If it were any other time — and if the stakes weren't so high — the swift international slapdown that followed French President Emmanuel Macron's recent comments on Ukraine might have been funny.French President Emmanuel Macron's comments about sending ground troops into Ukraine triggered low-level panic among NATO allies.
Macron's comments were interesting in part because he wasn't talking about an alliance-wide initiative but rather an individual bilateral initiative of the sort that's used to help train and arm Ukraine's military. "We will continue to provide Ukraine with comprehensive military assistance, but as a NATO member, Canada has no plans to deploy combat troops to Ukraine," said Diana Ebadi.
It is safe to say that, with Ukraine on the defensive and the Russian army building up for a late spring or early summer theater-wide offensive, "conditions" are not right for the Canadian government to take such a provocative step, even if that was truly France's intention. Andrew Rasiulis, a former senior official at the Department of National Defence who once ran the department's Directorate of Nuclear and Arms Control Policy, said Macron's comments are a sign of "deep concern" among European leaders about what's coming.
"In this case, we need to talk not about probability, but about the inevitability ," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters.Ivo Daalder, former U.S. permanent representative to NATO, says European members of the military alliance are ramping up military spending in the face of Russian aggression.