LONDON: British Prime Minister Liz Truss has said allies should stand firm on Ukraine and ignore Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “slashings”.
Truss, who met US President Joe Biden and France’s Emmanuel Macron on his first foreign trip as prime minister to New York last week, in an interview with CNN called on like-minded democracies to be firm against “autocratic regimes”.
Putin last week ordered a partial mobilization of troops and raised the possibility of a nuclear conflict. Truss said Putin was stepping up his invasion of Ukraine because he was not winning and had made a strategic mistake.
“I think he hadn’t anticipated the reaction force of the free world,” Truss said in the interview that aired Sunday.
“We shouldn’t listen to his slashes and fake threats. Instead, what we need to do is keep imposing sanctions on Russia and keep supporting the Ukrainians.”
Truss, who became prime minister earlier this month, pledged to increase defense spending to 3% of Britain’s GDP. Defense Minister Ben Wallace told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper that this represents an annual defense budget of around £100bn ($108.56bn) by 2030, around double the actual level.
Truss has taken a hard line against Russia and China, but has also been at odds with some traditional allies, particularly in Europe and the United States, over post-Brexit trade deals with the European Union.
She said she still wanted a negotiated solution on the so-called Northern Ireland Protocol, that she and Biden had agreed that peace in the province must be preserved, and that she still believed in the “relationship special” between Great Britain and the United States.