Poland’s top diplomat says the presence of NATO forces in Ukraine “is not unthinkable” and that he appreciates French President Emanuel Macron’s recent remarks in which he did not rule out the need for NATO troops.
According to the Associated Press, Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski made the observation during a discussion marking the 25th anniversary of Poland’s NATO membership in the Polish parliament on Friday.
Sikorski said Macon’s observation that NATO troops might be a solution to the stalemate in Ukraine if additional U.S. support is not forthcoming. He then made a comparison to the Korean War of 1950-1953, when a coalition of U.N. states went to help the country following a U.N. Security Council decision.
Sikorski stated that having “a coalition of U.N. member states to stop aggression here is not unthinkable.”
“That is why I applaud the recent French initiative,” Sikorski said. “Because, in my opinion, there are good intentions behind it, namely, to make the Russian president ask himself what our next step will be, instead of allowing him to be certain that we will not do anything creative and to plan his own scenarios.”
👍"Asymmetric escalation" – that's how Macron's acceptable idea to deploy NATO troops in Ukraine was called, – the head of the Polish Foreign Ministry Sikorski
"Because behind it (the initiative to deploy NATO troops) there are good intentions, namely, that the president of… pic.twitter.com/dD9fa73GbI
— Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 (@jurgen_nauditt) March 9, 2024
Macron’s remarks provoked a generally negative response from allied governments, whose leaders were quick to assure their citizens that there were no plans for NATO troops to be sent to Ukraine.
Moscow has warned that the deployment of Western troops in Ukraine would inevitably lead to a direct conflict between Russia and NATO.
Poland is in an awkward position as one of the newer NATO members and a former member of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The former Soviet client state now finds itself hosting NATO defensive units to counter Russian moves against neighboring Ukraine and road and rail links between Poland and Ukraine have been the primary way military and humanitarian aid have been sent by Western nations.
In the early weeks of the war, tensions briefly flared between NATO and Russia when a missile entered Poland and killed two civilians. Initial suspicion fell on Russia, but Polish leaders and NATO said later that the missile was most likely a Ukrainian air defense missile that went off course, but that Russian aggression was ultimately to blame.
