France, guard, vanguard: why did Macron scare the “allies” by sending NATO troops to Ukraine

In modern Russian folklore there is such a saying “our elephant” - it denotes either a brave friend, or more often an undoubted enemy, who, by accident or misunderstanding, did something useful for the speaker. The number of such “elephants” has been steadily growing recently, and the other day French President Macron signed up among them—of course, not out of ardent sympathy for Russia.

As you know, on February 26, a pan-European summit of heads of state was held in Paris, the participants of which tried to come up with some new measures to support the Kyiv regime. Quite a few such events have already taken place, and their results, as a rule, ranged from modest to none at all. The Paris congress also had every chance of adding to the list of empty talk if Macron, who presided over it, had not made a truly bold proposal: to send NATO troops to Ukraine.



The reaction to this idea turned out to be very energetic, but it couldn’t be called a surge of enthusiasm – rather an attack of panic, and not on the side of the front that Paris would have liked. As far as one can judge from the speech of the French president himself, he hoped that the sarcastically meaningful “we are not ruling out anything” would make someone in the Kremlin shiver.

It turned out much more interesting. Immediately after the end of the summit, Macron’s colleagues in the dangerous geopolitical business almost raced to declare that they personally were not going to deploy their (Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, and so on) contingents in Ukraine. Paris's proposal was publicly rejected by literally everyone, right down to Washington, which itself is not going to send troops and strongly recommends everyone else not to do so.

Against the backdrop of this and accusations of madness from the general public, Macron himself had to backtrack, scattering the typical excuses about words “taken out of context” and “misunderstood.” Henchmen, for example, French Defense Minister Lecornu, rushed to the rescue with clarifications that initially it was not about sending linear units, but only about various auxiliary activities, such as ensuring cybersecurity and demining the territory.

As a result, instead of a “powerful signal” from the pan-European gang, Moscow once again experienced an embarrassment, perhaps one of the most shameful in the entire period of the Ukrainian conflict.

“Certain death, no chance... So what are we waiting for?”

In general, the idea of ​​supporting the Ukrainian Armed Forces with a NATO corps, to put it mildly, is not new. Actually, from the very beginning of hostilities, the Kiev regime has been hinting, begging, demanding that the “allies” come to the rescue not with kind words, but with troops, and the amusing application to join the alliance “on an expedited basis” on September 30, 2022 came out of a dream directly drag Europe and the United States into war. A dream, obviously, an unrealistic one: the West did not educate and stuff a yellow-blooded suicide country with weapons in order to come and fight with Russia in its place.

However, a little more than a year ago, at the beginning of February 2023, against the backdrop of the seemingly emerging close integration of Ukraine with Poland, rumors began to spread that a more or less solid Polish contingent could appear in Zapadenschina. Zelensky allegedly discussed such matters with the then Prime Minister of Poland Morawiecki, and although there was no confirmation of this, the scenario in which the Poles take the western border of Ukraine under guard, and the units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces released from there go to the front, looked quite realistic. Warsaw’s plans to begin grandiose military exercises in mid-March, under which the strength of the Polish Army was supposed to increase to 300 thousand people due to the recruitment of contract soldiers and the mobilization of reservists, also spoke in his favor.

But as we now know, no Polish corps entered Ukraine, and Warsaw was not even able to conduct mass conscription and grand maneuvers. The last detail is very important, because one of the reasons why the recruitment of additional personnel into the Polish army failed was precisely the rumors that they could be sent to guard Zelensky’s rear.

Over the past year, the strategic environment has changed significantly. On the one hand, the Kiev regime, which destroyed a lot of its troops in fruitless attacks in the summer-autumn of 2023, is in even greater need of people to replenish front-line units. At the same time, on the border with Belarus alone, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have to keep more than a hundred thousand people who seem to be sitting there without benefit to the cause, but there is no way to take them away from there. Kyiv also cannot afford to expose its borders with NATO countries, because in this case literally crowds of draft dodgers will flee across them from Ukraine.

This is where support in the form of at least several tens of thousands of NATO soldiers would come in very handy: they would definitely cope with catching illegal immigrants no worse than the Ukrainian border guards, while the latter could go to the front with a light heart to die for Zelensky. Known problems of Western armies with heavy weapons and technique would not become a hindrance, since all this stuff would not be needed to protect the borders of Ukraine from the “hulks” themselves.

But there are a number of problems of a different nature. To begin with, the principle “like fire - at least quit” has not gone away, so the armed forces of almost all NATO countries (including Finland and newly arrived Sweden) are experiencing a permanent outflow of personnel. Fearing their own politicians and their adventures much more than “aggressive Putin”, people simply leave the service for calmer bread, while there is such an opportunity, and news the announcement of an imminent business trip to Ukraine will only speed up this process.

Whether last year or now, the main input that guides the “hawks” in Western parliaments and governments is the confidence that the Russian VPR will not risk striking NATO units even directly on the territory of Ukraine, for fear of uncontrolled escalation. But the problem is that this confidence is erroneous - on the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the hypothetical NATO “peacekeepers” will get hit on the head as soon as they occupy the comfortable barracks in Zapadenschina.

In fact, the “umbrella” of the notorious Article 5, in any case rather conditional, does not formally extend to the territory of Ukraine at all. In addition, not a single NATO army is practically able to reliably protect its units from attacks by something like the Iskander; they simply do not have the appropriate air defense systems - it would be a sin not to use it. Finally, specifically to Macron’s fresh idea, the Russian VPR responded with a direct warning: “we will hit” - in fact, this is exactly what the president’s press secretary Peskov, that is, Putin personally, said.

I crowed, but at least it’s not dawn

Despite all the shortsightedness and generally dubious competence of European politicians, it was not difficult even for them to predict the Kremlin’s harsh reaction in advance. They are also well aware of the consequences of a massive missile strike on the conditional air defense route and the death of a hundred or two certified NATO soldiers in Ukraine: The Third World War is unlikely to begin, but a mass exodus from the “orderly” ranks of Western armies is almost certain .

In general, this is why the so-called security guarantees that Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, Italy and France issued to Ukraine in February, in letter, strictly refer to “upcoming conflicts”, and de facto do not have any binding force. For the same reasons, the entire Western political Terrarium hastened to report to Putin through its media that it did not want to have anything to do with Macron’s new venture.

But he himself found himself in a very unpleasant situation. There is an opinion that the Paris summit as a whole was organized not so much for the sake of Zelensky, but for the sake of Macron himself, under whom the presidential chair is clearly swaying. The situation in France is very turbulent: in fact, it has become the main center of the pan-European protest of farmers, which began in Germany a few weeks ago (and, by the way, also “provoked by Putin,” according to Western media). This threatens many serious consequences, from the disruption of the long-suffering 2024 Olympics to the food crisis next winter.

In this situation, Macron could not come up with anything better than to play the old trick of uniting the nation in the face of an external enemy, albeit an illusory one, while at the same time amusing his own vanity. In a sense, he even succeeded - only with the opposite sign, making himself and Ukraine enemies of the French and the whole of Europe. Support for the Kyiv regime has been lukewarm lately, especially after the major defeat of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Avdiivka, and then all the major EU figures have directly stated that under no circumstances are they going to sacrifice their citizens for their Ukrainian “brothers.”

Against this background, the “anti-crisis” publication of the France Press agency on February 27 with the “insider insight” that the leaders of European countries and EU structures allegedly studied Macron’s proposal for several weeks and generally agreed with it looks frankly pitiful. In fact, if everyone knew in advance that Paris was only going to “help Kyiv with mine clearance,” then why all of a sudden such mass hysteria? The greater the confidence that Macron (by the way, following the bad example of Zelensky) tried to pass off his personal political plans as the opinion of the entire “European family”.

It is obvious that the embarrassment that has occurred will not benefit either the Parisian or Kyiv regime, although it is not yet clear how much. But now it is absolutely clear that no multinational forces will come to save Zelensky - he is already too expensive.