BRITISH and French teams will be deployed to Ukraine within days with generals set to help rebuild Ukraine's war-weary army, Emmanuel Macron has announced.
The French president gave a powerful speech in Paris today as he warned Vladimir Putin “still wants war” before Keir Starmer also accused the despot of playing games.
Speaking at a press conference, he said: “In very concrete terms, we agreed that the British Prime Minister and myself will task our chiefs of defence to ensure that a Franco-British team should be sent to Ukraine in the next few days to work very closely with our Ukrainian partners.
“They also agreed to this mechanism in order to prepare the format of the Ukrainian armed forces in the future, the army, the navy and the air forces.
“This will enable us to move forward to a planning phase in order to clarify the contribution of each country that’s a member of our coalition, in order to give Ukraine a clear idea of the very precise action plan we want to put in place.”
Sir Keir Starmer also echoed Macron's thoughts as he again said the collective view among those in the “coalition of the willing” meeting is that Putin is only playing games with ceasefire talks.
He said: "They are playing games, and they're playing for time.
"It is a classic from the Putin playbook. But we can't let them drag this out while they continue prosecuting their illegal invasion."
The strong remarks came after the pair headed up crunch talks in Paris with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and dozens of EU leaders.
The high-stakes summit focused on ramping up military support for Kyiv, reviewing the fragile Black Sea ceasefire, and hashing out Europe’s possible role in any future peace deal.
French and British teams to go to Ukraine to help on the ground
Emmanuel Macron has announced Britain and France will send a military delegation to Ukraine to work with Kyiv's armed forces.
He said he spoke with Sir Keir Starmer and the pair decided they "will task our chiefs of defence to ensure that a Franco-British team should be sent to Ukraine in the next few days to work very closely with our Ukrainian partners".
The French president added "coalition of the willing" members have three weeks to come up with proposals on how a ceasefire can be monitored in Ukraine.
No comments:
Post a Comment