French President Emmanuel Macron does enjoy a good grandstanding. Having once been keen to present himself as a possible bridge-builder with Moscow, he is now suggesting that western troops might go fight in Ukraine – secure in the knowledge that his bluff is unlikely to be called. At a press conference at the end of a summit in Paris on supporting Kyiv he said: ‘there is no consensus to officially send ground troops. That said, nothing should be ruled out.’ He wouldn’t say any more. He wanted to maintain some ‘strategic ambiguity.’

It is certainly true that manpower is a key Ukrainian constraint. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently admitted that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in the war, although other informed assessments put it at 50,000 or even higher. The higher estimates seem plausible if you add the thousands who are recorded as missing but are likely dead. Ukraine has only lost about a half to a third of the number of men Moscow has, but then again Russia has around four times the total population. Ukraine’s forces are largely exhausted, and a debate over a new law which would allow hundreds of thousands to be mobilised recently led to the dismissal of former commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhny.

However, regardless of Ukraine’s manpower shortage, there is at present no prospect of any consensus for sending western troops into battle, despite the emerging (and questionable) line that if Kyiv falls, then a Russian advance into Nato will follow. As wrangles over aid packages in Brussels (now resolved) and Washington (still rolling on) show, maintaining the momentum behind a proxy war is often hard enough. Western publics don’t seem to want to go to war either. A recent survey carried out by the European Council on Foreign Relations found on average that only 10 per cent of Europeans believed Ukraine would win the war, and half the proportion thought Russia would eventually prevail.

QOSHE - Why Macron won’t send troops to Ukraine - Mark Galeotti
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Why Macron won’t send troops to Ukraine

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27.02.2024

French President Emmanuel Macron does enjoy a good grandstanding. Having once been keen to present himself as a possible bridge-builder with Moscow, he is now suggesting that western troops might go fight in Ukraine – secure in the knowledge that his bluff is unlikely to be called. At a press conference at the end of a summit in Paris on supporting Kyiv he said: ‘there is no consensus to officially send ground troops. That said, nothing should be ruled out.’ He wouldn’t say any more.........

© The Spectator


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