European and North American countries rejected this Tuesday the possibility of nations belonging to NATO sending troops to Ukraine to help Kiev, a hypothesis pointed out the day before by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and harshly contested by Russia.
During a dinner in Paris this Monday, European leaders meeting at the Elysée agreed on moving towards “a war economy” to help Ukraine face the Russian invasion and Macron did not even exclude sending troops if necessary to achieve that objective. .
At the end of that dinner on the situation in Ukraine, Macron considered it necessary to “do everything possible so that Russia does not win this war.”
“The defeat of Russia is essential for the security and stability of Europe,” said the French president in a press conference, where he did not exclude a possible sending of soldiers to Ukraine in the future.
NATO has no plans to send troops
NATO has no plans to send combat troops to Ukraine to fight the war against Russia, allied sources told EFE on Tuesday in reference to the possibility alluded to by French President Emmanuel Macron and other leaders.
“NATO and its allies are providing unprecedented military support to Ukraine. We have done this since 2014 and intensified it after the large-scale invasion of Russia. But there are no plans for NATO combat troops on the ground in Ukraine,” the sources noted.
The US and Canada make it clear that they will not send them
The United States, the main pillar of the Atlantic alliance, made it clear that it has no intention of sending troops, as Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told EFE. “President (Joe) Biden has made it very clear that the United States will not send troops to fight in Ukraine,” Watson concluded.
Washington’s statement was known almost at the same time as the position of Canada, whose Ministry of Defense indicated that the North American country will continue to support Ukraine militarily but that, “as a member of NATO, Canada has no plans to deploy troops from combat” in the European country.
Scholz: neither European nor NATO soldiers.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stressed that the possibility of sending European or NATO soldiers is not on the table and stressed that there is “consensus” that this principle will remain in force “in the future.”
“What we had agreed together and between us will also remain in force in the future, that there are no ground forces, that there are no soldiers on Ukrainian soil that have been sent by European or NATO states,” he stated.
For its part, the Italian Government issued a statement in which it said that “since the Russian aggression two years ago, there has been full cohesion of all the Allies in the support that will be offered to Kiev” but that this “does not include the presence in Ukrainian territory of troops of European States or NATO.”
Spain prefers the delivery of material
Spain is not in favor of sending European or NATO troops to Ukraine, said the spokesperson for the Spanish Government, Pilar Alegría.
“We do not agree and we also have to focus on what is urgent, which is to accelerate the delivery of material,” he said in Madrid.
Russia warns
The Kremlin called a direct conflict with NATO “inevitable” if the allied countries deploy troops in Ukraine.
“In that case we are no longer talking about the possibility, but about the inevitable nature (of the conflict with NATO),” said the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov.
According to Peskov, the countries of the Atlantic Alliance must “assess” whether the conflict with Russia “corresponds to their interests and the interests of their people.”
BY: TTU
