It's not really unusual for the French to talk a lot. What they don't have is an ability to project and deploy military forces on the ground, and sustain it anywhere, certainly clear to Ukraine. The same is true of the rest of the Euro powers, to be frank, outside of perhaps a small capability from the UK, but their entire standing army is only around 70K I believe.
The folks closest to Ukraine in the EU have zero intent/desire to send their actual military folks/units there. The bloviators to the west also can't, and further are facing a political insurrection at home by farmers and the right wing domestically (in the UK, France, Denmark, and Germany see the farmer protests etc) so they just want to show some sort of verbal strength. Also note
Italian PM just lost a big regional election with more to come this summer. Keep in mind the EU is only going to hit around 1/3 of their revised 155mm shell commitment by April, per saint zelensky himself this week.
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The Czech Republic is not going to send its military personnel to Ukraine.
This was stated by Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, who is taking part in a conference in support of Ukraine taking place in Paris.
Earlier today, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said that some EU and NATO countries are thinking about sending their military to Ukraine on the basis of bilateral agreements.
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Read between the lines.
So yesterday, all day long, we discussed the message leaked by Slovak Prime Minister Fico that EU countries are thinking about sending their military contingents to Ukraine.
Many leaders of European countries began to deny, but then French President Macron said that this topic was discussed, but did not come to a common conclusion, but they discussed the case of increasing the rapid supply of ammunition and weapons to Kyiv.
Since the Europeans are starting to discuss this scenario, it means things are bad at the front and many in the EU are already talking about Kyiv's capitulation, and many forces in the EU are proposing to get involved in the case of cutting Ukraine apart by introducing "certain contingents" there, mainly to the western part of Ukraine.
The source also adds that this is POSSIBLY an attempt by the EU to bargain with the Russian Federation on the case of the terms of a future peace treaty in the Ukrainian crisis. The Kremlin's conditions were announced behind the scenes to the Europeans, but they cannot fulfill them, so they are publicly raising the stakes.
Oh well 'bilateral agreements' sounds like a commitment but it isn't. It's not a treaty, and it's not a group of countries (which would need to be led by the US) providing a combined force. It's the diplomatic equivalent of trash talking from the bench in a basketball game.
Anyway,
Americans owe Ukraine nothing;
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Harvard professor Graham Allison, famous for his theory of the "Thucydides Trap," which posits that a rising global power will challenge the existing global leader for preeminence, writes in The National Interest that the United States owes Ukraine and its courageous people much more than the $75 billion in military and non-military assistance we have provided in the last two years for Ukraine's weakening of Russia's military threat to Europe for at least a decade. All of that, Allison cheers, "[w]ithout the loss of a single American soldier." Never mind the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have suffered and died as a result of a war that Allison and others in the U.S. and Europe apparently want to continue until Russia leaves Ukrainian territory. And Allison chides Republicans in the House of Representatives who oppose "essential assistance to Ukraine" for trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Victory, according to Allison, is fighting Russia until it will negotiate with Ukraine to end the war. How many more Ukrainian lives will have to be sacrificed for securing the independence of its eastern provinces and Crimea? From his safe and secure perch in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Allison calls upon Congress, much to the glee of the military-industrial complex, to pour billions more into the fight against Russia so that Vladimir Putin's "military threat to NATO" can be further diminished.
None of this, of course, fits within Professor Allison's "Thucydides Trap" formula. Russia is not the rising power that threatens America's leadership of the "rules-based international order" --whatever that is. China, not Russia, is the world's rising power, and it is China, not Russia, that poses the greatest challenge to American security. Russia's "military threat" to Europe and NATO has been exaggerated to justify the ongoing efforts to fuel the Ukraine war. How is a country whose armed forces are having a difficult time holding on to Ukraine's eastern provinces and Crimea going to overrun Western Europe? Allison and other Ukraine war champions appear to be locked in a Cold War mindset where Europe and the United States need to keep watch on the Fulda Gap for Russian tanks attempting to sweep across Europe to the English Channel. Presumably, even Vladimir Putin knows that scenario is a fantasy.
What is not a fantasy is the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian dead, the physical destruction of parts of Ukraine, and the very real danger of escalation--including nuclear escalation--if the war continues to grind on. Allison mentions none of that in his article. Instead, he invokes CIA Director and former Ambassador to Moscow William Burns (whom he calls "our nation's most insightful Russia watcher") to support his call for continuing to fuel the war--the same William Burns who in 1995 as a political officer in our embassy in Moscow warnedWashington that "hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the political spectrum, and who later as Ambassador to Russia in 2008 wrote in a memo that "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)." "In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players . . .," Burns noted, "I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests." "Russia," Burns explained, "would view further eastward expansion [of NATO] as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains 'an emotional and neuralgic' issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia." Burns admitted in 2019 that he viewed NATO expansion as early as the mid-1990s as "needlessly provocative" as evidenced by Boris Yeltsin's strong opposition voiced in 1994.
Proxy war pimp Gen. Ben Hodges being mocked in Time magazine is pretty funny;
