Macron suggests sending troops to Ukraine: Why NATO allies bluntly rejected it

The Russia-Ukraine war has entered its third year. While Russian president Vladimir Putin believes he can win, Kyiv is desperately waiting for approval of aid from the United States. Amid this, French president Emmanuel Macron has triggered a storm by hinting at Western troops on the ground in Ukraine in the future – an idea that has been rejected by NATO allies.

What did Macron say?

Macron said on Monday that sending Western troops on the ground in Ukraine is not “ruled out” in the future after the issue was debated at a gathering of European leaders in Paris.

The French leader said that “we will do everything needed so Russia cannot win the war” after the meeting of over 20 European heads of state and government and other Western officials.

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“There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out,” Macron said in a news conference at the Elysee presidential palace.
He declined to provide details about which nations were considering sending troops, saying he prefers to maintain some “strategic ambiguity”.

The meeting included German chancellor Olaf Scholz and Poland’s president Andrzej Duda as well as leaders from the Baltic nations. The United States was represented by its top diplomat for Europe, James O’Brien, and the United Kingdom by Foreign Secretary David Cameron, reports The Associated Press.

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Do allies agree with Macron?

No, they don’t. The French president’s remarks were criticised by the country’s NATO and European Union partners.

The United States quickly ruled out sending combat troops to Ukraine. “President Biden has been clear that the US will not send troops to fight in Ukraine,” clarified White House national security council spokesperson Adrienne Watson.

The president believes the “path to victory” is providing military aid “so Ukrainian troops have the weapons and ammunition they need to defend themselves”, the White House statement added.

NATO also announced on Tuesday afternoon that there were “no plans” for combat troops in Ukraine.

Germany’s Scholz said that there had been no change to the agreed position that no European country or NATO member state would send troops to Ukraine. “It’s important to keep reassuring yourself of this and the fact that this has taken place as an understanding is, in my view, a very, very good and very important step forward,” he said.

The UK echoed similar views. British prime minister Rishi Sunak’s office said that the country had no plans for a large-scale military deployment to Ukraine, beyond the small number of personnel already training Ukrainian forces, reports BBC.

Italy also dismissed Macron’s remarks. The office of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni said the country’s “support does not include the presence of troops from European or NATO states on Ukrainian territory”.

The French president also came under fire from opposition politicians in the country. Marine Le Pen, whose far-right National Rally party is the largest single opposition party in the lower house of parliament, said Macron was “posing an existential risk to 70 million French people”.

The Socialist party leader, Olivier Faure, said Macron’s remarks were “totally counterproductive” and had only served to divide the EU, while Éric Ciotti, head of the right’s Les Républicains, said the French leader’s comments were “fraught with terrible consequences”, according to a report in Guardian.

Also read: 2 years of Russia-Ukraine war: From fall of Avdiivka to firing of Zaluzhnyi

What could be the fallout of the comments?

Macron’s comments may turn out to be prescient and pave the way for greater direct Western involvement in the war in Ukraine against Russia’s invasion sometime down the line, according to an analysis by Reuters.
But they also run the risk of undermining the very thing Macron sought to bolster with the Paris meeting – unity among Ukraine’s Western allies as Kyiv’s forces struggle to hold off Russian troops two years into the war.

A Western official said Macron had “rattled some cages and provoked some head-scratching” among NATO members. He said the move could complicate US debate over a bill stuck in Congress that would provide some $60 billion in aid to Ukraine - if it stoked fears of an escalation in the war.

A European Union diplomat was quoted as saying by Reuters that the result of Macron’s comments was “a cacophony between allies, at the expense of credibility”.

But a French diplomatic source said that if the West stayed on its current course of donating arms and aid and making declarations of support, “we will comfort President Putin in his impression that we are weak”.

How did Russia react?

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has warned of direct conflict if NATO troops are deployed in Ukraine.

He called Macron’s suggestion “a very important new element” adding it was absolutely not in the interests of NATO members and their people. “In that case, we would need to talk not about the probability, but about the inevitability [of direct conflict],” he said.

What NATO troops in Ukraine could mean?

The war in Ukraine has triggered the worst crisis in Russia’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and President Putin has previously warned of the dangers of confrontation between NATO and Russia.

Even talk of a confrontation between Russia and NATO – a Cold War nightmare of leaders and populations alike – indicates the dangers of escalation as the West grapples with a resurgent Russia 32 years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, reports Reuters.

Russia and the United States, the big power behind NATO, have the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. President Biden has cautioned that a conflict between Russia and NATO could trigger World War Three.

Aware of the possibility of a massive escalation in case of directly confronting Russian forces in Ukraine, NATO has restricted itself to training Ukrainian soldiers and supplying them with weapons.

But is NATO ready for war?

According to a report in The Conversation, NATO does not have the stockpile or the manufacturing capacity to supply a lengthy war. “This is because NATO has long planned on what’s known as a ‘come as you are’ war, which means it has the capacity to fight for only as long as the equipment and supplies last. For this reason, NATO’s strategy has always been, in the event of a conflict, to bring it to a conclusion as quickly as possible,” the article says.

Admiral Rob Bauer of the Royal Netherlands Navy, NATO’s most senior military commander and military adviser to its North Atlantic Council, spoke at the Warsaw Security Forum in October 2023. “We need large volumes. The just-in-time, just-enough economy we built together in 30 years in our liberal economies is fine for a lot of things – but not the armed forces when there is a war ongoing,” he said, according to The Conversation.

General Onno Eichelsheim, the Netherlands’ top military officer, said Macron likely wanted to make clear to Putin that no option was off limits. “You have to put all the options on the table,” he told Reuters during a visit to an arms plant in the Czech Republic. “This is the far-end option and I don’t think the NATO countries are yet very much willing to do it. But you never know what happens in time.”

With inputs from agencies