According to defense industry news portal Breaking Defense, Madis Roll, Estonia’s national security advisor, said Estonia is considering sending troops to Ukraine. According to the report, Estonian troops would take on noncombat roles to free up Ukrainian soldiers to fight at the front.
“Discussions are ongoing,” Roll said on May 10. “We should be looking at all possibilities. We shouldn’t have our minds restricted as to what we can do.”
Generally, NATO has maintained — at least publicly — that Western troops should not be deployed in Ukraine. That could change, though, according to Roll.
It is “not unthinkable” that NATO countries could drop opposition to such deployment “as time goes on.”
With Estonia considering sending troops to Ukraine, other NATO nations are also signaling a growing interest in more-direct involvement. Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė has indicated that she would consider sending troops into Ukraine to train Kiev’s forces. In France, Emmanuel Macron has taken what is perhaps the most hawkish stance in NATO. Although in a televised interview in March the French president said that “We’re not in that situation today” — in which French troops in Ukraine are needed — he continued, “all these options are possible.”
By the first week of May, Macron’s “possible” looked like it was quickly becoming French reality when seemingly credible reports indicated that up to 100 soldiers from the French Foreign Legion were operating in Ukraine. This claim stemmed from a report by Stephen Bryen, former staff director of the Near East Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The claim by Bryen has been debated, and even declared “False” by a Newsweek “Fact Check.”
Bryen, however, continues to indicate that he believes the sources he cited in his original report.
“Some have said I was incorrect and my sources suspect,” he wrote in a follow-up report on his Substack. “My sources (I will show them below) came from X (Twitter) and Telegram, not from mainstream media of Russia, Ukraine or NATO countries. Some have called them ‘fake’ but in my judgement they are not at all fake.”
The New American reported in April that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had warned that NATO was preparing to enter Ukraine. “We are one step away from the West sending the military to Ukraine,” he said.
