VILNIUS, May 2. /TASS/. The EU countries have not made any decisions on sending troops to Ukraine to take part in combat operations, although discussions on the issue continue, Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braze said.
"I haven't seen any national or any sort of joint decision on sending troops or pilots in a direct way into Ukraine," the top diplomat said in an interview with Ukraine’s online newspaper European Pravda. "Discussions take place all the time, but again, we only can talk when the decisions are made," she added.
In addition, against the background of Kiev’s shortage of air defense systems, a Ukrainian journalist asked Braze whether F-16 and F-35 fighter jets flown by European pilots could patrol the skies of Ukraine in the future. "I don't think those decisions have been made in such a way that European pilots would be flying in Ukrainian skies," the foreign minister said.
Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron said he did not rule out that sending troops to Ukraine could be considered based on Kiev’s request if Russian forces broke through the front lines.
"I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out. We have undoubtedly been too hesitant by defining the limits of our action," he said in an interview with The Economist, when asked if he stood by what he had said about possibly sending ground troops to Ukraine. The French leader pointed out that "many countries <...> understood" Paris’s approach and agreed "that this position was a good thing."
"If the Russians were to break through the front lines, if there were a Ukrainian request - which is not the case today - we would legitimately have to ask ourselves this question," Macron noted. "At the NATO summit in the summer of 2022, we all ruled out the delivery of tanks, deep-strike missiles, aircraft. We are now all in the process of doing this, so it would be wrong to rule out the rest," he added.
The French president said on February 26 that some 20 Western countries taking part in a Paris meeting on further assistance for Kiev had discussed the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine. According to Macron, no consensus was reached on the issue but such a possibility cannot be ruled out in the future.