The French president said the attacks on Ukraine show that Vladimir Putin does not want peace in the region. Emmanuel Macron believes that Moscow’s objective is not to negotiate peace but to intensify combat with Kiev’s troops.
French President Emmanuel Macron said this Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin “does not want peace with Kiev and is not willing to negotiate it”, following a massive Russian attack on the Ukrainian energy grid.
After this offensive, “I think it is clear that President Putin’s intentions are to intensify the fighting”, declared Macron in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“Regardless of what his statements are, he does not want peace and is not willing to negotiate it”, insisted the French head of state, who did not exclude the possibility of speaking again with his Russian counterpart, but only when “the context” is appropriate.
Macron issued these statements two days after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz urged Putin to withdraw troops from Ukraine and negotiate with Kiev, in the first telephone conversation they had in almost two years.
The chancellor appealed to Putin to demonstrate “willingness to enter into negotiations with Ukraine, with a view to a just and lasting peace” and underlined “the European Union’s (EU) unwavering commitment to Ukraine”according to the Foreign Ministry, which also indicated that Scholz had previously spoken with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky.
“If any of them want to resume contact (…) we have nothing against that”
This hour-long telephone conversation was the first dialogue between the two leaders since December 2022. Putin has not spoken to most Western leaders since 2022, when the EU and the United States imposed massive sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in February of that year.
Many Western leaders, such as the American heads of state, Joe Biden, and French, Emmanuel Macron, among others, refuse to speak to the Russian president – with the exception of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
In early November, Vladimir Putin regretted that Western leaders had “stopped” calling him.
“If any of them want to resume contacts, I’ve always said it and I want to repeat it: we have nothing against that,” Putin said at the political forum in Valdaï, Russia.
Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Germany has been the second largest arms supplier to Kiev, after the United States.
This conversation took place at a very difficult time for Ukraine, which is preparing to live its third winter under fire from Russia, with much of its energy infrastructure damaged or completely destroyed.
With the victory of former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump in the US presidential elections, the question arises of the continuity of aid from the United States, which has allowed Ukraine to resist Russian troops.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, with the argument of protecting pro-Russian separatist minorities in the east and “denazifying” the neighboring country, independent since 1991 – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – and which has been pushing away moving away from Moscow’s sphere of influence and getting closer to Europe and the West.
The war in Ukraine has already claimed tens of thousands of lives on both sides, and recent months have been marked by large-scale airstrikes by Russia against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, while Kiev’s forces have targeted targets on nearby Russian territory. border and on the Crimean peninsula, illegally annexed in 2014.
In the third year of war, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were faced with a lack of soldiers and weapons and ammunition, despite repeated promises of help from Western allies, which have since begun to materialize.
Russian troops, more numerous and better equipped, continue their advance on the eastern front, despite the Ukrainian offensive in Russia, in the Kursk region.
Negotiations between the two parties have been completely blocked since spring 2022, with Moscow continuing to demand that Ukraine accept the annexation of part of its territory.
