President Emmanuel Macron’s main ally in a proposal to send military trainers to Ukraine has cast doubt on the prospects of the proposal after the president’s recent elections weakened his position.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauzeda said the plan does not have broad support and that without an agreement “the idea will likely remain unresolved and in limbo,” he told Bloomberg News on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Washington on Wednesday.
“I don’t see President Macron taking any further steps to resolve this issue,” he said.
Speaking at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Normandy landings on June 7, Macron said he was putting together a coalition to send instructors to the war-torn country in response to a request for help from Kiev, but that came just days before the June 9 European Parliament elections upended his political plans.
Macron called for an early legislative vote after the far-right swept past his party in an EU-wide vote. The victory of a coalition of left-wing parties while the far-right slipped to third place may force Macron to work with a prime minister outside his centrist coalition.
The French official said the idea of sending instructors to Ukraine remains valid, recalling that a bilateral security agreement with Kiev was approved by parliament earlier this year with support from both the left and the right. The president has the final say on foreign policy, he added.
The French president’s idea of trainers has been met with mixed reactions: Some European officials have welcomed it as an attempt to confuse Russian President Vladimir Putin about the allies’ intentions, while others have warned that it risks drawing NATO allies into a broader war with Moscow.
NATO allies have already quietly sent limited numbers of trainers to Ukraine, and larger training exercises organized by NATO allies are taking place abroad, including in neighboring Poland.
Ukraine welcomed Macron’s proposal at the time, but some allied officials criticized it as an attempt to divert attention from France’s military assistance to Ukraine, which has lagged behind that of larger allies.
Nauzeda said the political turmoil in France was bad for Ukraine, adding that “similar efforts will be, and are, questioned.”
This article has been generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
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