France invited several states to join the training coalition in Ukraine - media

France invited several states to join the training coalition in Ukraine - media

Last week, the head of the French General Staff, Thierry Burcard, sent a letter to about a dozen Western states inviting their governments to take part in a training mission in Ukraine as part of a multinational coalition.

This was reported by Welt am Sonntag .

The letters were addressed, in particular, to the USA, Britain, Poland, the Netherlands, all the Baltic countries, Denmark and Sweden.

Brussels diplomats say President Emmanuel Macron is still trying to organize training in Ukraine under the auspices of the existing EU training mission, EUMAM. But for this it is necessary to change the mandate of the mission.

However, EU diplomats say that Brussels is resisting Paris’s ideas. Most EU countries are against holding exercises in Ukraine. The governments of Germany, Italy and Spain fear that local training in Ukraine could pose a significant risk of escalation and draw the West into the war.

For its part, Hungary emphasized at a meeting of EU defence ministers at the end of May that Ukraine no longer has a real chance of winning the war.

However, in EU diplomatic circles there was also talk that, from a military point of view, there were compelling reasons to train Ukrainian soldiers in their own country. Then the training would be better tailored to Ukrainian soldiers, and the soldiers would not have to leave the country to undergo training.

The US government does not want to participate in this initiative. On Friday evening, on the sidelines of President Joe Biden’s visit to France, John Kirby of the National Security Council said Washington had made it clear from the beginning that it did not want to send US troops to Ukraine.