LONDON, February 27. /TASS/. The UK and France have finished preparing for the potential deployment of troops from the so-called coalition of the willing to Ukraine in the event of the peaceful settlement of the conflict, The Daily Telegraph reported.

According to the newspaper, more than 600 UK paratroopers, supported by French and Italian servicemen, conducted a training operation in France’s Brittany region as part of the nine-day Orion drills, which began on February 24 with around 2,000 troops participating.

While the newspaper did not provide evidence to support the claim that the training had been completed, it did note that the strength of the UK Armed Forces is approximately 70,000, which is the lowest figure in more than 200 years. According to The Daily Telegraph, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been warned that the UK will have to withdraw troops from Estonia and Cyprus in order to fully staff one brigade in case it needs to be deployed to Ukraine. "When it comes to deterring Russia, we have three to five years before we have to fight a significant confrontation with a major state, a geographically constrained conflict in some shape or form," Armed Forces Minister Al Carns told the newspaper. "And the reality is, whether we like it or not our military in a lot of cases hasn’t changed from the 1990s. We’ve got to move faster, and on everything," he acknowledged.

The UK Defense Ministry previously reported that the Multinational Force for Ukraine headquarters, consisting of 70 people, had begun working in preparation for sending coalition troops to Ukraine after the conflict ends. On February 25, Defense State Secretary John Healey announced that UK Army and Air Force personnel had started preparing for deployment to Ukraine. He explained that ·200 million ($270 million) had already been allocated for this purpose.

Russia opposes the presence of NATO troops in Ukraine. On February 10, Russian Ambassador to France Alexey Meshkov told TASS that France's largest military exercise, Orion-26, in which the French repel a large-scale invasion of their territory, is self-reassuring against the backdrop of rhetoric about a non-existent "Russian threat.".