Will European boots on the ground in Ukraine actually keep the peace?

The UK will "play a full part" in any future peacekeeping initiative in Ukraine, said Keir Starmer.

After Donald Trump ruled out sending US troops to keep the peace, with one member of his team saying they should "get the Poles, Germans, British and French to do it", the prime minister told Politico that European states will "need to do more".

What did the commentators say?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insists that any deal with Moscow must be "followed up" with "meaningful security guarantees" from Kyiv's Western allies, and pressure is growing for European nations to step up.

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Bringing Ukraine into Nato "might take years", said Viktoriia Lapa, from Bocconi University in Milan, on The Conversation, so "European countries should consider deploying troops to Ukraine as a security guarantee for this interim period".

Any security guarantees offered to Ukraine are "likely to require foreign troops to credibly enforce a ceasefire", said Doug Klain from the Atlantic Council. So European leaders should "demonstrate their readiness to deploy forces" on the condition that Washington "backs them" with the "logistical, military, and political support" required to "make such an operation feasible".

Speaking to The Telegraph, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former British tank commander who served in Bosnia and Cyprus, said Russians and Ukrainians would be "very unlikely" to attack British peacekeepers because "that would just set in motion something they absolutely do not want".

If they are deployed, it's "very unlikely" that European troops would be stationed along the frontline itself, said Kyiv Independent. They'd more likely be "further back", acting as a so-called "tripwire force", to make any further Russian aggression in Ukraine "immediately come at the cost of direct conflict with Nato".

But the idea of putting European boots on the ground in Ukraine is "deeply problematic", said Samuel Charap in the Financial Times. While the UN is a "neutral third party" that can "arbitrate disputes and be an honest broker", given its "extensive support" for Ukraine, Europe is "anything but a neutral third party", so "almost by definition", European states "could not lead a peacekeeping force in Ukraine".

European leaders "appear to be putting the cart before the horse". So "they must first decide" if they're "willing to commit to go to war" with Russia "if it invades again", because "deploying a tripwire force" before choosing what exactly the wire would trip makes no sense.

What next?

Although Starmer has spoken to Emmanuel Macron about the prospect of a "Franco-British joint force", said The i Paper, UK officials have "played down the prospect".

Richard Dannatt, former head of the Army, said that 5,000-10,000 soldiers would be needed and our forces are not "large enough to do that with everything else that it's doing currently".

De Bretton-Gordon told The i Paper that any peacekeeping mission would place a huge amount" of pressure on the Ministry of Defence budget, and would leave Britain able "to do nothing else".

Putting British "boots on the ground" would be "controversial for Starmer at home", said Politico. Asked if he would give MPs a say on the issue, he said: "We are getting well ahead of ourselves."