France qualifies Macron's controversial speech: soldiers who went to Ukraine would not engage in combat with Russia

Emmanuel Macron, true to his style, has opened a door suddenly and with a bang.

The deep reservations among the EU and NATO partners regarding the French president's proposal to study the sending of ground troops to Ukraine forced his collaborators on Tuesday to make an educational effort.

To explain and clarify what he meant when, in a press conference on Monday at the dawn of dawn, he responded like this to a question about the deployment of Western soldiers: “Nothing should be excluded.

“We will do everything necessary to ensure that Russia cannot win this war.”

The person responsible for clarifying things was the Foreign Minister, Stéphane Séjourné.

Before a National Assembly where the extreme right and the radical left accused the president of playing with fire, he explained that sending troops to Ukraine has a limit: that they do not enter into direct combat with Russia.

“We must consider further actions to support Ukraine,” said Séjourné, a member of Macron's inner circle, sitting in the front row of the president's press conference the day before, at the end of the EU-EU leaders' conference. NATO over Ukraine.

“These [actions],” he continued, “must respond to very precise needs.

I think above all about demining, cybernetics, the production of weapons on the ground.”

The minister concluded that “some of these actions could require a presence on Ukrainian territory, without crossing the threshold of belligerence.

“Nothing should be ruled out.”

A diplomatic source, who requested anonymity, explained: “If troops are sent, it must be for precise objectives, not for combat.”

The entire debate—and the blurred line on which Macron walks—moves between the desire to avoid turning the French and Europeans into belligerents, and the assertion that nothing is ruled out and, as the president said at the press conference, “ “Everything is possible if it is useful to achieve [the] objective”: that Russia does not defeat Ukraine.

And to do this, France wants to preserve its “strategic ambiguity.”

That is, not showing all the cards.

“Strategic ambiguity” is a common term in nuclear deterrence.

(France is the only atomic power in the EU and Russia also has the bomb).

Macron, at a time of Western doubts about the war and uncertainty about the future of the United States' protective umbrella, wants to send a message to Vladimir Putin: European support for Ukraine is solid.

Placing limits on this support—saying, for example, that there will be no troops and thus undoing the ambiguity—would reduce its credibility.

“Our fear is that, if we limit ourselves to doing what we do today, the possibility that Russia is going to win will finally be established, and we do not want to settle for this,” says the aforementioned diplomatic source.

Hence the need not to close any doors and to avoid red lines like those set two years ago at the beginning of the Russian invasion of 2022. At the press conference, the president recalled: “Many of those who today say 'never, never' [ground troops] are the same ones who said 'never, never tanks, never, never planes, never, never long-range missiles (...).

I remind you that two years ago, many at [the] table [at Monday's summit] said: 'We are going to propose sleeping bags and helmets.'

There is a new red line now, that of not sending combat troops, but there are precedents of soldiers in accessory functions who ended up entering the fight.

The most famous, that of the “advisors” that Kennedy sent to Vietnam in the early sixties, and who reached half a million by the end of the decade.

Another common reference circulates in these situations, that of the 1930s.

“We are not resigned, we are trying to find the options for today that will allow us to avoid the worst tomorrow,” says the aforementioned source.

“We do not believe that, taking into account the European experience, pacifism in itself is an answer.”

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