The force will be deployed to defend Estonia, where Britain already has about 1,700 troops deployed but based in the United Kingdom, ready to fly to defend the Baltic state if necessary. On Wednesday, Ben Wallace said he would “deploy a brigade” to Estonia, effectively increasing the number of British troops available to about 3,000, but said it would be more effective to rely on some of the forces at home and equipment. in German. The commitment is part of NATO’s renewed European defense force, which will include 300,000 troops across the continent who will be on high alert in the event that Russia threatens a military attack on any member of the alliance. A significant part of Britain’s commitment to the defense force announced at this week’s Madrid summit will be naval, Wallace added: “We will put a huge amount of Navy. I think we will dedicate one of the airline teams to this. “ Britain operates two aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, which have a support fleet of ships known as the Aircraft Impact Team. The warships will be deployed to NATO on a rotating basis, Wallace said. Eight NATO defense forces are based in eight countries on the east side of the alliance, from Estonia to Bulgaria, and on Wednesday NATO members agreed to increase them to the size of a brigade in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Germany has already agreed to increase its commitment to Lithuania, but was criticized when it discovered that most of the extra 3,500 troops it offered would be based on its own territory, ready to move quickly east if needed. But Wallace defended the decision, arguing that a surprise attack by Russia on the Baltic was unlikely. “You will not have a huge surprise,” he said, noting that Russia had deployed more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border for several months before invading in February. Existing plans to defend Estonia and the other Baltic states were outdated, Wallace said, because the existing plan was to allow “60 days for the tanks to get there.” But he added that Russia’s attack on Ukraine changed everyone’s mind: “The Baltic states were right to say, well, what we just saw in Ukraine was that if you wait five days, no one will survive. Therefore, we do not want to take any chances and wait until our ferry meets the tanks “. In the new plans, most of the troops needed “are already there,” he added. Wallace also sought to reduce defense spending disputes to No. 10, and indicated he wanted to increase budgets by the end of the current spending review period in April 2025. Governments had received a “peace dividend” after the end. of the Cold War. but it was time now for “investment to continue.” The minister said he agreed with Boris Johnson that the current target of spending 2% of GDP on defense “was set at a different time” and that “Russia was not the same as now”. However, he declined to say whether, as indicated by leaks earlier in the week, the budget should be increased by about 10 10 billion to 2.5%. Wallace said 25,000 Russian men had been killed in the war in Ukraine so far, according to British intelligence estimates. The minister said Russia had gained relatively small amounts of land and that the war was “a disaster for them”. However, he warned that the biggest danger for Ukraine is the “collapse of its economy.” Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had told leaders gathered at the NATO summit that his country needed “about $ 5 billion.” [£4.1bn] a month “to continue fighting the war against Russia.
