France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Keir Starmer are unlikely to have been blown away by U.S. president Donald Trump’s description yesterday of their Ukraine ‘peacekeeping’ plans as a “beautiful gesture,” given that he also made it clear that America will not send troops “because we’re very far away.”
Trump stressed that it only made sense to send armed forces to Ukraine “from the standpoint of Europe,” whereas the US “won’t have to put any over there.”
This further complicates the European Union’s talks on security guarantees for Ukraine, which Starmer believes would rely on a “US backstop”—be that in the form of troops on the ground, or air support, logistics and intelligence capabilities.
Echoing this sentiment, one European diplomatic source told The Times in London that the U.S. would have to be involved in one way or another “because they have capabilities that all of Europe lacks.” But the paper added that Trump might even be against financing any such missions, never mind sending troops.
The fragility of the British Army appeared to escape Starmer’s thoughts when he said yesterday that it was too early to specify how many troops he would be willing to deploy to Ukraine. He should instead be asking how much the UK can actually commit, given the gutting over recent decades of its military capabilities. It is, for example, understood that the Army’s troop numbers will fall below 70,000 for the first time this year.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has also described the idea of a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine as “unacceptable,” adding that
The appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard.
In other words, Moscow would view the presence of British and French troops in Ukraine as the presence of NATO itself, and would act accordingly. That is, despite America’s further distancing from Europe in the shape of US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth making clear that such a mission “should not be covered” by NATO’s Article 5 of collective defence.
