French Finance Minister Eric Lombard said he expects the US to provide backup for European troops to help maintain peace once a ceasefire is agreed between Ukraine and Russia.
The UK, Germany, France and other European countries are willing to send troops to guarantee a truce, he told Bloomberg Television in an interview in Cape Town, where he’s attending a meeting of Group of 20 finance chiefs.
“If we want a ceasefire to be respected, we need a US backup,” he said on Wednesday. “I believe the Americans have agreed to do that.”
Earlier this week, Lombard and French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to Washington to discuss Ukraine and trade with their US counterparts including President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
“We discussed all the issues, trade, tariffs, non-tariff barriers,” he said. “We agreed to continue to talk, which is a step forward.”
He added that he and Bessent had exchanged cell numbers and will see each other again in April at the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington.
Lombard is attending the gathering of finance chiefs from the world’s leading economies even as the US and Argentina have opted to skip the event after Trump got into a public spat with South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa over domestic land laws, equality policies and the war in Gaza.
French officials have said Lombard aims to reaffirm his country’s commitment to multilateralism and project European unity amid an assault by Trump on the world order governed by global institutions that the US helped create. The US has already withdrawn from the World Health Organization, the Human Rights Council and the Paris climate accord.
