Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sunday announced a new $2 billion deal that would allow Ukraine to purchase 5,000 air-defence missiles using export finance.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence said Thales will manufacture the lightweight-multirole missiles for Ukraine.
Thales said the missiles have a range of more than 6 kilometres and they can be fired from a variety of platforms on land, sea, and air.
“This will be vital for protecting critical infrastructure now and strengthening Ukraine in securing the peace when it comes,” Starmer told reporters at a summit in London.
Russia last week launched more than 200 drones in an overnight attack, in what Ukraine said was the largest such attack since the start of the war three years ago.
Meanwhile, France and Britain are proposing a partial one-month truce between Russia and Ukraine that would not cover ground fighting, French President Emmanuel Macron told media on Sunday.
However, Macron said the truce would cover air, sea and energy infrastructure attacks.
“In the event of a ceasefire, it would be very difficult to verify (fighting) along the front was being respected,” Macron said, adding that the front line was equivalent to the distance between Paris and Budapest.
Macron attended a meeting with European leaders, convened by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to advance efforts at drawing up a Ukraine peace plan.
The summit in London came two days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s White House meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump ended in acrimony. World leaders have offered a strong show of support to the Ukrainian leader and promised to do more to help his nation.
Under the Franco-British proposal, European ground troops would only be deployed to Ukraine in a second phase, Macron said.
Macron has said his country and other European nations must spend more on defence. Likely in the region of 3% to 3.5% of gross domestic product. The European Commission also needed to be more innovative in financing defence spending, he said.
Team Bharatshakti
(With inputs from Reuters)
