Military personnel from more than 30 countries convening in the United Kingdom this week plan to thrash out the scope and scale of a ceasefire enforcement mission to Ukraine, military sources have told Al Jazeera.
The meeting comes two weeks after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that a “coalition of the willing” would work on a peace plan to present to United States President Donald Trump, who has put Washington’s support of the war-torn country into doubt.
“They’re looking very seriously… at what is required, what countries can contribute,” said a senior military source with knowledge of the discussion, insisting on anonymity to speak freely.
“It needs to be a maximalist approach, so then we can see whether the US can provide any enablers,” the source said. “This is an opportunity for the Europeans to step up. This is quite exciting… We can still do this quite quickly.”
Enablers include air, land and sea transport, long-range fires, drones, counter-drones and air missile defence, where the US excels and Europe still lags behind.
A Ukraine peacekeeping implementation force would require many “tens of thousands” of troops, military analysts told Al Jazeera, if it is to sit between Ukraine’s standing army, about a million-strong, and Russia’s invading armies, now believed to number about 650,000, backed by a government in Moscow hostile to the idea of multinational peacekeepers.
In addition, the US may be there only in a supporting capacity.
Trump told reporters last month he expected Europe to take the lead on securing Ukraine.
“I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much,” he said on February 26. “We’re going to have Europe do that.”
That onerous burden seems well beyond the requirements of the so-called “Ceasefire Toolkit” drafted in secret by US, Russian and Ukrainian military experts and published this month.
It suggested that 5,000 police and 10,000 supporting military personnel would be enough to monitor a 5km-wide (3-mile) buffer zone along the entire front. However, this was based on Russia consenting to a pullback of heavy military equipment, the creation of humanitarian corridors and joint military coordination.
The majority of countries volunteering forces are from the European Union, but non-EU countries, such as Norway and Turkey, as well as countries in the Asia Pacific, have also expressed an interest.
“If you fail to get a peace in Europe, elsewhere in the world you could have implications, and there could be repercussions in the Pacific,” said the military source, explaining the interest of non-Europeans.
One idea does seem to be agreed upon – that a ceasefire has to come first.
“I can’t see any circumstances under which a European country would put forces in Ukraine while there’s still a war going on,” said the source.
European casualties could trigger NATO’s Article 5 mutual defence clause without Russia having attacked a NATO member, said the source. “Article 5 is sacrosanct. It is the one thing that Putin respects. It is the one thing that deters him from attacking a NATO country. We need to safeguard that.”
What would the force do?
General Ben Hodges, a former commander of US forces in Europe, said, “With peacekeeping, you think of blue helmets, a UN mandate… which the Russians never respect and will not have a prayer of being successful in this case,” adding that the force has to have “real deterrent capabilities”.
Apart from armour, firepower and enablers, the force must have “the authority to use them immediately”, Hodges told Al Jazeera.
“If a Russian drone comes flying overhead, then they need to be able to shoot it down immediately, not have to call Brussels or some capital to ask permission,” he said. “The Russians will of course test all this in the first few hours.”
Contributing countries have not yet agreed on this authority. “I don’t think there is any consensus yet,” said the military source.
Russia has made clear it is hostile to the idea of a multinational force in Ukraine.
In an interview last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the initiative an “audacious stance”, amounting to “a continuation of provoking the Kyiv regime into war with us”.
The positioning of the force is also a key decision.
“If it is a force that is intended to be in the zone of separation between the Russians and Ukrainians, that could be a substantially large number,” said Hodges, because the line of contact is currently 1,000km (621 miles) long, and because troops would have to be rotated in and out over a long period – perhaps years.
The other possibility would be to install a reaction force stationed behind Ukrainians, “where if Russia did something, these guys would be deployed forward to deal with it”, said Hodges.
This would be safer for the troops, he said, but “probably initially less effective, because the Russians would be testing how long it takes them to react”.
Can Europe do it?
The UK and France are leading the effort to glue this multinational force together.
They are old hands at this, having led the formation of victorious coalitions in two world wars.
Their more recent history has been patchy.
France’s last major overseas operations to push armed groups out of Mali and the Sahel ended in failure. The last time the UK mobilised was for the second Gulf War in 2003 and Afghanistan in 2009.
Today, their standing armies are 140,000 (UK) and 202,000 (France) according to the Military Balance published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
French President Emmanuel Macron first raised the possibility of French troops in Ukraine in February last year, but his lieutenants quickly spun that into a peacekeeping force, not a combat force aligned with Ukraine.
Starmer announced that the UK was willing to send troops to Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force ahead of a Paris summit on February 17.
European purse strings were loosened when Europe’s leaders agreed earlier this month to keep defence spending increases off the books. That could generate 800 billion euros ($874bn) in new defence investments, said EU chief Ursula Von Der Leyen.
Others were not so sure Europe would act.
“When I see these European officials throwing around figures, that they’re going to invest in this and they’re going to do this and this and this, it’s all hollow… they haven’t delivered to this day,” said Demetries Andrew Grimes, a decorated US special forces commander who fought in the second Gulf War.
During three years of full-blown war in Ukraine, European defence budgets have only risen by an average of 30 percent, European Council President Antonio Costa recently told the European Parliament.
Even more than money, the fear of deaths has hampered European defence autonomy for decades, Grimes believes.
“We saw in the Balkans and in Afghanistan, it was all support level activities that were inside the wire,” he said, referring to base-camp activities. “That’s a lot different than being out on the front lines.”
The latest example was when the UK pulled out of a plan to police a floating pier in Gaza, and safeguard humanitarian resupply operations last summer, he said.
Such squeamishness would lead to “a few smaller units to symbolically go in, to show that they’re there”, said Grimes, peppered with “caveats associated with what they can and can’t do where they can, and they can’t operate”, and would take onerously long to cobble together.
“I don’t see conventional forces being brought in and supplied and supported… for at least six months or more,” he said.