Has he? Pretty sure he said that blowing up dams would be considered on par with use of WMDs and then Russians blew up several dams and there were no further consequences.
which is better than nothing but aint gonna change much.
The UK and especially France did promise that they would send troops to Finland when the Soviet Union was invading in the Winter War and probably wasn’t likely to actually happen – their goal was really to get passage into Norway where they could occupy iron mines in Norway to cut off Germany. However, I understand that it did worry Stalin enough that it was a factor in him deciding to exit the war when the Finns couldn’t really have held out a lot longer, where the Soviet Union could have taken over the whole country if the war had continued. So…it can be hard to predict what the impact is. If they hadn’t done that, well, there might not be a Finland today.
I’m skeptical that France will send soldiers to Ukraine, but I don’t think that it hurts Ukraine to have him saying it either.
Also, my understanding is that he’s got a certain amount of flexibility on the statement. There are some countries that do have small numbers of soldiers in Ukraine. This isn’t a division or anything, but small numbers of people involved with helping use weapons systems. Germany was in the news recently for having people get into some phone conference where they were talking about it and it leaking.
BERLIN, March 5 (Reuters) - Russian media published a 38-minute audio recording of an intercepted online call between senior German military officials about how to support Ukraine in its fight against the Kremlin’s invasion.
Germany’s government has confirmed the veracity of the call.
The discussions included details of allies’ operations, such as the fact British personnel were deployed in Ukraine and how Britain’s Storm Shadow and France’s Scalp missiles were deployed in the country.
One official talks about the fact Britain is already handling for France the satellite data needed for Ukraine to program the missiles.
He suggests it could do the same for Germany - preventing the country from being in any way directly involved in their deployment, which is a political red line for Berlin.
So, the UK’s got a small number of people on the ground. Not in the sense of an armored battalion slamming into the front, but they do have boots on the ground, and Macron could be referring to something more like that.
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