France will not accept “any demilitarization of the Ukrainian army,” French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu said.
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“Demilitarization” and “denazification” were two insincere excuses that the Kremlin used to invade Ukraine in a war of territorial and ethnocidal aggression in February 2022.
The Ukrainian army is “the main guarantee” of Ukraine’s security, Lecornu said in the opening remarks at the Paris Defence and Strategy Forum, which gathered over 30 army chiefs to discuss what Europe and the West can offer in support of Ukraine as part of a peace deal with Russia.
The French defense minister added that Europe is facing a “new period” in its history, significantly different from the Cold War and the period of “peace dividends” with several powers fighting for influence.
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Russia demanded that Ukraine reduce its army to 50,000 personnel. Moscow also sought to ensure that Kyiv “did not develop, produce, purchase, or deploy missile weapons of any kind with a range of over 250 kilometers (156 miles) on its territory.”
Ukraine has repeatedly highlighted the need for security guarantees in the event of a ceasefire in the war with Russia.
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Russians will be back if they think they can win.
That’s more a consequence of Russian domestic propaganda than French bluster. If you showed a Russian the end result of the Ukraine War four years ago, they’d call you a liar and turn up the dial on TASS to drown you out.
At the same time, this war has been miserable for everyone. “We have to keep shooting until we can trust those evil orks, which we will never do!” isn’t a strategy that will do anything but escalate the conflict. Which - hey, if you’re the world’s second largest weapons exporter staring down a recessionary global economy - might seem pretty good. But its not great for what’s left of Ukraine or what’s left of Russia or for anyone else in Eastern Europe, long term.
Here’s a secret though: Russia can simply go home. Just say they’ll withdraw to the pre-2014 borders and I will totally guarantee Ukraine will sign a peace agreement.
Ukraine isn’t the one escalating, and they’re not the one being unreasonable. Russia is.
Do you seriously believe that Ukrainians, radicalized by a three year long horrifyingly bloody conflict, are going to stop trying to fling explosive drones into Moscow office buildings if Russians all simultaneously decamped from Oblasts tomorrow?
Nevermind the fact that you’re dealing with people who are fully pilled on their own ideology. Try telling an Israeli that the war with Palestine can end when they go back to the 1948 borders. See how they respond.
Because they’re in retreat. They don’t have the bodies or the bullets to keep fighting independent of NATO support. But France seems content to ratchet tensions (not coincidentally thanks to the economic windfall this war has produced for them) regardless of what Zelenskyy thinks. So I guess people get to keep dying.
Hey look! An ignorant creature!
Yeah, it’s a shame Russia HAD to invade crimea and now further into Ukraine, if only they had another choice.