“I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out,” said French President Emmanuel Macron when asked if he stood by comments earlier this year not excluding the sending of Western troops that sent shockwaves around Europe.
Macron said “if Russia decided to go further, we will in any case all have to ask ourselves this question” of sending troops, describing his refusal to rule out such a move as a “strategic wake-up call for my counterparts”.
He described Russia as “a power of regional destabilisation” and “a threat to Europeans’ security”.
NATO is a defensive alliance. Joining a defensive war of your neighbor / any other country on their side isn’t defense of your country. So it doesn’t apply. Further, even if Russians attacked France, then it most likely wouldn’t apply if they had an army in Ukraine. Otherwise any country could support some movement for independence in a different country, start an uprising, join them and then call article 5 to take territory.