Emmanuel Macron, true to his style, suddenly opened a door with a bang. The major reservations of the EU and NATO partners about the French president's proposal to consider sending ground troops to Ukraine forced his staff to undertake educational efforts on Tuesday. To explain and clarify what he meant when he responded to a question about the use of Western soldiers in a dawn press conference on Monday: “Nothing should be ruled out.” We will do everything necessary to ensure that Russia does not win this war .”
Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné was responsible for the investigation. Addressing a national assembly in which the far right and radical left accused the president of playing with fire, he explained that sending troops to Ukraine had a limit: it should not enter into direct combat with Russia.
“We need to think about new measures to support Ukraine,” said Séjourné, a member of Macron's inner circle who sat in the front row of the president's press conference the day before, at the end of the conference of EU leaders and NATO to Ukraine. “This [acciones]”, he continued, “they have to respond to very precise needs.” I am thinking in particular of demining, cybernetics and the production of weapons on site.” The minister concluded that “some of these actions require a presence on Ukrainian territory “Nothing should be ruled out.” A diplomatic source who requested anonymity said: “If troops are sent, it should be for precise targets, not combat.”
The entire debate – and the blurred line on which Macron moves – moves between the desire not to turn the French and Europeans into belligerents and the assertion that nothing is excluded and, as the president said at the conference press conference , “all is”. possible if it makes sense to achieve it [el] “Goal”: that Russia does not defeat Ukraine. And to achieve this, France wants to maintain its “strategic ambiguity”. This means that not all cards are displayed.
“Strategic ambiguity” is a common term in nuclear deterrence. (France is the only nuclear power in the EU and Russia also has the bomb). Macron wants to send a message to Vladimir Putin at a time of Western doubts about the war and uncertainty about the future of the US protective umbrella: European support for Ukraine is solid. Limiting that support – for example, by saying there will be no troops, thereby removing the ambiguity – would reduce their credibility.
“We fear that if we limit ourselves to doing what we are doing today, there is a possibility that Russia will win, and we do not want to be satisfied with that,” says the above-mentioned diplomatic source. Therefore, there is a need not to close doors and avoid red lines like those set two years ago at the start of the Russian invasion in 2022. At the press conference, the President recalled: “Many of those who say 'Never, never' today [tropas terrestres] They are the same ones who said: “Never, never tanks, never, never airplanes, never, never long-range missiles (…).” I remind you that two years ago many in [la] Table [de la cumbre del lunes] They said, “We will suggest sleeping bags and helmets.”
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There is now a new red line about not sending combat troops, but there is precedent for soldiers in support roles eventually entering combat. The most famous is that of the “advisers” sent by Kennedy to Vietnam in the early 1960s, who numbered half a million by the end of the decade. Another common reference in these situations is that of the 1930s. “We are not giving up, we are trying to find the options for today that will allow us to avoid the worst of tomorrow,” says the source mentioned above. “We do not believe that pacifism in itself is an answer given the European experience.”
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