However, the officer, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, warned that there are “a lot of things that could scupper” a peacekeeping plan.
On the sidelines looking in
All this might be for naught. Any peacekeeping force must be agreed upon by Russia and Ukraine, notes François Heisbourg, a senior adviser with the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“It’s purely hypothetical,” Heisbourg said. “It’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to get Europeans to agree with each other, almost as difficult to get Ukraine and Russia to agree on a resolution [of the conflict].”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has slapped down the idea of peacekeepers in Ukraine and was quoted as saying Russia “was not satisfied” with the proposal. For Kyiv, a cease-fire and the deployment of European troops would mean accepting territorial concessions and risk seeing Russia hit Ukraine even harder in a couple of years.
No less certain is what Trump will decide to do. Any plan to deploy European troops to Ukraine — especially NATO member countries — would likely need U.S. backing to be an effective deterrent. That would keep Trump involved in Europe, something he doesn’t want.
Then there’s the matter of the seeming increase in pro-Russian support in Western Europe and what Gady, the former military planner, called “general war fatigue.”