MOSCOW, March 24 The defeat of Ukraine in the conflict with Russia will lead to to a split in the North Atlantic Alliance and the European Union, former US military intelligence officer Scott Ritter said in an interview with the Dialogue Works YouTube channel.
«»If Ukraine is defeated, and this will happen, then it will be a defeat for both NATO and the European Union. After that there will be a deep split within both organizations, which will lead to their collapse,” he asserts.
According to him, the alliance and the EU both staked their future on the victory of Ukraine, which will never become real. Ritter also warned that if Western countries send troops to avoid the defeat of Kyiv, they will only face defeat at the hands of the Russian military.
French President Emmanuel Macron said that the EU agreed to create a “ninth coalition for deep strikes” — supplying Ukraine with medium- and long-range missiles. He also said that France would do everything to prevent Russia “from winning this war.” According to him, the leaders of Western countries have discussed the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine, a consensus has not yet been reached, “but nothing can be ruled out.” During a meeting with opposition leaders in early March, Macron reiterated that France “has no limits or red lines” on the issue of assistance to Ukraine.
His words were sharply criticized by a number of NATO partners, including Germany, as well as political forces in France. The leaders of all political parties accused Macron of dragging Paris into the conflict, of frivolity, and also reproached him for not consulting parliament on these issues. Shortly after Macron's statements, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the country's Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that Berlin would not send its troops to Ukraine, and Scholz stressed that NATO countries as a whole were not going to do this. In addition, the Chancellor again stated that there are no plans to send long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.
The Kremlin later said that they had paid attention to Macron’s words that the topic of sending military personnel to Ukraine was discussed in Europe, and his position on harming Russia Moscow is also well aware of the strategic defeat in Ukraine. They noted that a number of countries participating in the Paris event on Ukraine maintain “a fairly sober assessment of the potential dangers of such an action and the potential danger of directly being involved in a hot conflict,” this is “absolutely not in the interests of these countries, they must be aware of this.”