Britain and France have not ruled out sending troops to Ukraine as part of a European coalition, French media has reported, amid fears that the war is edging closer to becoming an all-out conflict between Russia and NATO.
Discussions on sending troops from Western armies and private defence companies have been 'reactivated', according to French daily newspaper Le Monde, months after President Macron faced opposition from Western leaders over the suggestion.
The talks have also been revisited amid concerns that US support for Kyiv could be pulled by president-elect Donald Trump when he enters office on January 20, sources reportedly claimed.
London and Paris could head up a new coalition of European allies of Kyiv, the sources said, with the proposal said to have gained traction in recent weeks due to Sir Keir Starmer's visit to France for Remembrance Day on November 11.
'Discussions are underway between the UK and France regarding defence cooperation, particularly with the aim of creating a core of allies in Europe, focused on Ukraine and broader European security,' a British military source told Le Monde.
When asked about the possibility of French boots on the ground in Ukraine, France's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, told the BBC: 'We are not ruling out any option.'
'We will support Ukraine as intensely and as long as necessary. Why? Because it is our security that is at stake. Each time the Russian army progresses by one square kilometre, the threat gets one square kilometre closer to Europe,' he said.
He also insisted during the interview on Saturday that Western allies should 'not set and express red lines' regarding their support for Ukraine, and indicated that French long-range Scalp missiles could be fired into Russia 'in the logics of self-defence'.
His comments appear to confirm that France has followed the UK and US in giving Kyiv the green light to use long-range missiles it has supplied it with in strikes on Russian territory.
As tensions remain high over Kyiv's use of Western-supplied long-range arms against Russia, Moscow said Monday that its air defences had shot down eight ballistic missiles fired by Ukraine.
'Air defence forces shot down eight ballistic missiles,' Moscow's defence ministry said in a daily briefing. It did not say what kind of ballistic missile Ukraine used or where they were shot down.
Six US-made guided JDAM bombs and 45 aircraft-type drones were also downed in the past 24 hours, Russian state news agency TASS reported, citing the defence ministry.
Putin last week signed off on an updated version of the Kremlin's nuclear doctrine that broadens the scope for Moscow to turn to its fearsome atomic arsenal on the same day that US-made missiles rained down on Russian soil.
The document, first announced in September, allows Putin's strategic forces to deploy their devastating weapons if Russia or Belarus is threatened by a non-nuclear nation supported by a nuclear power.
It was feared that Ukraine's strike on an ammunition depot in Russia's Bryansk region with US-supplied ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) met these criteria, with Moscow saying that it marks a 'new phase of the Western war'.
In a move which Moscow said was a response to the Biden administration's missile policy shift, Russia launched an 'Oreshnik' intermediate-range missile on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday.
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