Vladimir Putin has said that sending European troops into Ukraine would mean war with Russia, speaking to reporters in New Delhi on the sidelines of the BRICS summit.

"Now, they say they are thinking of how to deploy troops to Ukraine. This would mean a war with Russia," he said, Russian state news agency TASS reports. Kyiv Post translates the same remark as: "Now they are talking about how they might send troops onto Ukrainian territory. That means war with Russia."

In the same exchange Putin apparently contradicted himself: "We are not threatening European countries, nor are we going to threaten them," Putin said, resting the claim on the post-war settlement and the arrangements that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he said remain binding under international law and the UN Charter.

Putin was responding to the European discussion of a “reassurance force” for Ukraine after any ceasefire, which is the part of the security guarantee question that has never been settled. Twenty-six countries agreed in September 2025 to contribute troops or equipment to a post-war force. No troops have been deployed, no deployment is scheduled, and the composition, mandate and rules of engagement of such a force have never been published. The reassurance force has been proposed in lieu of real security deal that Ukraine needs post-war to ensure its sovereignty in the face of a possible second invasion by Russia in the future.

Variants of the warning are not new. Putin said since 2024 that foreign troops sent to Ukraine would be treated as legitimate military targets and specifically targeted if they were stationed in Ukraine. He has repeatedly framed European deployment as the threshold between supporting Ukraine and active participation in a military conflict with Russia. What has changed is the setting: he made this one at a BRICS business event, standing next to Narendra Modi.

The BRIC relationships continue to expand and deepen as a counter to Western pressure on Russia and Brussels attempt to isolate it. Notably, this was Putin's second meeting with Modi in under a fortnight, after the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit at Bishkek on August 31, and comes ahead of the G20 Energy summit in Houston next week that Russia will also attend.

Putin and Modi discussed a Programme for Economic Cooperation to 2030 covering infrastructure, energy, technology and defence. India is the second-largest buyer of Russian fossil fuels, taking EUR4.8bn of them in August alone, 87% of it crude, on the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air's figures. It has bought 37% of Russia's crude exports since December 2022.

Europe's own week has run in two directions at once: the European Commission approved a EUR6.1bn defence tranche for Ukraine on September 11 and cleared the purchase of American PAC-3 Patriot interceptors with EU loan money.

At the same time the bloc's individual sanctions on more than 3,000 Russians and Russian entities expire on September 15, and EU ambassadors have now failed twice to roll them over because Slovakia wants two businessmen delisted and France has joined it in asking for one. Ambassadors meet again on September 14 to try and break the deadlock.

Nothing in the remark changes anything on the ground. No European government has committed to putting soldiers into Ukraine while the fighting continues and the comments remain talking tough on Russia withut actually doing anything for now. The reassurance force has always been described as a post-ceasefire proposition which remains as remote as ever.