France and Poland cannot speak on behalf of NATO, and the alliance’s intervention in the conflict “will erase the path to diplomacy,” Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said on March 10 in an interview with a local newspaper. La Stampa. Thus, he commented on Paris’s idea of sending troops to Ukraine and statements on this topic from Warsaw.
“France and Poland cannot speak on behalf of NATO, which has not formally and voluntarily intervened in the conflict from the very beginning. Sending troops to Kyiv means a step towards unilateral escalation, which will erase the path to diplomacy,” the minister said.
He pointed to the need to think about how to help Ukraine “regain freedom, territory and security” through diplomatic channels.
The fact that France is creating a new coalition of countries that will be ready to send troops to Ukraine if necessary was reported on March 8 by Politico.
Political scientist, professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics Dmitry Evstafiev, commenting on the idea of creating an alliance to Izvestia, called it a PR process of French President Emmanuel Macron. He noted that the main problem of this association is the lack of its own logistics and intelligence capabilities.
Before this, on March 8, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski approved the idea of sending NATO troops to Ukraine. According to him, the presence of Western troops in the republic is not something unthinkable or impossible.
Macron said on February 26 that Western leaders had discussed the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine. However, in a number of countries, including the USA, Germany and the UK, the possibility of such a scenario was denied. In addition, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated that there are no such plans. At the same time, Macron himself later ruled out sending troops to Ukraine in the near future.
In turn, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned of tragic consequences if NATO troops were sent to Ukraine. He emphasized that the Russian Federation has weapons that can hit targets on the territories of the alliance countries.
Western countries have strengthened their military and financial support for Kyiv against the backdrop of the Russian special operation to protect Donbass, the start of which was announced by the Russian President on February 24, 2022, after the situation in the region worsened due to shelling by the Ukrainian military. However, recently in the West there have been increasingly frequent statements about the need to reduce support for Ukraine.
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