Last month Macron refused to rule out putting troops on the ground in Ukraine, which prompted a stern response from Berlin and other European partners.

But the French president has not recanted from his position, but stressed that western allies would not take the initiative.

“Maybe at some point—I don’t want it, I won’t take the initiative—we will have to have operations on the ground, whatever they may be, to counter the Russian forces,” Macron told newspaper Le Parisien in an interview.

“France’s strength is that we can do it”.

Disagreements over the possibility of ground operations and the delivery of long-range missiles to Kyiv had threatened to undermine cooperation between the allies.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reacted angrily to Macron’s earlier refusal to rule out sending troops to Ukraine and his pointed comments urging allies not to be “cowards”.

Macron met his German and Polish counterparts in Berlin on Friday, in a show of solidarity behind Kyiv.

After the meeting, Macron stressed the three countries of the so-called Weimar Triangle were “united” in their aim to “never let Russia win and to support the Ukrainian people until the end”.

In an article published on Saturday, the outlet detailed the plight of the village of Makov, in the Khmelnitsky region in Western Ukraine, where virtually every man of fighting age had been killed, wounded, or gone missing with the remaining few being hunted down by the draft officers.

“It’s just a fact, most of them are gone,” Larisa Bodna, deputy director of the local school, which keeps a database of students whose parents are deployed, told the daily.

“People are being caught like dogs on the street,” noted another resident, whose husband was forcefully drafted last year, despite a medical condition that was meant to exempt him from the military service.

“The whole village was taken this way,” her mother-in-law added.

The newspaper noted that the sense of resentment is steadily growing among the civilian population, with the majority feeling that their men have been targeted disproportionately, compared to larger cities, where it is easier to go into hiding. The residents say that even those already serving in the army and youths below the draft age are being stopped and questioned on the streets. Multiple videos of troops forcing men into vehicles that have surfaced online in recent months, sparking rumors of kidnappings and contributing to panic among the locals.

Ukraine announced a general mobilization shortly after the start of the conflict with Russia in February 2022, but thousands managed to flee to the bordering Romania and Moldova. Following the failed counteroffensive in the summer of last year, Kiev was desperate to replenish the ranks, seeking to mobilize up to 500,000 new recruits.

In late January, the Ukrainian lawmakers passed the first reading of a revised mobilization bill aimed at increasing the military ranks by lowering the conscription age from 27 to 25 and tightening draft conditions.

The Russian military estimated Kiev’s casualties at over 444,000 killed or badly injured, as of the end of February. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed last month that only 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in two years of hostilities with Russia, a figure that even journalists sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause have called implausibly low.

The minister made the remarks during an interview on the sidelines of the LetExpo show in Verona. Asked about the prospect of NATO troops ending up in such a deployment, Tajani spoke out against the idea.

“I think that NATO shouldn’t enter Ukraine. It would be a mistake. We need to help Ukraine defend itself, but entering the country to wage war against Russia means risking World War Three,” the diplomat stated.

Tajani ruled out any possibility of Italy’s own troops ending up in Ukraine. Asked about other NATO nations sending their troops to prop up Kiev in its fight against Moscow, particularly France, the minister said he hoped “it doesn’t happen”.

The statements from Tajani come after French President Emmanuel Macron again brought up the topic of sending Western soldiers to Ukraine, in a fresh interview with broadcasters TF2 and France 2.

Macron bluntly described Russia as France’s “adversary”, insisting, at the same time, that Paris has not been “waging war on Russia” but merely “supporting” Kiev in the conflict. Regarding the potential troop deployment, he refused to say anything concrete, insisting he wanted to maintain a “strategic ambiguity” and that he had his own “reasons not to be precise”.

The prospect of sending Western troops into Ukraine was first mulled by the French president in late February, when he said the idea could not be “excluded” entirely. The remarks prompted a wave of denials from fellow members of the US-led bloc, with its major participants repeatedly rejecting the idea. Minor states of the alliance, however, including new member Finland, backed Macron’s take on the issue.