WP: Putin warns Europe of war if peacekeeping troops are deployed to Ukraine

Vladimir Putin in New Delhi
Photo: RIA Novosti

Offering a grim assessment of Russia’s relations with the West, President Vladimir Putin pointedly warned European governments not to deploy any troops, including peacekeeping forces, to Ukraine, saying it would mean “war,” The Washington Post quotes.

“They speak of contemplating the dispatch of troops to the territory of Ukraine,” Putin said, following his participation Friday at a summit of leaders of the BRICS bloc of nations in New Delhi. “This would mean war with Russia.”

Putin lashed out at what he called systemic errors committed by the “West’s globalist circles,” insisting that Russia posed no danger to European countries, which he said “seek to frighten their populations with a mythical Russian threat.”

He also insisted that the West was to blame for the war in Ukraine by seeking to expand NATO. “They directly supported separatism in the Caucasus and sought to break up Russia; this is a matter of fact. Furthermore, today’s crisis in Ukraine was likewise instigated by them.”

As if to put an exclamation point on Putin’s remarks, a Russian drone strike hit passenger rail infrastructure in western Ukraine as many Western diplomats, officials and experts, including former CIA director David Petraeus, former British prime minister Boris Johnson and former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt were leaving the country after attending the annual Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv.

Passengers on at least one train were evacuated, but no deaths or injuries were reported from the strike.

The Trump administration in recent days has renewed its efforts to jump-start peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, including with trips by presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow and Ukraine.

Following those talks, Kushner said that Washington had already drafted most of the peace agreement but that it was being held up by Ukraine’s reluctance to make territorial concessions to Russia.

“President Putin laid out his position regarding what he wants to achieve,” Kushner said at the YES conference. “If Ukraine wanted to retreat to that line, we would have already prepared and agreed on the remaining terms of the deal. Currently, Ukraine does not want to do this.”

The potential deployment of a European peacekeeping force has been discussed as one potential way to provide Ukraine with “security guarantees.” But any such step would first require the signing of a durable truce between Kyiv and Moscow.

Britain and France previously had agreed to deploy forces in Ukraine if the country reaches a peace deal with Russia, with then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron signing a “declaration of intent.”

But as negotiations stalled, with Washington focused on its own war in Iran, the proposals to send European troops to Ukraine have also gone quiet.

Europe, because of its increasing role in Ukraine’s capability to launch strikes against Russian territory, is becoming Moscow’s central strategic problem, overshadowing the United States, Ukraine and, to some extent, even NATO.

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