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NATO says no plans to send troops to Ukraine
Insights from the Financial Times and Bloomberg
The News
Military bloc NATO said it had “no plans” to send combat troops to Ukraine, a day after French President Emmanuel Macron said the idea could not be ruled out.
There are “no plans for NATO combat troops on the ground in Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday, as member states including Germany, the U.K., and Spain said they did not back any such move. The Kremlin in turn reacted by saying it would certainly go to war with NATO in the event that Western militaries enter Ukraine.
Defeating Russia is crucial to European security, Macron said on Monday after a meeting of European leaders in Paris. There is “no consensus” on sending Western troops to aid Ukraine’s war efforts, he added, but said “nothing can be ruled out.”
SIGNALS
Western defense needs to ramp up, Danish PM says
Europe must up its spending on defense and security if it wants to ward off Russia, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the Financial Times. She said that to date, Europeans have not put enough money forward — something that could be a setback in the face of the growing threat of Russian imperialism. Fears are growing in Europe that Russia could soon target a NATO member, bringing the alliance into a war with the nuclear power. “We have to step up and scale up. It is our own responsibility to be able to protect ourselves,” Frederiksen said. Russia is building up its war economy and could soon have the means for such an attack, she added. “What we have to do in the coming years is to ensure it will not happen.”
North Korea is shipping munitions to Russia
Russia, increasingly isolated in the face of wide-ranging Western sanctions, has been resupplying its military equipment through trade with North Korea, Bloomberg reported. The pace of the transfers have picked up significantly in recent weeks: Officials in South Korea believe Pyongyang has sent approximately 6,700 containers that could carry millions of artillery shells to Russia. Both North Korea and Russia have denied that there are arms transfers being carried out between them, but satellite imagery has shown cargo vessels moving between the two countries.
