Emmanuel Macron wants to believe in diplomacy. In an interview with the Journal du Dimanche, Le Figaro and France Inter, the President said he was “convinced” that the war in Ukraine “will not end militarily”. Also, if he claimed to want “the defeat” of Moscow against Ukraine, he also warned those who want “above all to crush Russia”, which will “never” be the “position of France “.
“I want the defeat of Russia in Ukraine and I want Ukraine to be able to defend its position, but I am convinced that in the end it will not be concluded militarily,” said the French head of state. “I don’t think, like some, that Russia should be totally defeated, attacked on its soil. These observers want above all to crush Russia. This has never been France’s position and it never will be,” he added.
These observers seem in his mind to be those who, especially in Eastern Europe, are more hard-line and had strongly criticized in May 2022 his remarks that Russia should not be “humiliated”.
In this interview conducted Friday evening on the plane that brought him back from Germany, where he participated in the annual Munich conference on security, the president reaffirms his desire to promote a negotiated outcome. In his speech in the Bavarian city, he had already considered that Russia must “fail” in Ukraine, but some observers had criticized him for not having gone so far as to evoke a necessary “defeat” of Moscow.
He also explained that it was necessary to “intensify” support for kyiv to move towards “credible negotiations”. “What is needed today is for Ukraine to lead a military offensive that disrupts the Russian front in order to trigger the return to negotiations,” he insisted to the three media.
According to him, “neither side can fully prevail”, “neither Ukraine nor Russia, because the effects of the mobilization are not as great as expected and it itself has capacity limits”.
Emmanuel Macron also believes that “all options other than Vladimir Putin within the current system” “seem worse” to him than the Russian president, in an allusion to hardliners like the head of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev or the boss of the group paramilitary Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin. “Do we sincerely believe that a democratic solution will emerge from the Russian civil society present there after these years of hardening and in full conflict? I really want it, but I don’t really believe it,” he warned.
