Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron created a stir among his European Union and NATO allies when he declared that the West should consider deploying troops to Ukraine. Though his remarks were immediately repudiated by several of his European counterparts, they reflect fears in Europe and the U.S. that Ukraine is losing the war against Russian aggression.
Macron’s timing was no coincidence. It came just weeks after a lack of ammunition and artillery forced Ukrainian forces to retreat from the city of Avdiivka, despite four months of heavy fighting that cost Russian forces over 47,000 soldiers and 360 tanks. The growing concern about the Ukrainian military’s ability to resist the Russian onslaught in 2024 has been compounded by the political impasse in Washington over funding the next tranche of military aid for Kyiv.
Macron justified his proposal by saying the West needed to introduce “strategic ambiguity” in its approach to Ukraine in order to throw Russia off balance. Russian President Putin has warned that sending NATO troops to Ukraine could result in nuclear war, but the West has crossed several of Putin’s red lines in the past with impunity. In fact, it is now certain that British troops are present inside Ukraine, while numerous reports suggest the presence of special operations forces from several other Western countries as well.
With this in mind, Canada, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania and the Netherlands have joined France in beginning to consider the possibility of sending ground forces to Ukraine. While these are preliminary discussions about sending soldiers for noncombat and training roles, they point to an effective way for the West to signal its collective resolve against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: sending a non-NATO military mission to train Ukrainian forces and help protect Ukrainian territory.
Putin regularly blames NATO expansion for pushing Russia into invading Ukraine and has accused NATO of trying to “disband” Russia. As a result, NATO leaders have been careful to avoid lending any weight to Russian narratives regarding the alliance’s role in supporting Ukraine, providing only about $700 million in humanitarian and nonlethal aid to Ukraine to date.
But while Putin is obsessed with NATO, the West now has an opportunity to craft non-NATO military missions to Ukraine.
Two mechanisms already exist to do so. First, the European Union has a dedicated training mission known as the EU Military Assistance Mission, or EUMAM, in support of Ukraine, which has already trained over 45,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Expanding the EUMAM training mandate and mission inside of Ukraine would facilitate accelerated training timelines, while improving the quality of the courses. The value of using an EU-flagged mission is that it could include EU member states that do not belong to NATO, such as Ireland, which already contributes troops to EUMAM. Similarly, the U.S. also contributes several personnel from a National Guard unit to EUMAM for training Ukrainian sappers. It could expand that to include deploying military trainers to Ukraine under the military banner of the EU flag.
European leaders can no longer be risk-averse to confronting an imperialist Russia that has demonstrated a repeated willingness to invade its neighbors.
Second, the 10-member Joint Expeditionary Force, or JEF, is a U.K.-led initiative comprising mostly Nordic and Baltic countries that was launched in 2014 to ensure a well-equipped and highly adaptable rapid response force for military operations across Europe. The JEF filled a gap by providing a non-NATO structure to reassure allies and deter Russia, given that NATO membership for Sweden and Finland—which joined the JEF in 2017—was considered farfetched at the time. Given the fact that the U.K. already has forces inside Ukraine, a British-led JEF mission presents another non-NATO option for Western military intervention inside Ukraine.
As with an expanded EU mission, any JEF personnel deployed to Ukraine would be for noncombat roles, but unlike the training purpose of the EUMAM, the JEF mission would have a protective mandate. For example, it could deploy forces along Ukraine’s border with Belarus and to major cities, such as Lviv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Odesa, Mykolaiv and as far east as Dnipro. This would serve several purposes, providing air defenses to ensure that Ukrainian cities are guarded from further Russian cruise missile strikes, glide bombs and drone attacks targeting civilian population centers and nonmilitary infrastructure, while also deterring Russian aggression on Ukraine’s northern and southern flanks.
Not only would this signal to Moscow a strong European resolve to protect Ukraine, it would also free up over 20 Ukrainian brigades that are currently guarding border areas and protecting major Ukrainian cities. Most importantly, it would ensure that the Odesa region—with Ukraine’s only three remaining ports of Odesa, Chornomorsk and Pivdennyi—is not destroyed or captured, which would deal a severe blow to both Ukraine’s economy and global food security due to its major role in transporting Ukrainian grain.
Both of these options obviously come with some level of risk regarding potential escalation with Moscow. However, European leaders can no longer be risk-averse to confronting an imperialist Russia that has demonstrated a repeated willingness to invade its neighbors. As for warnings that the death of any Western troops in Ukraine will lead to the invocation of the NATO treaty’s Article 5 mutual defense clause, they ignore how the treaty and the alliance works. Many NATO troops have been killed in action across Africa and the Middle East over the past two decades, and none of these incidents resulted in Article 5 discussions or the deployment of more NATO forces, for a simple reason: The treaty’s Article 6 prevents the invocation of Article 5 if NATO forces are attacked outside of their sovereign territories.
With Ukraine’s leaders currently struggling to mobilize another 500,000 troops to defend the country and Russia continuing to make battlefield advances in 2024, Europe can no longer stand behind words. It must follow through with deeds. The likelihood of continued political dysfunction in Washington means that the U.S. can no longer be relied upon to ensure Ukraine does not fall to Russian forces. European leaders must finally exercise their strategic autonomy by mobilizing the necessary political willpower to send non-NATO military missions to Ukraine to both increase the capacity of Ukrainian troops and protect Ukrainian cities from continued destruction. Failing to do so now will only cost the West more in the future.
G. Alexander Crowther is a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He has published in a variety of formats and outlets since 2005, mainly on cyber and European security issues.
Lt. Col. Jahara “Franky” Matisek, is a military professor in the national security affairs department at the U.S. Naval War College, a research fellow at the European Resilience Initiative Center and U.S. Department of Defense Minerva co-principal investigator for improving Western security assistance. He has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and policy relevant outlets on warfare, strategy and foreign policy. He can be found on X/Twitter at @JaharaMatisek.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. This article was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-20-1-0277.