Western media reports say France's President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday there was no consensus on sending troops to Ukraine, but the subject could not be ruled out.
"There is no consensus at this stage… to send troops on the ground," Macron said after hosting some 20 countries allied to Ukraine, according to Reuters.
"Nothing should be excluded. We will do everything that we must so that Russia does not win," France’s president noted.
According to The Guardian, he pointed out that past shibboleths such as sending long-range missiles and planes had been cast aside, adding “people used to say give them just sleeping bags and helmets”.
“We must do whatever we can to obtain our objective,” Mr. Macron said at a meeting of 20 mainly European leaders in Paris convened by Macron to ramp up the European response to the Russian military advances inside Ukraine.
Among those present at the meeting were the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the UK Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, the Polish President, Andrzej Duda, and the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte. Relatively junior officials attended from the United States and Canada.
Speaking at the end of the meeting, Macron warned: “There is a change in Russia’s stance. It is striving to take on further territory and it has its eyes not just on Ukraine but on many other countries as well, so Russia is presenting a greater danger.”
He pointed out that past shibboleths such as sending long-range missiles and planes had been cast aside, adding “people used to say give them just sleeping bags and helmets”. He said: “We must do whatever we can to obtain our objective.”
Al Jazeera says Macron declined to provide details about which nations were considering sending troops, saying he prefers to maintain some “strategic ambiguity”.
A White House official told Reuters that the United States had no plans to send troops to fight in Ukraine and that there were also no plans to send NATO troops to fight in Ukraine.
It is the first time there has been such open discussion of nation states collectively looking at providing troops to support the depleted Ukrainian military manpower.
