BRITAIN is set to send 120 Mastiff armoured cars to Ukraine and more fighter jets to the Russian border in a fightback against Vladimir Putin.
UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Britain would step up arming the war-torn nation and vowed to do whatever he could to help back those fighting Putin’s troops.
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The vehicles were previously used in Afghanistan and can be shipped over via Europe.
As he joined British RAF personnel in Bucharest, Romania, to kick off a four-month air policing mission yesterday he vowed to stare down Putin‘s bullyboy tactics.
And Britain will send another two typhoon jets out to Romania next week to help support the NATO air mission out there – joining four already in the region.
He said alongside Romanian, American and Italian allies that the only thing Putin would listen to was a show of strength.
He said: “Putin’s war machine is busy murdering and killing civilians bombing civilian areas breaking international law.
“We have something that Russia doesn’t have – friends and allies.
“We are 30, Putin is one. That’s our strength.
“Our values make us better than him, our freedoms that we’ve all fought for at all stages in our history make us better than him.
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“And I am absolutely determined the United Kingdom is to contribute to make sure that we all play our part in saying to Putin, you will not get your way, you will not bully us.
“You will not make us compromise on our values that we hold so dear. And we will do everything to see him defeated in Ukraine.”
He vowed: “Britain will do more. It will contribute more.”
He said of Putin’s few allies in Venezuela and North Korea: “That’s not a party I want to attend.”
Backing any nation to join the NATO alliance if they want to, he insisted: “Countries choose NATO, NATO doesn’t choose countries.”
“And it is our values of democracy, the rule of law and freedom of the press which set us apart from the Kremlin and his cronies.”
He must not be allowed to “go back to his superyachts and to reality”, Wallace added.
Russia is wearing itself out but preparing for a fresh attack in the east of Ukraine, he warned but promised to do all he could to help push back their forces.
It comes as at least 50 people were killed and more than 100 injured when a Russian missile with “for the children” scrawled on the side blitzed a Ukrainian train station.
Horror pictures show bodies strewn across the ground beside abandoned luggage at Kramatorsk railway station in eastern Ukraine amid reports the site has been blasted by Russian troops.
The state railway company said two Russian rockets struck the station, which was being used to evacuate civilians from areas under bombardment by Putin’s forces.
About 4,000 people, most of them elderly, women and children, were at the railway station when it was struck, Mayor Oleksander Honcharenko said.
Pictures showed a huge missile with Russian writing scrawled on the side that translates to ‘the children’.
A translator who spoke to Sky News said that part of the Russian writing could be interpreted as meaning ‘for our children’ or ‘for what has been done to our children’.
Others have speculated that the translation could also be ‘for the children’ and could be referring to widespread Russian propaganda that kids have been killed by Ukrainian forces in Donbas and Luhansk.
Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the attack in a social media post early today, saying: “This is an evil that has no limits.”
“The occupiers hit the Kramatorsk railway station with a Point-U [missile], where thousands of peaceful Ukrainians were waiting to be evacuated,” the Ukrainian President wrote on Instagram.
“About 30 people died, about 100 people were injured to varying degrees. Police and rescuers are already on the scene. Russian non-humans do not abandon their methods.
“Lacking the strength and courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population.
“This is an evil that has no limits. And if it is not punished, it will never stop.”
Russia’s defence ministry has said its troops did not have any targets assigned in Kramatorsk on Friday.
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