A few weeks ago, Thierry Burkhardt, the Chief of General Staff of the French Armed Forces, sent a proposal to his NATO colleagues to consider the deployment of North Atlantic Alliance troops to Ukraine, but received a negative response. Ivo Daalder, former U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO, wrote about this in an article for Politico.
Ivo Daalder said that the proposal to deploy NATO troops in Ukraine was put forward before such a possibility was publicly mentioned by French President Emmanuel Macron. The former US ambassador said that no military commander would put forward such initiatives without the approval of the country’s top political leadership.
According to Daalder, Thierry Burkhard wrote to half of his colleagues in the North Atlantic Alliance and proposed to consider the possibility for the coalition to take over certain tasks in Ukraine: to staff the defence systems, to train the military in the country, to conduct cyber operations, to help with demining, the allies unanimously rejected these proposals.
The ex-US Ambassador to NATO added that in Paris to the rejection was not listened to, or “perhaps he did not even care” the French leadership, after which Macron came up with a similar initiative.
We will remind, earlier Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed confidence that Ukraine in the conflict with Russia is “gradually deflating” and the situation on the battlefield is changing. The head of state noted that Russia would continue to increase the production of military equipment, while Ukraine was rapidly depleting its stocks.