By Guy Faulconbridge and Dmitry Antonov
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia ruled out European proposals to send peacekeeping forces to Ukraine and said on Thursday that French President Emmanuel Macron had threatened it by suggesting that Moscow was a grave menace to Europe.
French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address to the nation on Wednesday he plans next week to hold a meeting of army chiefs from European countries willing to send troops to Ukraine after any eventual peace deal with Russia.
He also said France needs to be ready if the United States is no longer by its side.
President Donald Trump has upended U.S. policy towards Ukraine and Russia and demanded a deal to end the war, berating Ukraine while discussing a renewal of ties with Moscow.
Macron said Russia was “a threat for France and Europe”, that the Ukraine war was already a “global conflict” and that he would open a debate about extending the French nuclear umbrella to allies in Europe.
The Kremlin said the speech was extremely confrontational and that it was clear Macron wanted the war in Ukraine to continue while President Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister said the speech amounted to a threat against Russia.
“This is, of course, a threat” against Russia, Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow.
“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 also dismissed European ideas about sending peacekeepers from NATO member states to Ukraine, saying that Moscow would consider such a deployment to be a NATO presence in Ukraine and that Moscow would not allow it.
Russia and the United States are by far the world’s biggest nuclear powers, with over 5,000 nuclear warheads each, followed by China with about 500 and then France with 290 and the United Kingdom with 225, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Russian officials say the tough rhetoric from Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other European powers over recent days is simply not backed up by hard military power and point to Russia’s advances on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Putin last year ordered the regular size of the Russian army to be increased by 180,000 troops to 1.5 million active servicemen in a move that would make it the second largest in the world after China’s.
Putin has repeatedly dismissed as nonsense Western claims 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 repeatedly vowed to defeat Russia, which currently 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.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Dmitry Antonov, Mark Trevelyan, Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Stephen Coates, Michael Perry, Philippa Fletcher)
