President Emmanuel Macron of France has warned that while there is “no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground” to Ukraine, “nothing can be ruled out.”
The Frenchman spoke in Paris after a meeting of Western officials — including more than 20 European heads of state and government — vowing, “We will do everything needed so Russia cannot win the war.”
His comments follow revelations by Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia — a skeptic of Western involvement in the Ukraine war, like Hungary’s Viktor Orban — that “a number of NATO and [European Union] member states are considering that they will send their troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.”
Macron said he would not comment on which countries are considering sending forces to Ukraine, citing “strategic ambiguity.”
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany struck a different note, however, claiming it had been agreed in Paris “that there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil who are sent there by European states or NATO states.”
Fico said Slovakia would not be sending troops, with his counterpart in the more pro-war Czech Republic, Petr Fiala, also saying his government “certainly doesn’t want to send its soldiers.”
Poland, one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters, also said it does not plan to intervene militarily.
Russia currently has the upper hand on the battlefield, having thwarted a Western-equipped counter-offensive in 2023 and captured the fortress town of Avdeyevka, contested since 2014, in recent days.
