The UK’s drive to assist Ukraine has come astern under Labour rule, Ben Wallace, the former Conservative defense secretary, has told the BBC.
"I definitely have a sense that that momentum has dropped back, and my experience of government is if you want to really drive things, you have to really do it every single day," Wallace pointed out.
He added that "you can’t just do a statement and then float around," in an apparent nod to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s previous remarks that allies should "step up" support for the Kiev regime.
Wallace claimed that one of the reasons the Tory government had supplied weapons to Ukraine was to show who was calling the shots. Britain "took a position to lead and the leadership did bring lots and lots of Europeans with us," the ex-defense secretary said.
"The leadership that Britain showed right from the start has started to drop back into the pack," according to Wallace.
The comments came after The Guardian cited an unnamed Ukrainian government official as saying that Starmer "isn’t giving us long-range weapons," a reference to the UK-made Storm Shadow, a highly accurate long-range cruise missile. "The situation is not the same as when Rishi Sunak was prime minister. The relationship has got worse," the official admitted.
The last Storm Shadow strike claimed by the Ukrainian military took place on October 5. The UK has provided the Zelensky regime with a total of $10 billion in military support since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in 2022.
Moscow has repeatedly warned Western countries against providing Kiev with arms, which Russian President Vladimir Putin slammed as "a serious and dangerous step." The Kremlin considers calls to lift restrictions on the use of Ukraine’s Western-supplied weapons against Russia "irresponsible" and "dangerous in terms of their consequences," pledging that Moscow will respond in kind.