Quote:
Originally Posted by Pierre
As long as we get paid back, just as we had to pay back for WW1 & WW2, then fine.
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Lend lease was on a vastly greater scale, and in fact at one point the USA offered to write down a chunk of the debt but HMG felt it was important for our international standing that we pay. We got about £300 billion of hardware from the USA (inflation adjusted to today). So far we have sent about £2 billion to Ukraine.
Regardless, your proposition suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s unfolding in Ukraine now. The European security order will be decided for a generation based on whether Russia eventually overruns Ukraine or is crushed and forced back across its own borders. Russia’s immediate neighbours understand this - the Baltic states’ contributions are far greater, as a percentage of their GDP, than ours and even the United States.
A Ukrainian victory and a humbled Russia is absolutely in our security interests. And in fact a great deal of the kit we’re sending to Ukraine was procured on the assumption that it might, if the worst happened, have to be deployed against Russia anyway. In Ukraine it is being used as designed, even if it’s not UK personnel pulling the trigger.