Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson acknowledged in an interview last week that the West is waging a “proxy war” against Russia in Ukraine and argued NATO hasn’t done enough to achieve victory.
“We’re waging a proxy war, but we’re not giving our proxies the ability to do the job. For years now, we’ve been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, and it has been cruel,” Johnson said on a podcast produced by The Telegraph.
Johnson played a key role in sabotaging peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in the early days of the conflict to ensure the war would continue. While visiting Kyiv in April 2022, then-Prime Minister Johnson urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not to negotiate and said even if Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Russia, its Western backers were not.
Ukrainska Pravda first reported Johnson’s message to Zelensky and said his position was that of the “collective West.” David Arakhamia, a Ukrainian official who led short-lived negotiations with Russia, later confirmed that Johnson “came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with [the Russians] at all, and let’s just fight.”
In the podcast interview, Johnson said British and other Western troops should defend Ukrainian territory as part of any future ceasefire deal. “I don’t think we should be sending in combat troops to take on the Russians,” Johnson said. “But I think as part of the solution, as part of the end state, you’re going to want to have multinational European peace-keeping forces monitoring the border [and] helping the Ukrainians.”
Johnson said Western countries should give Ukraine security guarantees as part of any peace deal, but that would be an unacceptable demand for Russia. Arakhamia noted that during the peace talks in 2022 that Johnson helped end, Russia’s primary demand was Ukrainian neutrality.
“It was the most important thing for them. They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to – as Finland once did – neutrality and committed that we would not join NATO,” Arakhamia said.
