According to BFMTV, Macron said that there are no limits and no red lines in France's support towards Ukraine.
Later in the day, the leader of France's right-wing Patriots party, Florian Philippot, wrote on X that Macron should be dismissed in light of the recent remark and that France needed to put in all efforts to exit the European Union and NATO.
The French president met with representatives of French political parties earlier on Thursday in order to identify how far Paris could go in its support for Ukraine, but the sides failed to reach common ground.
Following a Paris-hosted conference on Ukraine on February 26, Macron said Western leaders had discussed the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine and, although no consensus had been reached in this regard, nothing could be ruled out. Apart from Poland, some other EU countries, including Germany, hastened to dismiss such plans. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that NATO had no intention of sending its forces to Ukraine either.
Macron's statement also made him a target of criticism from the opposition at home, with parties on both sides of the political spectrum accusing him of trying to drag France into an armed conflict.
The opposition leaders warned the president against drawing the country into the Ukraine conflict, BFMTV reported.
Thus, the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party, Jordan Bardella, said he had pointed out to the president the "importance of France not initiating a conflict with Russia."
"I think we can find a lot of solutions other than diving head-first into the war and a new world war. It is necessary to draw the red lines, but the president of the Republic refused to do so. I believe France's position should be a voice of peace and impartiality. I have the impression that both the president and the prime minister are losing their cool. It is necessary to draw the red lines, so that France does not become a party to the conflict," Bardella told BFMTV.
Macron's proposal to send troops to Ukraine "raises concerns in the country, isolates France in the international arena and shows differences among NATO countries," the politician added.
Both Bardella and French Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel said Macron believed that France had no limits nor red lines in supporting Ukraine. The president insisted a quantum lead was needed in assisting Kiev to help it repel recent Russian attacks, they said.
The only issue was the amount of money that could be invested in this support, Roussel said.
Meanwhile, the leader of the left-wing La France Insoumise party, Manuel Bompard, said that he had left the meeting "having even more concerns," adding that he would have preferred the president to "choose a path of dialogue."
The leader of the Les Republicains party, Eric Ciotti, also ruled out any option of France becoming a part of the Ukraine conflict. He also expressed his suspicion that Macron was using support for Ukraine in his party's campaign ahead of the European Parliament elections, and described it as unacceptable.
The French president said, responding to criticism, that his every word about sending troops to Ukraine was "weighted, thought through and measured."