Russia slammed a “reckless” Polish proposal to send international troops into Ukraine on Wednesday, warning that it might lead to a direct confrontation between Russian and NATO forces.
Last Friday, Poland announced that at the upcoming NATO summit, it would formally present a proposal for a peacekeeping force in Ukraine.
“It would be a very irresponsible and extremely hazardous decision,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said when asked about the plan.
On a conference call with reporters, he said that any engagement between Russian and NATO soldiers “may have significant consequences that would be difficult to rectify.”
On February 24, Russia dispatched tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine in what it described as a “special operation” aimed at degrading its southern neighbor’s military capabilities and rooting out “dangerous nationalists.”
Ukraine’s soldiers have resisted, and the West has slapped Russia with sweeping sanctions in an attempt to force it to remove its men.
“I believe that it is necessary to have a peace mission – NATO, possibly some wider international structure – but a mission that will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory,” Poland’s ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said in Kyiv last week.
In talks to staff and students at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also slammed the plan.
“This will be a frontal battle between Russian and NATO armed forces,” he said. “Everyone has sought to avoid it and has maintained it should not happen in principle.”
