There may be a role for Irish peacekeepers in postwar Ukraine, the Taoiseach has said, after 26 nations agreed to take part in a “reassurance” force in the event of a peace deal with Russia.
Micheál Martin, who was speaking after a summit of the leaders of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, said he had told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy earlier this week that “Ireland is open to participating in an appropriately mandated mission of this kind”.
However, it remained unclear whether the US would provide the air power that would be crucial to the viability of any such force in Ukraine.
Speaking alongside Mr Zelenskiy in Paris on Thursday, French president Emmanuel Macron said they had talked to US president Donald Trump about the outcome of the meeting, at which 26 countries committed to deploying troops to Ukraine “on land, on sea or in the air”.
“The conclusions of this call are simple: in the coming days, we will finalise US support and security guarantees. The United States ... has been involved in every stage of the process,” he said.
However, a White House official briefing reporters about the call said Mr Trump had urged European states to do more to put pressure on Russia and China – the biggest buyer of the energy exports that replenish the Kremlin’s war chest.
“President Trump emphasised that Europe must stop purchasing Russian oil that is funding the war – as Russia received €1.1 billion in fuel sales from the EU in one year,” the official said.
Mr Trump said late last month that the US was open to playing a “co-ordinating” role to help a European-led security mission in postwar Ukraine, and might provide air support but would not send peacekeepers.
Russia has said it will never accept western troops in Ukraine and would regard any peacekeeping mission as a hostile “intervention”.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Dublin criticised the suggestion that Ireland might send peacekeepers to Ukraine.
He accused the Government of attempting to “inflate its ‘peacekeeping’ reputation’” and said Dublin “played no small role” in escalating the situation in Ukraine.
“The embassy of Russia in Ireland pays close attention to this rhetoric and considers it categorically unacceptable and unsustainable,” he said.
“Russia categorically rejects any scenarios which envisage the deployment of the western army contingents in Ukraine and may result in an uncontrolled escalation with unpredictable consequences.”
British prime minister Keir Starmer spoke to the Paris summit by video-link and emphasised that the coalition “had an unbreakable pledge to Ukraine, with President Trump’s backing” and it was clear they needed “to go even further” to apply pressure to Russia and secure a cessation of hostilities.
German government spokesman Stefan Kornelius said European leaders “expressed the hope that the United States would continue to make a substantial contribution to the joint efforts to support Ukraine, formulate security guarantees and shape a productive diplomatic process”.
Mr Zelenskiy emphasised the need for defence guarantees to be legally binding, recalling how US and British security “assurances” given to Kyiv when it handed over its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal to Moscow in 1994 proved to be worthless.
“We are counting on a US backstop,” Mr Zelenskiy added. “The exact American contribution will be specified in the coming days.”
Mr Zelenskiy and other leaders also stressed that the central plank of Ukraine’s future defence should be its own powerful military – contrary to Kremlin demands that the country’s armed forces should be subject to strict limits on their size and power.
“A strong Ukrainian army is and will remain the central element of security guarantees. Therefore, it is about the capabilities of our army – financing, weapons, and defence production,” he said.
