Kremlin rejects western security guarantees, warnsagainst peacekeeping force

Vladimir Putin warned on Friday that any Western peacekeeping forces deployed to Ukraine would be a “legitimate” target for Moscow’s armies.

Russia rejected Western security guarantees a day after Emmanuel Macron, the French president, said 26 of Ukraine’s allies were ready to commit troops in a “reassurance force” to protect it from any future attacks in the event of a peace deal.

“If some troops appear there, especially now, during military operations, we proceed from the fact that these will be legitimate targets for destruction,” Putin said at an economic forum in the far eastern city of Vladivostok.

He argued that if a peace deal was struck, there would be no need to deploy troops, ignoring concerns that Russia could regroup and invade Ukraine again.

“If decisions are reached that lead to peace, to long-term peace, then I simply do not see any sense in their presence on the territory of Ukraine, full stop,” Putin said.

The president has long argued one of the reasons for launching an invasion of Ukraine was to prevent it from joining Nato and moving the military alliance’s border closer to Russia.

His comments once again highlighted the gulf between Moscow’s position and that of Kyiv and its Western allies on the shape of future security guarantees for Ukraine under any agreement to end the three-and-a-half-year war.

Kyiv says security guarantees, backed by Western troops, are crucial to any peace deal to ensure Russia does not re-launch its offensive in the future.

France and Britain, which co-chair a “coalition of the willing” in support of Ukraine, have signaled they are open to deploying troops to Ukraine after the war ends.

Donald Trump, the US president, has said that Washington will not put troops on the ground but may provide other support such as air power.

Ukraine’s allies have not revealed specific details of the plan, including how many troops it would involve and how specific countries would contribute.

Putin said security guarantees must be set in place for Russia and Ukraine.

‘No serious security guarantees’

“I repeat once again, of course, Russia will implement these agreements. But, in any case, no one has discussed this with us at a serious level yet,” he said.

Mr Trump, who took office in January with a pledge to end the war quickly, hosted Putin for a summit in Alaska last month that failed to achieve any breakthrough.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has long been pushing for a direct meeting with Putin in order to make progress towards ending Europe’s deadliest war for 80 years.

Putin said on Friday that he did not see much point in such a meeting because “it will be practically impossible to reach an agreement with the Ukrainian side on key issues”.

However, he reiterated an offer he made earlier this week to host Zelensky for talks in Moscow. “I said: I’m ready, please, come, we will definitely provide working conditions and security, a 100 percent guarantee.

“But if they tell us: ‘we want to meet with you, but you have to go somewhere else for this meeting’, it seems to me that these are simply excessive requests on us.”

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for the Kremlin, also rejected the idea of Western security guarantees for Ukraine, saying on Friday that “foreign, especially European and American” troops “definitely cannot” provide such assurances to Kyiv.

It comes as Mr Trump is set to cut funding to train and equip European armies of nations that border Russia, as Washington pushes allies to spend more on their own defense.

Mr Macron on Thursday hosted a Coalition of the Willing summit in Paris, where he said Ukraine’s allies were ready to commit troops in a “reassurance force” to protect it from Russia once fighting had ended.

Mr Zelensky hailed the move: “I think that today, for the first time in a long time, this is the first such serious concrete step.”

The troops would not be deployed “on the front line” but aim to “prevent any new major aggression”, said Mr Macron.

Macron added that another major pillar was a “regeneration” of the Ukrainian army so that it can “not just resist a new attack but dissuade Russia from a new aggression”.

Frustration has been building in the West over Mr Putin’s apparent unwillingness to strike a deal to end the fighting.

Mr Macron accused Russia of “doing nothing other than try[ing] to play for time” and intensifying attacks against civilians, and warned that he would impose “additional sanctions” in coordination with the US if Russia continued to refuse a peace deal.