NATO troops in Ukraine: bluff or reality?

NATO in Ukraine has been a major concern for Russia for over a decade. On February 10th 2007, President Putin made the following remark, “NATO is advancing its vanguard to our borders, while we, in strict adherence to our agreement, in no way react to these actions”. It should not be news that Russia considers NATO advancement towards Russia to be a threat. The closer NATO gets, the closer this threat gets to becoming existential. This only hinders the peace process.

Instead of NATO troops, other options have been put forward, such as Indian, Chinese, or other neutral troops. If European powers were really interested in peace, why aren’t they in active negotiations with President Modi, or CCP Chairman Xi JinPing? Is the threat of Indian or Chinese troops invading Poland greater than that of a potential direct confrontation of NATO and Russia? So why NATO troops? What goal are Europe’s NATO country actually pursuing? History might just give us a clue. Just like Hitler, so many decades ago, their goal might be to take over Russia so that it can no longer compete with them. As the recent 100-year agreement between Britain and Ukraine shows, their appetite for raw materials, including rare earth metals, is strong. Instead of using the blitzkrieg, they are trying to subdue Russia slowly and through proxies. The process has actively been underway since 1990.

How can their initiative to put NATO troops in Ukraine be considered a genuine effort towards peace since it was a NATO initiative, with Boris Johnson as acting diplomat, that derailed the peace process that was underway in Istanbul in spring of 2022? Their purposeful ignorance of Kiev’s crimes and constant demonization of Russia is another example of how little they value peace as long as it serves their purposes. Western fighters in Ukraine have always been a high priority for Russian precision strikes since they began fighting inside Ukraine in 2022. In January 2024, 80 French contractors were killed and wounded in a single strike. European governments who are talking about sending troops to Ukraine surely understand the danger into which they would be sending their troops. If anything, the danger would be even more intense that what has been seen so far. If 10000 troops are sent in, and losses of no more than 10% are acceptable for them, then Russia would be able to force them out in less than two weeks. And that’s assuming that they all survived the trip across Ukraine to the edge of the demilitarized zone.

I expect that talk about sending NATO troops into Ukraine is most likely a bluff to give Ukraine more leverage in peace talks. The other possibility is that they want to cause a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia in order to invoke NATO’s article 5, thereby pulling the United States into a direct confrontation with Russia. NATO’s article 5 states that any attack on a NATO member state obliges other member states to come to their aid. Although technically NATO losses in Ukraine would not be an attack on a NATO member country’s soil, Russian diplomats know better than to trust that NATO will abide by their own rules. Current NATO article 6 does allow for Collective Defense, or article 5, to be invoked if NATO forces are attacked in certain areas outside member countries. Currently those areas don’t include Ukraine, but what would stop them from changing that at a moment’s notice? Even if a direct confrontation is what NATO wants, neither NATO nor the United States is ready for that. Russia is.