Are several NATO and EU member states considering bilateral agreements to deploy soldiers to Ukraine? No, that's not true. NATO, the United States, and several European political leaders denied the possibility after the issue was discussed during a meeting in Paris in February 2024 on support for Ukraine.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here), published by TikTok user @gabrielaiordachita (archived here) on February 28, 2024, with a caption translated into English from Romanian by Lead Stories staff that reads:
Sending soldiers in Ukraine - is war starting for Romania?
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Feb 29 14:38:40 2024 UTC)
In the video, Romanian senator Diana Șoșoacă is quoting Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico speaking ahead of the meeting in Paris on February 26, 2024, in support of Ukraine, when he said (archived here) that several NATO and EU member states were considering sending troops to Ukraine "on a bilateral basis," adding that he could not say more and that Slovakia was not among them.
After the meeting (archived here), which brought together 25 European political leaders with representatives from the US and Canada to discuss how to ramp up ammunition supplies to Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron held a news conference and talked about sending troops to Ukraine, when he said, as translated from French to English by Lead Stories staff (archived here):
Everything was discussed this evening in a very free and direct manner. There is no consensus today to send ground troops in an official, assumed and endorsed manner, but in terms of dynamic nothing should be excluded. We will all do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war.
Following Macron's remark, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned (archived here) Kyiv's European allies that sending troops to fight in Ukraine would lead to the "inevitability" of war between Russia and NATO.
However, no EU or NATO member state official present at the conference expressed interest or the intention to send soldiers to Ukraine, and Macron's remarks were soon rejected by European political leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, and Czech Prime Ministers, the Bulgarian President, the UK Prime Minister's spokesman and the office of the Italian Prime Minister (archived here and here).
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told the Associated Press (archived here) that NATO had no plans to deploy combat troops to non-NATO member Ukraine, a statement he made before the Paris meeting as well (archived here). A White House official told Reuters (archived here) that the US had no plans to send troops to fight in Ukraine and that there were also no plans to send NATO troops to fight in Ukraine.
French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné said on February 27, 2024 (archived here), addressing the French Parliament, that Macron had in mind sending troops for specific tasks such as helping with mine clearance, production of weapons on site, and cyber-defense, which "could require a [military] presence on Ukrainian territory, without crossing the threshold of fighting." Macron, though, stood by his refusal to rule out the prospect of sending Western troops to Ukraine, and said (archived here) his comments were "weighed, thought through, and measured."
