Support for Macron
Poland’s Foreign Minister: NATO troops in Ukraine not unthinkable
March 9, 2024, 11:15 a.m
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French President Macron is discussing the deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine and is initially met with overwhelming rejection. But at least Poland’s Foreign Minister Sikorski can get something out of the idea.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has commented positively on French President Emmanuel Macron’s move to send ground troops to Ukraine. “The presence of NATO troops in Ukraine is not unthinkable. I welcome the initiative of French President Emmanuel Macron,” he wrote on Platform have in front of Putin”.
His position therefore differs from that of the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. During a visit to Prague last week, he made it clear that Poland had no intention of sending its troops to Ukraine.
Macron had previously stated after an international Ukraine support conference in Paris, attended by numerous heads of state and government: “There is no consensus today about officially sending ground troops.” However, he added: “But nothing can be ruled out in the dynamic. We will do everything necessary to ensure that Russia cannot win this war.”
Boots on the soil of Ukraine?
A number of governments subsequently made it clear that this was out of the question for them. Chancellor Olaf Scholz clearly contradicted this and recalled the agreement in the Western alliance that NATO should not become a party to the war. “Nobody really wants boots on the ground in Ukraine, there is a discussion about it now, so we should stop it at this point,” warned Federal Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on Friday during a visit to Helsinki.
Finnish Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen made similar comments: “Nobody supports the ‘boots on the ground’ idea now,” he said. “But everyone supports greater support in the form of weapons, ammunition and money, and that is what we should focus on now.”
Pistorius emphasized that there was a problem with the production capacity for artillery, especially for ammunition, for air defense systems, for Patriot and IRIS-T missiles. “We must do everything we can, everywhere in the world, to collect, source, buy and produce whatever we can to support Ukraine as much as possible.” Germany has trained 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers by the end of 2023. The same number received training in Germany in 2024.