BRUSSELS: The prospect of deploying peacekeepers to Ukraine under a United Nations mandate is "very hypothetical" at this stage, the UN's peacekeeping chief said on Tuesday.
European nations are working on plans to secure a potential ceasefire in Russia's war on Ukraine, which could include the deployment of a peacekeeping force.
"I think it's fair to say it's very, very hypothetical," Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the UN's Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations since 2017, told reporters in Brussels when pressed on the matter.
"The question is obviously there and it's being asked -- and we think of it," he said. "But we're not planning anything."
A new summit of the so-called "coalition of the willing" being assembled by France and Britain will meet on Thursday in Paris.
Russia's negotiator in the latest round of talks with the United States on ending the conflict said on Tuesday that Moscow would aim to involve the UN in the process -- without specifying what role it might play.
Any UN peacekeeping mission to Ukraine would first have to receive a mandate from the Security Council, stressed Lacroix, who said his teams had received no signals "at this stage" in that regard.
"We're not mandated to plan and I can't really know on what basis right now we would be planning anything," Lacroix said.