NEW YORK, April 7. /TASS/. The initiative of France, the United Kingdom and other countries of the "coalition of the willing" to deploy their troops on the territory of Ukraine makes no practical sense without the participation of the United States and its definition of security guarantees for the contingent, Bloomberg reported, citing experts.
At the moment, the US does not express interest in the scenario with the deployment of European troops in Ukraine, so the less complete will be the guarantees of the United States, the further west the "coalition of the willing" will have to deploy its units, which reduces the practical value of the military presence to zero. "The less fulsome the US guarantees, the further from the battlefield the force is likely to be deployed, raising the question of what purpose a European brigade or two would even serve when sitting in, say Lvov, a city in western Ukraine that’s closer to Berlin than to the front lines of Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region," the news agency points out.
According to Jack Watling, a senior researcher for land warfare at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, a "coalition of the willing" should not attempt such an undertaking. France and the United Kingdom consider 25,000 troops to be the most likely number of contingents, a number not even comparable to the reserves that the Russian Armed Forces released after the completion of the operation to dislodge the Ukrainian military from the Kursk Region.
Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), also pointed out that the deployment of a smaller contingent of about 10,000 "may just be inviting Russia to test it," while a larger group of 100,000 troops would not be able to stay in Ukraine for long due to high maintenance costs. Overall, he believes that the "coalition of the willing" will walk a fine line in implementing its plan between threatening a direct Russian strike and actually trying to have a deterrent effect in the conflict.
At the same time, Ben Hodges, a former commander of the US Army in Europe, said that the EU, Norway and Canada have enough forces to deploy an effective contingent on the territory of Ukraine without US participation, and that the "coalition of the willing" needs to "urgently" start implementing the initiative.
On March 12, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the presence of NATO troops under any flag and in any capacity on Ukrainian soil is a threat to Russia. According to him, Moscow will not accept it under any circumstances.