Europe Sending Peacekeeper Troops to Ukraine ‘Unacceptable’, Says Kremlin

Britain is set to pitch a plan for thousands of European NATO members’ soldiers to be deployed to Ukraine as peacekeepers in the coming week, a notion Russia says may constitute a “direct threat”.

Moscow has attempted to pre-empt a European initiative to buttress security in the east of the continent by deterring further fighting after a putative future ceasefire in Ukraine. Russia specifically cited a report in the UK’s Daily Telegraph this week professing to reveal the plan for a European deployment to Ukraine after a ceasefire to keep the peace that would allegedly run to 30,000 troops.

Responding on Thursday morning from the Kremlin, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned “the deployment of NATO countries’ troops to Ukraine cannot be acceptable for Russia”.

He said: “This causes concern for us, because we’re talking about sending military contingents – about the possible, eventual sending of military contingents from NATO countries to Ukraine… This takes on a completely different meaning from the point of view of our security”.

Russia is monitoring this situation “very closely”, he said, while making reference to comments on the same topic by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who had sat down with America’s Marco Rubio on Tuesday. Lavrov said then that “NATO expansion and absorption of Ukraine was a direct threat to Russia’s interests and its sovereignty”.

Whether the troops came under a NATO flag or under some other banner, Lavrov claimed it would not “change anything in this regard. This is unacceptable”.

Russia has made many — tens of dozens — of such warnings, sometimes with allusions to potential nuclear consequences, against various Western involvements in its invasion of Ukraine. These dire warnings appear to have been largely hollow so far — Russia’s claimed ‘hybrid warfare’ attacks on Europe notwithstanding — yet on the verge of negotiations with the United States the Kremlin may feel it suddenly has more leverage to gain from making demands.

Per the Telegraph report’s claims this week, when British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer meets with President Donald Trump next week, he will use his audience to pitch a plan for 30,000 European troops in Ukraine. They would be there to monitor and police any future ceasefire deal, he is reported to be planning to say, but would have to be backed up by American air superiority in case of Russian misbehaviour.

It is stated part of the point of the plan is to encourage the U.S. to remain invested in European defence, rather than washing his hands of the matter and leaving it purely in the hands of the Europeans once the Ukraine peace is concluded.

While the boots-on-the-ground plan is now being enthusiastically taken up by Britain’s left-wing government, it was originally the pet project of France’s President Emmanuel Macron who has talked up the idea for many months, but now it may be on the verge of fruition appears to be getting cold feet. As relayed by French broadsheet Le Figaro, Macron has now assured the country he is not planning to send fighting troops to the front line in Ukraine.

Macron is reported to have discussed with his fellow leaders a plan that stands as sending: “experts or even troops in limited terms, outside any conflict zone, to comfort the Ukrainians and sign a solidarity. This is what we are thinking about with the British… France is not preparing to send ground troops, belligerents in a conflict, to the front”.

The French President is also reported to have brought up NATO membership for Ukraine again, somewhat a difficult sell given both main players at the negotiation table at this time — the U.S. and Russia — are both against the notion.

The French position of talking a big game on Ukraine but not bringing action to match is somewhat typical of Paris’s response to the Ukraine war, a notion underlined dramatically by a visualisation of global aid being sent to Kyiv over the course of the conflict published this month. In both terms of actual support in U.S. dollars donated for military, financial, and humanitarian aid and how this relates as a proportion of the gifting nation’s GDP, even remote Japan or tiny Denmark gives considerably more to Ukraine than France.