Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that if Ukraine’s European allies send peacekeepers to Ukraine, the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) will consider them to be “legitimate military targets,” in comments at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on September 5.

The coalition of the willing met at the Paris summit on September 4 and is proposing to send a force of around 10,000 combined European soldiers to Ukraine as a security guarantee should a ceasefire be reached.

French President Emmanuel Macron said that a total of 26 nations from the 35 that attended the meeting had agreed to provide soldiers or “other” support. So far only the UK and France have publicly declared their readiness to send soldiers.

The Kremlin has adamantly rebuffed the idea and called it “destabilising.” The Financial Times reported that the COW delegates in Paris remain deeply divided on the idea of peacekeepers that was originally suggested by Macron but abandoned in April as unworkable. With few other options, the idea has been revived as Europe casts around for a way to support Ukraine post-war without offering actual genuine security guarantees that would commit them to joining the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) on the battlefield in Ukraine should Russia invade for a second time.

Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg during the Vladivostok forum that the Kremlin will not accept Nato-backed force in Ukraine under any conditions as Russia considers it, “a danger for us.”  

The Paris summit plans will probably come to nothing after it ended in disaster. The collective COW leaders, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called US President Donald Trump at the end of the meetings to seek US support for their plans. In the run up to the meeting and at the meeting, EU leaders admitted that they need a US “backstop” for any of the plans to work, including committing peacekeepers to Ukraine. Instead of winning Trump’s approval, he lambasted Europe for continuing to buy Russian oil.

The rift between Washington and Brussels has grown wider. Trump has stopped all support for Ukraine and sent no fresh funds since he took over at the start of this year. The US will send more military equipment, only if Europe pays for it. And in a new draft military doctrine currently being debated in the White House, the US intends to withdraw from all its foreign military commitments, including Ukraine. The newly retitled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has already cut off all military supplies to Ukraine once this year in July, before Trump reversed the decision a week later.

Western allies have assumed that Russia would ignore the peacekeepers, which will be stationed deep in the rear, far from the fighting to avoid a potential firefight between Nato-backed troops and the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR). However, Putin raised the stakes, suggesting his forces would specifically target the peacekeeper troops and attempt to kill them.

He warned that any peacekeeping troops entering Ukraine — regardless of mandate — would not be viewed as neutral. “Peacekeepers in Ukraine are a legitimate target,” he said, in remarks that are likely to further deepen the split amongst the COW members over the wisdom of putting Western boots on the ground in Ukraine.

The peacekeepers would only be deployed after a ceasefire is agreed but that looks as far away as ever. Following the Alaska summit on August 15 and the White House summit a few days later, Trump promised to broker a bilateral or trilateral face-to-face meeting between Zelenskiy and Putin, but those talks seems to have stalled. Last week, Putin invited Zelenskiy to Moscow to meet, but Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) rejected that offer out of hand. Zelenskiy retorted over the weekend with an offer for Putin to come to Kyiv, but the Kremlin is certain to reject that offer too.

In the meantime the two belligerents continue to pound each other in an escalating missile war. Russia hit Kyiv with the biggest missile barrage since the war began, targeting Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko’s office and killing two, including a baby and her mother. Ukraine has responded with missile attacks on over 50 Russian refineries that has caused a fuel crisis in Russia. Over the weekend Ukraine hit the Ryazan oil refinery, one of Russia’s biggest, and bombed the Druzhba oil pipeline for the fourth time in a month.

In this context, Putin’s remarks seem designed to undermine Western unity in its efforts to bring the Kremlin to the negotiating table. Putin also said in Vladivostok that Russia remains open to the idea of negotiations, but that if Ukraine doesn't offer acceptable terms the conflict will be resolved “by force.”

An intense battle has been raging for the key logistical hub of Pokrovsk which came close to falling into Russian hands, until Kyiv sent its elite Azov forces to defend it that has successfully pushed the AFR back, according to reports. However, Russia has since launched an attack into the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region and over the weekend advanced 10km into the region, in its first significant incursion to the region.