French President Emmanuel Macron does enjoy a good grandstanding. Having once been keen to present himself as a possible bridge-builder with Moscow, he is now suggesting that western troops might go fight in Ukraine – secure in the knowledge that his bluff is unlikely to be called. At a press conference at the end of a summit in Paris on supporting Kyiv he said: ‘there is no consensus to officially send ground troops. That said, nothing should be ruled out.’ He wouldn’t say any more. He wanted to maintain some ‘strategic ambiguity.’

It is certainly true that manpower is a key Ukrainian constraint. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently admitted that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in the war, although other informed assessments put it at 50,000 or even higher. The higher estimates seem plausible if you add the thousands who are recorded as missing but are likely dead. Ukraine has only lost about a half to a third of the number of men Moscow has, but then again Russia has around four times the total population. Ukraine’s forces are largely exhausted, and a debate over a new law which would allow hundreds of thousands to be mobilised recently led to the dismissal of former commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhny.

However, regardless of Ukraine’s manpower shortage, there is at present no prospect of any consensus for sending western troops into battle, despite the emerging (and questionable) line that if Kyiv falls, then a Russian advance into Nato will follow. As wrangles over aid packages in Brussels (now resolved) and Washington (still rolling on) show, maintaining the momentum behind a proxy war is often hard enough. Western publics don’t seem to want to go to war either. A recent survey carried out by the European Council on Foreign Relations found on average that only 10 per cent of Europeans believed Ukraine would win the war, and half the proportion thought Russia would eventually prevail. While 31 per cent wanted continued support for Ukraine’s efforts to retake the occupied territories, 41 per cent preferred to see Europe push Kyiv towards negotiations with Moscow.

Macron’s dramatic language is in many ways obscuring rather than addressing the key needs of the war

In these circumstances, unless Moscow does something to escalate and provoke dramatically, the notion that there can be any coordinated deployment of combat troops into Ukraine looks deeply unlikely. Slovakian president Robert Fico – no fan of what he has called ‘completely failed’ western strategy that is ‘opting for a total escalation of tensions’ – has alleged that some countries are contemplating going it alone and sending troops. It is hard to see this as more than another example of inflammatory propaganda, though.

There are already some Nato troops in Ukraine supporting the logistical pipeline bringing in weapons and supplies, and small numbers of British and other special forces, although apparently they’re essentially there as advisers and observers. Despite outlandish Russian claims of whole Ukrainian units commanded by Nato ‘advisers,’ the relatively limited numbers of foreigners actually fighting there are individual volunteers – and their ranks include some Russians.

In the future, there may be some scope for more training in Ukraine (at present training programmes such as the UK’s Operation Interflex are conducted abroad) and eventually even some deployments in the context of a future peace settlement – as guarantors of any deal, observers and ‘tripwires’. This is, however, a long way out, and Macron knows that full well. It is hard not to see his statement, therefore, simply as an attempt once again to hog the limelight and also to draw attention away from Paris’s lacklustre track record in helping Ukraine. Its aid to Ukraine overall has amounted to 0.07 per cent of its GDP, for example, one of the lowest in Europe (compared with the UK’s 0.55 per cent and Poland’s 0.69 per cent). Only now is Paris lifting its opposition to a Czech-led initiative to buy artillery ammunition from outside the European Union to arm Kyiv, filling a crucial Ukrainian need.

Paris has now followed London and Berlin in signing a bilateral security pact with Kyiv, and is trying to find the money for a more generous aid provision while its budget is having to be cut by €10 billion. France is seeking to tackle its deficit after disappointing growth figures. Nonetheless, Macron’s dramatic language is still in many ways obscuring rather than addressing the key needs of the war: a reliable supply of weapons and equipment, and in the longer term a more serious consideration of just what a plausible ‘victory’ may mean. On that, there should be no ‘strategic ambiguity.’