As Iran saps US focus, the troop math for monitoring a Ukraine peace deal looks grim

KYIV, Ukraine — The Pentagon has surged tens of thousands of service members to the Middle East since the war with Iran began, raising questions here about how involved the Trump administration could get in securing a peace agreement in Ukraine when the time comes – even if it wanted to.

The war has consumed American stockpiles of key weaponry, including the Patriot interceptor batteries that have become key to protecting the skies over the U.S., NATO countries, and allies like Ukraine for years.

As Kyiv watches the defenses it needs get expended in a new war in the Middle East, long-term plans for a U.S. troop commitment to Ukraine — once seen as foundational to any lasting peace in the region — have become less and less likely.

Since taking office, Trump administration leaders in Washington have kept their counterparts in Kyiv at arm’s length, backtracking from their original proposals to lead an eventual peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, all while telegraphing sympathy for many of Russia’s war aims.

Progress in the US-brokered peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow has been virtually stalled since the Middle East heated up on Feb. 28, taking Washington’s focus away from ending Russia’s four-year full-scale invasion with Moscow in favor of securing an elusive victory in Iran and maintaining control over multiple military arenas.

Ukraine needs a multinational peacekeeping force of at least 10,000-25,000 troops for a minimal “tripwire” presence, and potentially more than 100,000 for a true defense-in-depth, on top of more than 100 national brigades, the Center for Strategic and International Studies assessed last year.

Military force-generation math could further drive up that number, said Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a former British military officer, referring to the logic that only one-third of forces is actually frontline-ready at any given time, with the rest rotating through recovery and preparation phases.

“That means if you’re going to provide 25,000, you actually need 75,000,” Arnold told Military Times.

Britain and France, the co-leads of a nascent Coalition of the Willing, have said they are prepared to send roughly 10,000 troops between them — about 5,000 each, or one brigade apiece — under a declaration of intent they signed in Paris on Jan. 6, if a peace deal and ceasefire take hold.

That would translate to just over 3,000 foreign troops on Ukrainian soil, manning over 1,200 kilometers of active front line.

Every comparable deployment in recent history has been several times larger: During the 1990s, NATO sent 60,000 troops to patrol about 1,000 kilometers of the ceasefire boundary in Bosnia, and nearly 50,000 to monitor a 300-kilometer border in Kosovo.

Although the U.S. was expected to play a central role in ceasefire monitoring in any Washington-brokered peace deal, “that doesn’t mean we could not contribute to this too, as Europeans and members of the Coalition of the Willing,” Gaël Veyssière, Ambassador of France to Ukraine, told Military Times on Tuesday.

“But it would be a different task from that of the multinational force, whose aim is different in nature because it is meant to support the Ukrainian army in its ability to be beefed up,” he said.

Other countries have signaled openness to commit troops — particularly among Nordic, Baltic and Western European partners — but none have offered a firm deployment pledge or any public troop numbers, keeping commitments conditional on a ceasefire and the mission’s rules, per German news outlet DW.

Britain, France and Germany would inevitably anchor any coalition mission — yet each of the three is operating well below the force size required to comprehensively protect its own borders, let alone Ukraine’s. And all three governments would have to find consensus for a Ukraine peacekeeping mission from voters, a political hurdle that hasn’t even been on the table.

European NATO allies field roughly 1.86 million active-duty personnel combined, according to a CSIS assessment — spread across nearly 30 separate national armies, most of them structured for homeland defense rather than long-range deployments.

CSIS analysts concluded that a credible force in Ukraine still requires an American backstop — the air-defense umbrella, intelligence sharing and rapid-reaction capacity only Washington can provide.

Arnold agreed: “I really don’t think that the Europeans would be able to put a military mission together without a lot of US support,” he said.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe, told Military Times that recent events mean Europe will have to carry more responsibility for its own defenses and that of its eastern flank in Ukraine.

“Ultimately, this is where Germany and other European countries have got to fill that gap, both in terms of capability, but also economic pressure,” Hodges said.

The coalition has also not resolved the question of what any of its peacekeeping forces would be authorized to do once a ceasefire takes place.

Washington has been tasked with leading ceasefire monitoring under the Paris Declaration, although the U.S. has not yet committed monitoring personnel to the cause.

The mechanism the Americans have so far proposed would run on “drones, sensors and satellites, not U.S. troops,” Reuters reported.

In a Dec. 15 statement, European leaders defined the mission as “the regeneration of Ukraine’s forces, securing Ukraine’s skies, and supporting safer seas, including through operating inside Ukraine,” according to the European Council.

French President Emmanuel Macron said at the March 2025 Coalition of the Willing summit in Paris that the troops would be stationed at “strategic locations” away from the front line and were “not intended to be peacekeeping forces,” nor would they replace Ukrainian forces.

The UK frames the mission as peacekeeping across land, sea and air.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, during a January 2025 visit to Kyiv to sign a 100-year partnership agreement with Ukraine, said Britain is “ready to play a leading role in accelerating work on security guarantees.”

His Defense Secretary John Healey followed up with a stronger statement in February that he wanted to be “the defence secretary who deploys British troops to Ukraine — because this will mean that this war is finally over,” according to the Sunday Telegraph.

The thousands of European troops on the table are pledged for monitoring, training and infrastructure protection — but none for shooting back at Russia.

Hodges stressed that to maintain peace, any credible deterrent depends on the authority to fire.

“If there’s any expectation that Russia will respect some sort of a zone of separation or demilitarized area, there will have to be Europeans and Canadians in there with real capability that have the authority to shoot back immediately when Russia violates it or to inflict consequences on Russia immediately,” he said.

“Right now, I don’t know that they’re willing to do that,” Hodges said. “But that’s what it’s going to take.”

The Kremlin’s take has been clear. A draft peace memorandum explicitly rules out foreign troops in Ukraine, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has called any deployed Western force “legitimate combat targets.”

For now, European governments are sending weapons and money to help sustain Ukraine’s fight.

On April 13, London unveiled its biggest drone package yet for Ukraine: at least 120,000 systems spanning long-range strike, ISR, logistics and maritime roles, alongside a joint declaration pledging to “accelerate” security guarantees under the Coalition of the Willing framework.

On Thursday, Europe released a roughly $106 billion (€90 billion) loan for Ukraine after months of deadlock over frozen Russian assets in a politically hard-fought compromise that Brussels framed as essential to keeping Kyiv afloat, both economically and militarily, through 2027.

The package is a big win for Ukraine’s finances, but it still does not address the deeper problems at the heart of current negotiations to end Russia’s full-scale invasion, now stretching into its fifth year.

With Ukraine peace talks stalled and future meetings yet to be scheduled, hard-to-resolve questions on issues like foreign troop deployment remain challenges for later.

”Of course, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” the French ambassador said.