Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said that he does not agree with French President Emmanuel Macron regarding the conflict in Ukraine and called on him to avoid escalation. The newspaper writes about this on Friday, April 5 Le Figaro.
“We agree on the intention to achieve lasting peace. But our positions differ in choosing the path to achieve this goal. I advocate the precautionary principle. The President of France is a supporter of the principle of containment,” Nehammer commented on Macron’s statement about the possible dispatch of French troops to Ukraine.
Nehammer acknowledged that some of the aggressive arguments may seem persuasive, but he himself is a proponent of the “precautionary principle to avoid uncontrolled escalation.”
On February 26, Macron said that Western leaders had discussed the possibility of sending their troops to Ukraine, and did not rule it out. Then his words did not find support in a number of countries, including the UK, USA and Germany. In addition, NATO head Jens Stoltenberg also spoke out against it.
In March, the French leader indicated that he remains committed to the position that there are no red lines in matters of providing assistance to Kyiv and the possibility of sending the military.
Kremlin official Dmitry Peskov, commenting on this, said that a direct clash between the alliance countries and Russia is not in their interests, and they must be aware of this. Assessing the risk of escalation in the event of sending troops to Ukraine, he noted that in this situation, a clash between Russia and NATO would be inevitable.
On March 19, the director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, said that France was preparing a contingent of its military to be sent to Ukraine, which at the initial stage would amount to about 2 thousand people. According to him, the French military unit will become “a priority legitimate target for attacks by Russian armed forces.”
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