UK willing to send tanks to Ukraine as British aid workers go missing
PM supportive of Challenger II supply that could provide Zelensky with ‘knockout punch’
BRITAIN is considering becoming the first country to send Western tanks to Ukraine, in what would be a major stepup of international support.
Defence sources said the UK could supply Volodymyr Zelensky with Challenger II, the British Army’s main battle tank, to encourage other Western allies to follow suit and stop the war.
Rishi Sunak is understood to be supportive of efforts to send British tanks to Ukraine and spoke to President Zelensky last week. The move would bust the taboo that has prevented the West from sending modern tanks for fear of escalating the conflict with Russia since the war began in February last year.
Challenger II tanks would “provide the punch needed to knock the Russians out of Ukraine”, one former senior officer said, as news broke that two British aid workers have gone missing in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. Andrew Bagshaw, 48, and Christopher Parry, 28, disappeared last week while helping to evacuate citizens near Soledar, close to the frontline city of Bakhmut.
President Zelensky has spent months begging for Western-made tanks, air defence systems and fighter jets to press home Ukraine’s hard won advantages in the battle for its survival.
The Ukrainian leader said he and Mr Sunak had made “concrete decisions” to “intensify our efforts to bring victory closer this year” after the call between the two leaders. A squadron of 12 Challenger II tanks could be sent from the Army’s stock of almost 200.
Challenger II’S Chobham and Dorchester armour – the exact composition of which is graded secret – will enable them to survive direct hits from Russian T-72s, which would be outmatched by the superior British tank. A defence source told The Daily Telegraph no final decision had yet been taken over increased British support but that discussions on the issue have been going on “for weeks”.
Any pledge by the UK could be made at the next meeting of the Us-led “Ramstein Contact Group” of international supporters of Ukraine, due next week.
France, Germany and the US have all promised in recent days to send Kyiv powerful armoured vehicles, but the Challenger II would be the first Western, rather than Soviet, main battle tank sent. Britain faced criticism for falling behind its allies last week after Paris and Berlin promised lighter, wheeled combat vehicles.
Last Friday, the US pledged a further $3 billion in military aid for Ukraine, which included 50 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. On the same day, Berlin promised to send 40 Marder vehicles, marking a significant upgrade in firepower for Kyiv’s troops.
The Marder and Bradley fighting vehicles lack the firepower and protection of main battle tanks, but the move was seen as a watershed moment. Earlier in the week, France said it would send Ukraine an unspecified number of AMX-10 armoured combat vehicles.
German-made Leopard II tanks, in service with several Nato allies, have been high on Kyiv’s wish list for months. Poland and Finland are thought to be happy to supply their Leopard II tanks, but require the approval of Germany, which holds the export licence.
Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has been reluctant to provide permission while other countries are unwilling to supply heavy armour, in case the move is seen as too confrontational. It is hoped that if Britain sends Challengers, Berlin could be convinced to do the same. “It will be a good precedent to demonstrate [to] others – to Germany first of all, with their Leopards… and Abrams from the United States,” a Ukrainian source told Sky News.
Robert Habeck, the economy minister, yesterday said Germany said it had no plans to send Kyiv its Leopard II tanks but that could not be ruled out in the future.
Hamish de Bretton-gordon, a former Commanding Officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, said: “Tanks are best used for ‘shock action’ where their firepower and movement can dislocate and rout an enemy.” He added: “I suspect that the very impressive Ukrainian Army will show the Russians a thing or two about tank warfare if we give them modern western tanks.
“Combined with the armoured fighting vehicles the US and the French have already offered, this force could provide the punch needed to knock the Russians out of Ukraine.”
The Kremlin has said supplying Ukraine with armoured vehicles would “prolong the suffering” of the Ukrainian people and “not change anything”.
Meanwhile, Nato and the EU are seeking to ramp up cooperation in response to Russia’s invasion, a joint declaration seen by AFP on Monday said. The two Brussels-based organisations have been looking to improve coordination for years, despite fears in some quarters that efforts to bolster the EU’S role in defence could undermine the Us-led alliance.
Britain’s Foreign Office said it was “supporting the families of two British men who have gone missing in Ukraine”. The two volunteers were last seen on Jan 6. Ukrainian police said they had received reports the two men, who are “citizens of Great Britain”, had disappeared at around 5.15pm local time on Monday. The men are believed to have been helping civilians evacuate while under fire from Russian forces.
‘This could provide the punch needed to knock the Russians out of Ukraine’
‘Okay,” he says, steeling himself for a moment, before sprinting through a deserted village to the sound of intense artillery fire. Alone, and using just his mobile phone as a guide, Christopher Parry races through Bakhmut, in Ukraine, to save a civilian, Oksana, who is desperate to be rescued.
Shared on the day local police say the 28-year-old from Cornwall disappeared, this is among the videos posted by the software engineer to show the bone-chilling danger he is putting himself in to save more than 250 innocent Ukrainians from almost certain death.
It has been four days since he and fellow British humanitarian aid worker Andrew Bagshaw, 48, went missing while helping to evacuate civilians near Soledar, in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russians attacks have been focused in recent days.
They are understood to have been moving between the cities of Kramatorsk and Soledar, attempting to evacuate residents from the area.
The parents of Mr Bagshaw, who was born in Britain but emigrated to New Zealand, said their son had travelled to Ukraine to “assist the people, believing it to be the morally right thing to do”.
Yasya Golovko, who has been working with Mr Parry as a translator, said he had just celebrated his birthday. “I sent him a letter from Kyiv and on Thursday he sent me a photo of the note on his fridge saying ‘proud place for your letter for me, thank you’,” she told LBC.
“It was then that he said he was going to Soledar tomorrow, but I didn’t reply until the next day. I said, give me a call or text when you get back.
“He was last online at 8am on Jan 6 and then I got a call from his girlfriend saying she hadn’t heard from him either and that’s when we found out both Chris and Andrew were missing.”
British prisoners are considered to be of high value by Moscow. In September the Kremlin swapped 55 Russian troops in a deal that included five UK prisoners of war.
The deal included the release of Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-kremlin Ukrainian politician who is a personal friend of Vladamir Putin.
Mr Parry, a running coach, who arrived in the war-torn country on March 5 after becoming “obsessed”
‘Yesterday I had a drone within 10 metres of my face … I was definitely flinching then’
‘I break down in tears thinking of my family back home, if anything were to happen to me’
with promoting “good against evil”, had originally planned to fight on the front line, despite promising his parents he would stay out of danger, helping with supplies from Poland.
But after he was told he would be “more of a hindrance” without military experience, Mr Parry began helping to evacuate civilians from the most dangerous parts of the country.
Speaking on his birthday, Jan 2, Mr Parry, who lives in Cheltenham, said he was staying in a town 10 miles away from the front line.
“I feel more at home the closer I get to the front,” he said.
“When I’m in those areas, that’s where I feel I have more purpose so I inherently feel happier being there, because when I am there I’m helping somebody.”
He told the BBC: “Yesterday I had a drone within 10 metres of my face, which was the closest and one of the scariest times of my time here. I was definitely flinching then. But generic bombardment overhead, it just happens continuously in areas like Bakhmut, you just haven’t got the time or effort to flinch for every one because you’d spend half your life sitting on the floor.”
Discussing his proximity to artillery, Mr Parry said in November: “Because of the intensity in the moment it’s fine, but when you get back and you start to think ‘Oh that was kind of close, that was only 100m away from us’, that’s when you kind of think ‘Maybe my luck might run out’, but it’s worth it to save these people, I think.”
Mr Parry, who met a Ukrainian girlfriend after arriving in the country, was given a 4x4 by a man from London, while others had donated more than £23,000 to help him rescue civilians in Ukraine.
His efforts have seen him evacuate hundreds of people, including a grandmother, daughter and granddaughter, who had been all been raped by Russian soldiers, from the village of Zarichne in Luhansk.
He described arriving to rescue a woman and her daughter whose home was hit before he got there. “The daughter very sadly burnt to death and the mother was like a ghost. That does stick with you,” he told Sky News.
In an anonymous Instagram account Mr Parry used to document his efforts when he first arrived, before he had told his family about his whereabouts. He wrote of the “anguish” of reading the messages from mourning relatives of Ukrainians killed.
“I break down in tears a few times thinking of my family back home, if anything were to happen to me,” he wrote.
Mr Parry returned to England briefly in the summer to explain what he was doing to his family.
He said: “I can’t leave now. I evacuated six people on Tuesday and another six on Wednesday. I am willing to go to the places that a lot of people aren’t. If I take time out, I’d just be thinking of the people who won’t be saved as a result.”