Christopher Luxon says New Zealand stands by Ukraine.
Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
The Prime Minister says the government would be open to sending peacekeepers to Ukraine if a ceasefire was reached.
It follows European leaders meeting in Paris for an emergency summit on the future of Ukraine.
Luxon said New Zealand stood with Ukraine because it was unacceptable for a major power to cause huge amounts of suffering.
“I think that is something we’d be open to, but obviously it’s speculative at this point, but we do support a lot of peacekeeping missions around the world and this is something that we would be open to working through.”
Currently New Zealand troops were embedded with British troops and working to train Ukrainian forces in the United Kingdom, he said.
Luxon told Morning Report that New Zealand stands by Ukraine.
“We very much stand with Ukraine, I mean we’re a country … with our strong set of values around nation states and sovereignty of nations.”
The war there was one of several shifts from rules to power, from economics to security and from global efficiency to resilience in international relations, he said.
Luxon said he was open to sending troops as peacekeepers and said the negotiations to end the war were a good thing, but Ukraine should be involved in them.
Luxon pledges to get NZ defence spending close to 2%
Luxon said he wants to get New Zealand’s defence spending close to 2 percent of gross domestic product.
New Zealand currently spends just over 1 percent of GDP on defence with more set to revealed about the future spending plans in the Defence Capability Plan, although at this stage it is unknown when the plan will be released.
US President Donald Trump has been pushing for higher defence spending in Europe – and may yet push for other countries to do the same.
Luxon said the Defence Capability Plan sought to give certainty about the capability New Zealand would need in defence over the next 15 years, he said.
“We will be getting as close to 2 percent [of defence spending on GDP] as we possibly can, we know that’s the pathway we want to get to.”
Asked when defence spending would reach the 2 percent mark, Luxon said that would be revealed via the Defence Capability Plan in due course.
“As we put more money in, I want to make sure we’ve got a really good strategy and part of that is making sure that we’re very inter-operable with Australia, for example, that we’ve got some real capability, that we’re respected around the world.”
More money needed to go into the defence system but equally it was important that as a small country New Zealand chose carefully about where it wanted to build that capability, he said.
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