‘Coalition of Willing’ for Ukraine gathering to mull options for possible force

PARIS (AP):

Their collective name, ‘Coalition of the willing’, suggests that the loose grouping of Ukraine’s allies certainly wants to help. But as the nearly three dozen nations gather again for more talks in Paris, it is still far from clear exactly what kind of aid they are preparing that could contribute toward their goal of making any ceasefire with Russia lasting.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been driving the coalition-building effort with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is expecting 31 delegations around the table Thursday morning at the presidential Elysee Palace. That’s more than Macron gathered for a first meeting in Paris in February – evidence that the coalition to help Ukraine, possibly with boots on the ground, is gathering steam, according to the presidential office.

The big elephant in the room will be the country that’s missing: the United States.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has shown no public enthusiasm for the coalition’s discussions about potentially sending troops into Ukraine after an eventual ceasefire to help make peace stick. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has dismissed the idea of a European deployment or even the need for it.

“It’s a combination of a posture and a pose and a combination of also being simplistic,” he said in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

That’s not the view in Europe. The shared premise upon which the coalition is being built is that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine – starting with the illegal seizure of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and culminating in the 2022 full-scale invasion that unleashed all-out war – shows that he cannot be trusted. They believe that any peace deal will need to be backed up by security guarantees for Ukraine, to deter Putin from launching another attempt to seize it.

European officials say that in any peace-deal scenario, Ukraine’s first line of defence against any future Russian aggression would be Ukraine’s own army. Options for the coalition of allies could include providing more military training to help replenish the Ukrainian army’s losses, which Kyiv keeps secret but are heavy after more than three years of intense fighting.

That’s something allies already have been doing, preparing more than 75,000 Ukrainian troops for battle against Russia’s larger and expanding military.

The 27-nation European Union is also pressing ahead with a so-called steel “porcupine strategy” aimed at making Ukraine an even tougher nut for Russia to crack, by strengthening its armed forces and defence industry. Britain is also pledging continued military aid so Ukraine can keep fighting if peace talks fail or a ceasefire is broken.

The basket of possible options that military chiefs and planners have been looking at in their own meetings in Paris and in the UK includes an array of scenarios that they’ve been preparing for their government leaders to consider and, ultimately, green light.

A possible option that France has been pushing would be a deployment by coalition members of a sizeable force – large enough to serve toward deterrence – in central Ukraine, somewhere along the Dnieper River, away from the frontlines, said a French official who spoke on condition of anonymity about the closed-door military planning discussions.