Did French President Emmanuel Macron call a meeting among European Union and NATO leaders to agree on sending soldiers to Ukraine, and was Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico the only European leader to reject the idea? No, that's not true: The meeting was called to discuss European military and financial assistance to Ukraine. While the issue of ground troops was discussed and Macron said nothing should be excluded in the future, there was no consensus around the possibility of troop deployments to Ukraine: Fico was not the only leader to oppose such a possibility. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala and other European leaders also said they are not planning to deploy ground troops to Ukraine.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on TikTok on February 26, 2024, with the caption (translated from Czech to English by Lead Stories staff):
Officials from the EU and several NATO countries are gathering in Paris to agree on a troop deployment in Ukraine. The only one who clearly said no is [Slovak] prime minister [Robert] Fico. The meeting was summoned by [French President] Emanuel [sic] Macron
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
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(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Feb 27 13:15:40 2024 UTC)
The post is misleading. More than 20 European Union and NATO leaders met in Paris on February 26, 2024, to discuss further support for Ukraine, and steps to boost the quantity and speed of weapons deliveries to Ukrainian forces. The idea of a possible future ground troop deployment to the war-torn country was discussed. But talking about ground troop deployment was not the reason Macron called the meeting, he said.
After the summit, in the evening hours of February 26, 2024, Macron said at a press conference there was no consensus to send ground troops to Ukraine but that nothing should be ruled out, news reports cited him as saying (archived here).
Before the summit, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, a proponent of a quick negotiated solution to the conflict, said at a press conference, a video of which is available on his official Facebook page that some countries whose leaders were heading to Paris were mulling troop deployments to Ukraine on a bilateral agreement basis, a move that he strongly opposed.
However, the claim suggesting the Slovak leader was alone in opposing the potential deployment of European ground troops to Ukraine is false. In reaction to Fico's statements, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said the Czech Republic is not preparing to send soldiers to Ukraine, the Czech News Agency reported him as saying before the Paris meeting (archived here). The leaders of Germany, Britain, Spain and Poland stated that their countries had no plans to deploy troops in the Ukrainian territory either, Reuters news agency reported on February 27, 2024 (archived here).
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