A new permanent headquarters in Paris will serve as the base for the Western-led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ for Ukraine for one year, coordinating a future multinational ‘reassurance force’ ready to support Kyiv after a potential ceasefire.
A virtual meeting of coalition leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and other European leaders agreed on the step on Thursday.
A three-star multinational operational headquarters in Paris, led jointly by France and the UK, will rotate to London after 12 months and enable flexible military contributions from partner nations.
The fact that Paris called dibs on the headquarters is seen as a political win for Macron, who in the past weeks has made attempts to revive efforts to position France back at the centre of diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine, including a controversial phone call with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
The plan was developed after military chiefs met in Paris on Monday to agree on the strategy for the force and coordinate plans with the EU, NATO, and the US, as well as more than 200 planners from 30 international partners.
Once a decision is made to deploy a reassurance force to Ukraine in the future, potentially, a coordination cell led by a UK officer would also be established in Kyiv.
Some of its tasks would include rebuilding Ukraine’s armed forces, securing its skies, and ensuring safe maritime access in the Black Sea.
So far, however, the ad-hoc format of Ukraine’s allies, which has become more formalised over the past few months, has produced few tangible results.
While coalition members continue to provide immediate military and financial assistance to help Ukraine defend its territory and protect critical infrastructure amid relentless Russian strikes, the idea of any post-war arrangement has not moved forward.
For the first time, however, US representatives were part of the coalition talks – including Ukraine special envoy Keith Kellogg and US Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal – after previous editions of the talks had been widely shunned by the Trump administration.
The announcement also comes as Moscow’s battlefield advances in Ukraine in the past weeks increase the urgency of Western support to Kyiv – but Volodymr Zelenskyy is having to get increasingly creative to coax aid out of them.
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