Our Planet Climate and Geopolitics
France’s President Macron set the hares running on Monday by refusing to rule out the idea of western boots on the ground in Ukraine, and the hares haven’t stopped. Germany, Poland, Italy and the Czech Republic have pushed back hard. Moscow has said any such deployment would mean a full-blown Russian war with Nato. French officials say (with deliberate if not reassuring echoes of US policy on Taiwan) that their man was merely seeking to preserve “strategic ambiguity” about Nato’s commitment to Ukraine. It’s easy to see why Germany has a problem with this stance. The Kiel Institute calculates that Germany has given nearly 30 times more military aid to Ukraine than France since the Russian invasion. Hence a suggestion from Germany’s deputy chancellor yesterday that France start by “sending more weapons”. But Macron’s emphasis was also revealing, and not in a good way. He said Europe should do “whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war”. How about: “... to ensure that Russia is defeated, and Ukraine wins”?