Putin: European troops in Ukraine would mean war with Russia

Putin's framing is a deterrence signal aimed less at Kyiv than at European capitals weighing a troop presence, and it raises the political cost of any deployment before it is even decided. The notable part is the pairing: an explicit war warning alongside an insistence that Russia has no quarrel with Europe, which keeps escalation blame assigned to Western policy rather than Moscow. Whether European governments treat that warning as a binding constraint or as rhetoric is the open question, and it is the variable that will shape how far any deployment debate proceeds.