By Guy Faulconbridge and Dmitry Antonov
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia cautioned French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday against threatening Russia with nuclear rhetoric and ruled out European proposals to send peacekeeping forces from NATO members to Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the biggest confrontation between the West and Russia since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Kremlin and White House have said missteps could trigger World War Three.
Russian forces’ advances in 2024, U.S. President Donald Trump’s upending of U.S. policy towards Ukraine and Russia, and his demand for a deal to end the war have caused fears among European leaders that Washington is turning its back on Europe.
Macron said in an address to the nation on Wednesday that Russia was a threat to Europe, Paris could discuss extending its nuclear umbrella to allies and that he would hold a meeting of army chiefs from European countries willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine after a peace deal.
The Kremlin said the speech was extremely confrontational and that Macron wanted the war in Ukraine to continue.
“This (speech) is, of course, a threat against Russia,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
“Unlike their predecessors, who also wanted to fight against Russia, Napoleon, Hitler, Mr Macron does not act very gracefully, because at least they said it bluntly: ‘We must conquer Russia, we must defeat Russia’.”
Lavrov dismissed European ideas on sending peacekeepers from NATO member states to Ukraine, saying Moscow would consider such a deployment a NATO presence and that Moscow would not allow it.
Russian officials and lawmakers accused Macron of rhetoric that could push the world towards the abyss. Russian cartoons cast Macron as Napoleon Bonaparte riding towards defeat in Russia in 1812.
Russia and the United States are the world’s biggest nuclear powers, with over 5,000 nuclear warheads each. China has about 500, France has 290 and Britain 225, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
WAR
Russian officials say tough rhetoric from Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other European powers is not backed up by hard military power and point to Russia’s advances on the battlefield in Ukraine.
President Vladimir Putin last year ordered the regular size of the Russian army to be increased by 180,000 troops to 1.5 million active servicemen, a move that would make it the world’s second largest after China’s.
The Kremlin dismissed Macron’s proposal to send peacekeepers to Ukraine and said Russia would not agree to it.
“We are talking about such a confrontational deployment of an ephemeral contingent,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Putin has dismissed Western assertions that Russia could one day attack a NATO member.
Ukraine and the West say Putin is engaged in an imperial-style land grab in Ukraine, and have vowed to defeat Russia, which controls just under 20% of Ukraine, including Crimea and a chunk of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Putin portrays the war as part of a historic struggle with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday cast the conflict as a proxy war between Russia and the U.S., a position the Kremlin said was accurate.
“This is actually a conflict between Russia and the collective West. And the main country of the collective West is the United States of America,” Peskov said. “We agree that it is time to stop this conflict and this war.”
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Dmitry Antonov, Mark Trevelyan, Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Stephen Coates, Michael Perry, Philippa Fletcher and Timothy Heritage)
