NATO Chief: No Plan to Deploy Combat Troops to Ukraine If Russia Invades

Officials look to dial back tense rhetoric

With panic building over a possible Ukraine war, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says the alliance has no plans to send combat troops into Ukraine in the event that it is invaded.

That’s likely a relief to many, coming just days after President Biden warned Kiev could soon be sacked, and constant talk of sending more and more troops to Eastern Europe.

It was pretty intense, and the talk was that NATO was seriously looking at a major war in Europe. Today’s assurance is that NATO won’t be jumping into such a war.

Things were getting so intense that even Ukraine’s President Zelensky was criticizing the West for creating a “panic.” This might well have been the encouragement needed for NATO to reassure that all of those troops aren’t heading straight into a calamitous war.

That is not to say that the US and other nations are going to stop sending more troops to the Russian frontier. That buildup has been ongoing for years, and while not exactly of any productive use, those deployments are an excuse for more military spending,

All of this may ultimately be just talk, as predictions of an imminent Russian invasion often don’t amount to anything beyond an excuse to scare everybody with talk of war.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.