UK defence secretary refuses to reveal how many troops could be sent to Ukraine

UK Defence Secretary John Healey has not specified how many British troops might be sent to Ukraine to support peacekeeping operations.

As reported by Sky News, the UK and France committed in a joint declaration on 6 January to deploy forces to Ukraine in the event of a peace agreement.

When asked by Shadow Defence Secretary James Cartlidge to confirm how many troops the UK had pledged under the declaration, Healey said he was "simply not... going to get into details about the nature of the activities in the deployment, the numbers of troops that are likely to be deployed to Ukraine, or the details of the commitments that other nations have made."

He added that revealing such information would "only make Putin wiser".

French President Emmanuel Macron said on 7 January that France could deploy "several thousand" troops to perform peacekeeping functions.

The Times reported that the UK plans to send fewer than 7,500 troops to Ukraine to monitor compliance with any potential peace agreement.