Russia 'highly likely' to invade Ukraine: UK defense secretary

By Muhammad Mussa

LONDON (AA) - Britain’s defense secretary on Sunday said Russia is “highly likely” to invade Ukraine despite diplomatic efforts by the West to defuse the crisis.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Ben Wallace compared current diplomatic efforts to the 1938 Munich Agreement that aimed to prevent World War II but ultimately failed with the German invasion of Poland.

Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis also drew parallels between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler, as there was a great deal of diplomacy aiming to prevent the Third Reich from launching a new war.

"It may be that he (Putin) just switches off his tanks and we all go home but there is a whiff of Munich in the air from some in the West,” Wallace said.

"If you look back to that period of time there was a lot of diplomatic engagement, there was an optimism at the time, actually, that there may be a diplomatic way through,” Lewis said in a separate interview with BBC News.

"That eventually turned out not to be the case. It turned out that wasn't the intent or aim of Adolf Hitler at the time,” he added.

Wallace earlier cancelled a family holiday, planned after his official visit to Moscow, in light of further heightened tensions between Russia and the West, with the latter warning of an imminent invasion.

On Saturday, the British government ordered the withdrawal of all British troops in Ukraine. Soldiers numbering in the hundreds had been dispatched on a training mission nicknamed Operation Orbital.

The withdrawal of troops was announced a day after the Foreign Office instructed all British citizens to leave the Eastern European country amid fears that Russia could launch an invasion at any moment.

Western nations have also called on their citizens to leave Ukraine while commercial means are still available to them.

On Friday US intelligence reported that Moscow was aiming for a lightning military offensive that would see the Ukrainian military defeated and the encirclement of its capital in a number of days where a regime change would occur.