UK and France Plan Appeal to Trump for US Air Support in Ukraine

The UK and France are drawing up plans for a European-led “reassurance force” for Ukraine, to ensure Russia doesn’t attack the country again if a ceasefire and peace deal are negotiated.

The plan is contingent on President Donald Trump agreeing to provide the force with US protection, including American aircraft and intelligence, and would primarily police Ukraine’s airspace and the Black Sea, according to western officials.

The plan, the details of which are still being discussed, would likely require less than 30,000 European troops to be deployed to Ukraine’s major cities, ports and critical national infrastructure, officials said. European troops wouldn’t be sent to the east of the country, where the fighting between Ukraine and invading Russian forces has been fiercest.

The UK and France are currently trying to persuade other European nations to supply personnel and equipment to the force. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer will next week visit Washington DC to try to convince Trump to agree.

It’s unclear whether the European proposal will satisfy Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy, who’s so far been excluded from talks between the US and Russia. Zelenskiy has said that Ukraine will not agree to any deal that it has no part in negotiating. 

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday that Russia would not accept European troops as peacekeepers in Ukraine.

European leaders have been scrambling to come up with a strategy to secure a potential ceasefire in Ukraine, following the US bilateral negotiations with Russia in Saudi Arabia last weekend. Since then, the Trump administration has appeared keen to do a quick deal with the Kremlin, excluding European powers from negotiations and putting pressure on Zelenskiy. On Wednesday, Trump called Zelenskiy “a dictator” and warned that the Ukrainian president had “better move fast” to reach a deal with Russia “or he is not going to have a country left.”

The US has previously ruled out committing troops to Ukraine, indicated that it believes Europe needs to take responsibility for security on the continent, and said that European peacekeepers would not be covered by NATO’s collective defense agreements if they were attacked. That, along with signals that the US is willing to make significant concessions to the Kremlin on NATO membership for Ukraine, left European officials concerned that there would be little to deter Russia from breaking a ceasefire once it has regrouped and rearmed.

European countries have been trying to build a “coalition of the willing” to create a force that could backstop an agreement.

Various compositions have been floated over the past week, from a “tripwire” force that would act as a deterrent to Russian attacks, to a full peacekeeping force deployed across the front line, consisting of more than 100,000 soldiers. Western officials say the UK-France plan would be lighter in construct and focused on the technical monitoring of the border.

Getting countries to commit soldiers had proved difficult. Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia and Poland all ruled out contributing troops. Italy expressed skepticism, while the German government said it was too early to commit.

“I’m a little irritated that all these Europeans are putting their hands up already and setting out what they’re prepared to do,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Wednesday in an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio.

“Who does it benefit to discuss at this point whether and how many troops we’re ready to commit as long as it’s unclear what peace will look like? It doesn’t make any sense. Speculating about it now only helps Vladimir Putin’s negotiating position.”

Pistorius was echoing a common sentiment among EU officials, who are unconvinced that President Putin is genuinely willing to stop fighting, and who are concerned by the concessions that the US appears to be willing to make to Russia. They fear that Europe will be left responsible for policing an agreement in Ukraine that it had no part in negotiating, without military support from the US, something that Pistorius called “totally unacceptable.”

The UK-French plan would require a smaller deployment than a full peacekeeping force, because officials believe that a peace deal, coupled with a US backstop and the creation of a safe airspace over the country, would be enough to provide reassurance for Ukraine and its people.

Under the plan, aircraft would be placed in Poland and Romania, and land forces would be positioned on their eastern borders to allow them to be quickly deployed to Ukraine if needed, officials said. 

Drones, satellites, intelligence and surveillance aircraft would be used to provide a complete picture of any activity on Ukraine’s border with Russia. Two taskforces are also likely to be deployed to the Black Sea: the first to clear up any sea mines and the second to patrol the waters.

While the proposal is considerably less ambitious than some that had been discussed over the past week, it would still require significant manpower, and could strain Europe’s military capacities. An analysis by Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London said that for the UK to deploy just 5,000 troops to Ukraine would require the bulk of the army’s support and engineering capacity, and essentially tie up the entirety of the country’s deployable forces that aren’t currently stationed elsewhere.

Several analysts pointed to the fact that Germany has yet to meet a commitment, made in 2022, to deploy a brigade to Lithuania.

“What’s missing is not tanks and artillery, what’s missing is political will,” said Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of the US Army in Europe. “The UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland all have very large armies. So how pathetic is it that 30-something NATO members without the US can’t put together a force?”

Analysts, including Hodges, point out that for all the frantic conversations around Europe, attempts to define what a force would look like are premature unless European countries can actually decide on what they want to achieve, and what they’re willing to risk on the ground.

“This will not be a peacekeeping force. What we’re talking about is a force that will be required to ensure that both sides — and we’re really talking about Russia — will respect the ceasefire agreement,” he said. “They have to be ready for combat if the ceasefire is interrupted, which you know Russia will do immediately.”

Before any kind of operational strategy can be put in place, Europe needs to answer a fundamental question, Hodges and other analysts said: are you willing to go to war with Russia?

Germany, and other powers have made it clear that they don’t want a military confrontation with Russia. “This means that Russia essentially will hold escalation dominance over any European troop deployments in Ukraine, because they can just essentially call the bluff,” defense analyst Franz-Stefan Gady said.

“Once you are involved, a lot of stuff is just out of your hands, and extracting troops is a lot more difficult than inserting them into a combat environment,” he added. “Wars have a tendency to suck you in.”

With assistance from Irina Vilcu and Peter Guest.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.