French President Emmanuel Macron insisted once again this Thursday on the possibility of sending Western troops to Ukraine if Russia breaks the defense lines on the battle front and if kyiv requests it.
“As I have already said, I do not rule out anything because we are facing someone who does not rule out anything,” Macron explained in an interview with the British weekly ‘The Economist’ more than two years after the start of the Russian aggression launched unilaterally on February 24. 2022. »Ruling it out a priori is not drawing the lessons of the last two years» of war, he insisted.
Macron also recalled that in the summer of 2022, at the NATO summit, “we all ruled out a priori the delivery of missile tanks and aircraft. We are all doing it and we would be wrong to dismiss the rest. But, above all, we would be wrong in terms of credibility, of deterrence against the Russians,” he stressed.
The French politician, who was one of the Western leaders who maintained open dialogue with Moscow for the longest time before the war in Ukraine broke out, has raised his tone with Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent months.
Macron created a great controversy at the end of February when he said that he did not rule out sending troops to Ukraine if necessary to prevent Russia from winning the war, although he acknowledged that there was no consensus on the matter.
Real risk
Its European and American partners immediately distanced themselves from this proposal and their statements were criticized by Moscow. Putin warned Macron of the “real” risk of nuclear war if Western countries send soldiers to Ukraine.
The French president is committed to maintaining “a strategic ambiguity” with Russia to try to plunge Moscow into uncertainty about Western intentions. Macron considers that Western countries have been “certainly too hesitant to formulate the limits of our action to someone who has none and who is the aggressor.”
«Russia cannot win in Ukraine. If Russia wins in Ukraine, we will no longer have security in Europe. Who can expect Russia to stop there? »What security for the other neighboring countries: Moldova, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and many others? And, finally, what credibility is there for the Europeans who will have spent billions, who will have said that the survival of the continent is at stake there and will not have been given the means to stop Russia?” asked Macron, who insisted that Westerners should not “exclude anything because our goal is that Russia can never win in Ukraine.”
The head of state of Paris gave this interview to ‘The Economist’ a few days after giving a long speech on April 25 at the Sorbonne University in Paris about the future of Europe and a few weeks before the European elections in June.
“Our Europe is mortal and can die,” Macron warned his European partners on campus, urging them to act now to prevent the European Union from being weakened or relegated compared to other world powers, such as the United States or China.
Macron warned in the interview with the British weekly that Europe faces “a triple existential risk”: a military and security risk; an economic risk and for our prosperity; and an existential risk of internal incoherence and disruption of the functioning of our democracies. The president considers that these risks have been accentuated by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, which has led to the return of war to the European continent.
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