Boris Johnson has vetoed a Ukrainian no-fly zone again, despite expressing his horror at a Russian strike on a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol yesterday (Wednesday).
Official reports from Ukraine claimed that the attack killed three people, including a child, and injured 17 others. It led to renewed calls from President Volodymyr Zelensky for Western warplanes to intervene. However, Mr Johnson said that while Vladimir Putin had abandoned “all norms of civilised behaviour”, a no-fly zone would bring the UK and Nato into direct conflict with Russia – something he was determined to avoid, reports PA.
Speaking on Sky News’s Beth Rigby Interviews, he acknowledged that some of his conversations with Mr Zelensky had been “deeply upsetting” as the Ukrainian leader appealed for more help.
He said: “What’s happened in Mariupol in that maternity hospital really shows that Putin is prepared just to reject, to abandon, all norms of civilised behaviour. The difficulty is that there is a line beyond which, quite frankly, the UK and Nato would be deemed to be in conflict – direct conflict – with Russia.
“It’s agonising. It’s absolutely agonising. And I’ve had this conversation at least a couple of times now with Volodymyr, but I think the difficulty is that it will require me to order RAF jets, UK pilots into the air with a mission to shoot down Russian fast jets.
“I think we’ve got to be realistic… there’s a line that is very difficult to cross.”
He said he believed the conflict would only end when Mr Putin accepted he had made “a disastrous miscalculation” and withdrew his forces. “I don’t think that he can conquer Ukraine. Ukraine is a country of 45 million people,” Mr Johnson said.
