This would be the case either from the perspective of provoking the Kremlin or from invoking NATO's Article 5 in the event of those western personnel being attacked, Kallas said in an interview given to U.K. daily the Financial Times (FT).

While Russia is struggling both as a result of its early failings in its assault on Ukraine from February 2022 and of current problems such as corruption, inefficiencies and duplication in its military machine and elsewhere, Ukraine remains, the FT reports, outgunned and outmanned by the invaders, and is struggling to maintain its defensive lines against a larger and better equipped army.

This has prompted European leaders to slowly shift their position on how to best help Kyiv, while Kyiv itself needs to recruit and train hundreds of thousands of its own troops in the months ahead – both Ukrainian and western officials say that training can be more effectively conducted in Ukraine rather than ferrying between it and other nations.

This presents the problem of what happens if NATO personnel conducting training is viewed by Moscow as an escalation, a problem which Kallas was fairly sanguine about, telling the FT: "If you send your people to help Ukrainians . . . you know the country is in war and you go to a risk zone. So you take the risk."

"There are countries who are training soldiers on the ground already" she noted, adding they do so at their own risk.

In Estonia, where Riigikogu approval would be needed to make the move Kallas is calling on other countries to make, the situation is one of "an open public debate, but I think we shouldn't rule out anything right now," she told the FT, adding that support for Ukraine runs the gamut in terms of intensity.

This means that at one end of the spectrum countries like Estonia, are committed to a Ukrainian victory, while at the other end, some countries simply want them not to lose.

"And if you don't have a goal, you don't have strategies. You don't have tactics, how to reach that goal. And that is what I'm worried about," she said, without naming any specific countries.

"We can only have the goal as victory, but Ukraine will define what that victory is," she said, adding that Ukraine's definition of victory is the full liberation of its territory, including Crimea, and all of the Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.

Kallas dismissed fears of the flip side of Russia being provoked was NATO personnel being hit, leading to a triggering of the famous Article 5 mutual defense clause, she said.

"I can't possibly imagine that if somebody is hurt there, then those who have sent their people will say 'it's article five. Let's . . . bomb Russia.' It is not how it works. It's not automatic. So these fears are not well-founded."

General C.Q. Brown, the chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, recently said Europeans will "get there eventually, over time" with regard to sending military personnel to Ukraine.

Most NATO members ruled out sending troops to Ukraine in the wake of French President Emmanuel Macron's suggestion earlier this year that this was at least theoretically possible; the French leader finessed this by arguing that Moscow should be kept guessing on how far the west would go to help Kyiv, come what may.

The full FT piece is here.

Other criticisms the collective west has faced on Ukraine includes those about military hardware donations, which have generally been a case of countries seeing what they have spare in their warehouses and making donations accordingly, as opposed to a clear and centralized plan.

The NATO troops based in Estonia are effectively a tripwire force, not dissimilar to the situation in West Berlin during the Cold War. This means that while the numbers are not high enough to stave off a Russian attack on their own, public outrage in their home countries would be such that sending much larger forces would be an easier sell from all angles, than it might be at present.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and Twitter and never miss an update!