The French Contingency

Little bit late on this but it’s still worthy of discussion:

President Emmanuel Macron of France on Monday said “nothing should be ruled out” after he was asked about the possibility of sending Western troops to Ukraine in support of the embattled nation’s war against Russia.

Mr. Macron, speaking after a meeting of European leaders in Paris to bolster support for Ukraine, stressed that the talks had not resulted in any consensus on putting troops on the ground “in an official, approved and endorsed way.”

But he insisted that “anything is possible if it is useful to reach our goal,” which he said was to ensure that “Russia cannot win this war.”

Reaction from the rest of Europe was not particularly positive, and reaction from Russia was positively scathing. For a variety of reasons this does not seem likely to happen; there’s not much domestic appetite for it in France and there are escalation concerns, although Russia’s constant invocation of the nuclear threat does begin to ring hollow after a while.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s not the physical presence of French troops that will enable Ukraine to salvage itself from this war. Western equipment is more important than Western troops, at least in the numbers that European armies are likely to provide. More importantly, Ukraine needs to do a better job of mobilizing its own population and its own defense industrial base. This war is not over and there’s still time for Ukraine to turn things around. Macron’s statement is helpful not so much in terms of offering a likely policy as in indicating (to both Moscow and Kyiv) that Western Europe is committed to Ukraine’s survival.