"At last week’s Paris meeting of the ‘coalition of the willing’, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron congratulated themselves on reinserting Europe into the peace process opened up by President Trump. In practice, they have done their best to derail it.
Nothing is more foolish than their idea of placing British and French military soldiers and aircraft in Ukraine to provide ‘reassurance’ against renewed Russian aggression after a ceasefire.
Not only cannot it not be made to happen -since both America and Russia reject it – but the attempt to make it happen distracts attention from the serious business of making peace. It is, rather, a desperate attempt to make Britain and France relevant to a peace process which they did not initiate and never wanted.
What might be made to happen, because potentially acceptable to both Russia and the United States, is a UN-supervised ceasefire with non-NATO peacekeepers. But there has been no European suggestion to this effect.
Scarcely less foolish is the Paris decision to ‘accelerate’ and ‘toughen’ economic sanctions against Russia. To keep sanctions as a pressure point is perfectly sensible, but to urge their expansion now is to derail peace talks just at the moment when a real prospect of peace has opened up.
Economic sanctions are instruments of war, successors to the blockades. Their phased withdrawal should be part of peace-making."
https://braveneweurope.com/robert-skidelsky-europes-misguided-interventions