Germany to send soldiers to fortify Poland border; Security guarantees 'prerequisite' for peace deal, says Ukraine

by AFP Staff Writers
Berlin (AFP) Dec 13, 2025

Germany has said it will send a group of soldiers to Poland to help with a project to fortify the country's eastern border as worries mount about the threat from Russia.

Poland, a strong supporter of Ukraine in its fight against Moscow, announced plans in May last year to bolster a long stretch of its border that includes Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

The main task of the German soldiers in Poland will be "engineering activities," a spokesman for the defence ministry in Berlin said late Friday.

This could include "constructing fortifications, digging trenches, laying barbed wire, or erecting tank barriers," he said.

"The support provided by German soldiers as part of (the operation) is limited to these engineering activities."

The spokesman did not specify the exact number of troops involved, saying only it would be a "mid-range two-digit number".

They are expected to participate in the project from the second quarter of 2026 until the end of 2027.

The spokesman stressed that parliamentary approval was not needed for the deployment as "there is no immediate danger to the soldiers from military conflicts".

Except for certain exceptional cases, the German parliament has to approve the deployment of the country's armed forces overseas.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Warsaw has staunchly backed Kyiv and been a transit route for arms being supplied by Ukraine's Western allies.

Warsaw has also modernised its army and hiked defence spending.

Germany is Ukraine's second-biggest supplier of military aid after the United States and has sent Kyiv a huge quantity of equipment ranging from air defence systems to armoured vehicles.

Security guarantees 'prerequisite' for peace deal, says Ukraine's NATO envoy
Brussels, Belgium (AFP) Dec 12, 2025 - Concrete security guarantees for Ukraine are a "prerequisite" for any peace agreement and must be set out in a legally binding document, Ukraine's ambassador to NATO, Alyona Getmanchuk, told AFP.

"If for some of our partners the most important thing is to reach the deal and then to work through security guarantees, for us it's now a precondition for reaching the deal," she said on Thursday in an interview at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels.

Such guarantees should be "well-developed" -- not mere "assurances" -- expressed in a "strong" language close to that of NATO's Article 5, and included in a treaty with the United States and possibly some European countries, she added.

A cornerstone of NATO, Article 5 provides that if one member is attacked, the entire alliance comes to its defence.

Under a coalition of the willing co-chaired by France and Britain, Ukraine allies are discussing providing security guarantees to Kyiv to deter Russia from further aggression, if a peace deal is reached.

Many see US participation as key for these to be effective, but Washington's willingness to chip in remains unclear.

Citing the deployment of a "multinational reassurance force", Getmanchuk said: "What we have to clearly understand now (is) what could be the US backstop here".

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday he had discussed security guarantees with top US officials, without providing further details.

This came amid a flurry of diplomacy around a plan to end the conflict in Ukraine originally proposed by US President Donald Trump last month.

Separately, the European Union is debating using frozen Russian assets for a mammoth loan to support Kyiv -- something Getmanchuk described as a "game-changer".

"Putin will realise that Ukraine will not collapse as he's hoping," she said.

EU leaders are due to discuss a plan to tap some 200 billion euros ($232 billion) of Russian central bank assets immobilised in the bloc as they meet in Brussels next week.