Germany and other European allies of Kiev on Tuesday rejected French President Emmanuel Macron’s comments on sending Western troops to Ukraine, saying the day before that this could not “be excluded”.
The Kremlin, for its part, judged that it was “absolutely not in the interest of these countries” to send soldiers to Ukraine. The mere fact of evoking this possibility constituted “a very important new element” in the conflict, added the spokesperson for the Russian presidency, Dmitry Peskov, while noting that there was “no consensus” on the subject among Westerners.
Asked about the risk of a direct conflict between NATO and Russia, in the event of a military presence in Ukraine, Dmitry Peskov replied that “in this case, we should not talk about probability, but about inevitability”.
Monday in Paris, Emmanuel Macron recognized that there was “no consensus today to send ground troops in an official, assumed and endorsed manner”. “But in dynamics, nothing should be excluded. We will do everything necessary to ensure that Russia cannot win this war,” he added, saying he was “assuming” a “strategic ambiguity”.
He was speaking at the end of an international conference in support of Ukraine, hastily organized in France in the presence of twenty-seven other countries, at a critical moment for kyiv, awaiting the Western weapons necessary for its survival.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday that “no soldiers” would be sent to Ukraine by European or NATO countries.
Poland’s refusal
He judged during a press conference that “what was decided between us from the beginning continues to be valid for the future”, namely “that there will be no troops on the ground, no soldiers sent neither by European states, nor by NATO states on Ukrainian soil.”
Warsaw and Prague also rejected the possibility outlined by Paris. “We are not considering sending our troops to Ukraine and we have a common position on this point” with the Czech Republic, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared Tuesday during a press conference with his Czech counterpart Petr Fiala .
“Today, we should concentrate, as the Polish or Czech governments did, on supporting Ukraine as much as possible in its military effort,” said Mr. Tusk.
Ulf Kristersson, Prime Minister of Sweden who will very soon become the 32e NATO member, argued that “there is no demand” on the Ukrainian side for ground troops. So “the question is not current”, he insisted, without however excluding this possibility in the future.
“At the moment, we are busy sending advanced equipment to Ukraine (and) in different ways,” he stressed.
“End the war, not expand it”
Budapest, the only capital among the Twenty-Seven to have maintained close ties with Moscow after the launch of the invasion of Ukraine two years ago and which for some time blocked new European aid to kyiv, has unsurprisingly displayed his opposition.
“Hungary’s position is clear and firm: we are not ready to send weapons or soldiers to Ukraine. We must end the war, not deepen and widen it,” its head of diplomacy, Peter Szijjarto, said on Facebook on Tuesday.
Since he received Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in mid-February at the Élysée to sign a bilateral security agreement, Emmanuel Macron has painted a very dark picture of Vladimir Putin’s intentions and has tried to position himself at the forefront of support brought to Kiev.
“We are seeing, and particularly in recent months, a hardening of Russia”, “which was unfortunately cruelly illustrated with the death of Alexeï Navalny”, the main Russian opponent, he reaffirmed on Monday, while launching this warning: “We also know that Russia is preparing new attacks, in particular to stun Ukrainian public opinion.”
Within the French political class, the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine has raised an outcry among opposition groups, from the radical left to the far right, including the socialists and the right.