NATO’s secretary-general has said there are no plans to send troops to Ukraine, as Russia claimed it was ready to enter a direct conflict with the Western military alliance should it put boots on the ground.

Responding to remarks made by French President Emmanuel Macron the previous day, Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday denied that NATO countries were considering the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine amid the Russian invasion.

There are “no plans for NATO combat troops on the ground in Ukraine”, the NATO chief said.

French President Emmanuel Macron wanted to create "strategic ambiguity" by openly discussing the idea of sending Western troops to Ukraine, but he was so ambiguous that he sparked confusion and irritation among some allies.

Macron's comments at a late-night news conference, after he hosted a meeting of Western leaders to rally support for Ukraine, fitted with his reputation as a diplomatic disruptor who likes to break taboos and challenge conventional thinking.

Various NATO allies have dismissed French President Emmanuel Macron’s belief that they should not rule out the possibility of sending troops to fight in Ukraine against Russian forces.

Following a meeting of 25 European leaders in Paris on Monday, Macron said, “We will do everything needed so Russia cannot win the war,” though he acknowledged there is not unanimous support for sending Western troops to Ukraine to fight.

On June 27, French police murdered Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent. Rather than treating the incident as an opportunity for introspection, French police have rebelled against all attempts to be held accountable.

What if the state of the French police is but a reflection of the profound malaise engulfing the rule of law in the country as a whole? Just over a month after the death of Nahel Merzouk, a seventeen-year-old boy shot down by the police, France now confronts seditious inclinations within its law enforcement ranks.

What the street barricade was to France in the 19th century, the burning car has become in the 21st: a preferred means of violent protest, and a key theatrical symbol of political defiance. In 2005, after two boys named Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré died while running from police, rioters burned close to 9,000 cars across France in unrest that ultimately led President Jacques Chirac to declare a state of emergency.

Three nights of rioting across France have once again exposed the country’s acute social tensions at a time of growing political polarisation.

The latest protests demonstrate that France’s impoverished, ethnically-mixed neighbourhoods remain a powder keg, riven with a feeling of injustice, racial discrimination and abandonment by the state. The criminal disorder, though shocking, is not yet on the scale of 2005, when more than 10,000 cars were torched and more than 230 public buildings damaged in a three-week orgy of violence. But the authorities understandably fear a repeat.

Right- and leftwing politicians, social scientists, analysts and commentators have rushed to variously condemn, explain, exploit and justify the fury and violence that erupted in many French cities after Tuesday’s fatal police shooting of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of north African descent. But some of the most revealing and insightful testimony came from Kendra, a resident of the Pablo Picasso estate in the Nanterre suburb of Paris, near to where the teenager was killed during a traffic-stop. There have been 21 fatal police traffic-stop shootings since 2020.

An obsession with comparing Britain unfavourably to France has long been one of the most counter-productive pathologies of our bien pensant establishment. Such people believe in a naive, one-dimensional caricature of the country – a place that only exists in their imaginations, or on their summer holidays.

In the month that has passed since Emmanuel Macron issued his call for greater European strategic autonomy, two rival camps have gone to battle over its legacy. The first is populated by Atlanticists such as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, outraged by Macron’s alleged ingratitude towards US security guarantees and his suggestion that Europe must consider its own strategic interests independent from Washington.