crude oil to Poland and Germany. It echoes previous threats from Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, to shut down gas supplies to Europe in retaliation for new sanctions against his regime.

Mr Lukashenko has been accused of waging a “hybrid war” against the EU, by facilitating a migrant stand-off on the bloc’s eastern borders.

In a boost to his international credibility, he has held talks with Angela Merkel, the outgoing German chancellor, the first such discussions with a Western leader since he launched a crackdown on domestic dissent last summer.

Mrs Merkel has come under fire at home and abroad for engaging with the authoritarian leader on at least two recent occasions.

Poland’s defence minister yesterday warned that the crisis on the Belarusian frontier, where about 4,000 migrants had gathered, could last for months, despite separate claims in Warsaw that “Lukashenko has lost the border battle” for now. Polish authorities believe 20,000 migrants are stranded inside Belarus, mainly from the Middle East and North Africa after Mr Lukashenko promised to “flood” the EU with migrants.

There are fears of a pending humanitarian crisis in Belarus after those migrants failed to break through the EU’S border defences.

But in an interview with Polish news website Onet, one unnamed soldier was quoted as saying that they feared a war with Belarus could be on the horizon.

“We are all preparing for the fact that it may end in a war,” the soldier said.

“We are afraid that when it comes to the use of weapons, it will be turned against us,” referring to claims that Belarus was handing stun grenades and other weapons to migrants.

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, said Brussels would donate €700,000 (£585,000) to deliver food, blankets and first aid kits to migrants stranded at the border with Poland, but only if Belarus stops sending people to the frontier.

“Europe is at the side of the people trapped at the border with Belarus,” she said.

“We are ready to do more. But the Belarusian regime must stop luring people and putting their lives at risk.”

An Eu-funded flight will land in Minsk today to repatriate about 250 Iraqis stuck in Belarus, a senior Brussels source told The Daily Telegraph.

In a sign that Minsk may be willing to cooperate with Brussels, Belarusian state television released footage that showed migrants being sheltered from the freezing conditions in a logistics warehouse in Bruzgi, close to the frontier with Poland.

Hegumen Gavriila, a controversial pro-regime nun, was filmed arriving at the makeshift facility, where she handed out chocolates and blessings to about 1,000 migrants, who were given hot meals and mattresses to sleep on. Works on the Druzhba pipeline will limit crude oil deliveries to Poland, but Transneft, the system’s Russian operator, insisted they would not impact the schedule for November shipments.

The pipeline carries Russian crude oil to Mozyr in Belarus, where it splits into a northern branch to Poland and Germany and a southern branch through Ukraine to Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Rebeka Foley, an oil market analyst said: “Poland gets the bulk of its crude oil from Russia through Belarus, so any halt of supplies is a disruption for Poland.

“In recent years, Poland has been trying to reduce reliance on Russian crude oil, using a greater share of oil from other sources and expanding port infrastructure to increase seaborne imports.

“Its share of Russian crude in total oil imports fell from over 90 per cent in 2014 to around 61 per cent in 2019.”