11:59 p.m., February 26, 2022
When the master of the Kremlin asked to speak to the President of the Republic on Monday afternoon, Emmanuel Macron’s diplomatic team suspected that it was possibly to announce bad news. During the night from Sunday to Monday, Dmitri Kozak, Vladimir Putin’s sherpa, had written a six-page letter to Emmanuel Bonne, his counterpart at the Elysée, with whom he had scrapped for very long hours in Berlin to try to put back negotiations on the status of Donbass within the framework of the Normandy format are on track. France thought it had obtained an agreement in principle from Moscow for a summit between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden.
On Sunday, moreover, during an interview between Emmanuel Macron and the American president, the first had told the second that, at this stage of the one-upmanship between Putin and the West, there was only a dialogue direct between Americans and Russians to avoid war. Biden had replied that he was ready for it. On Monday morning, however, the Kremlin spokesman downplayed this ” agreement in principle “. Then, at midday, the Russian president had convened his security council under the dome of the sumptuous Sainte-Catherine hall in the Kremlin, the very place where the Crimean annexation agreements had been signed.
Ten interviews since December 14
So that at 4:15 p.m., when Emmanuel Macron and his interpreter take the call, the storm is not far away in the clouds. Vladimir Putin announces from the outset that he is preparing to recognize the independence of the two self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, in the Ukrainian Donbass. “I wanted to warn you of what I am going to announce”, starts Vladimir Putin. Emmanuel Macron answers him in summary: “I take note of it, you know what I think of it, you are aware of what it means, that you are putting an end to the Minsk agreements. »
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Response from the Russian President: ” Yes. »“You know that there will be very heavy consequences, you should not underestimate them”insists the French head of state. “I went to the end of what was possible to avoid the war and you always had the choice and there you have just made this choice”, adds Emmanuel Macron in this conversation reconstructed in snippets.
At the end of this one-and-a-half-hour interview, but which, due to consecutive translation, formally only lasted half, Vladimir Putin told Emmanuel Macron that they would not speak to each other again, in any case not before ” a good moment “. The Frenchman is one of the three Western leaders with whom he has exchanged the most since December 14: ten interviews in all, including the famous six-hour discussion in the Kremlin on February 7, composed mainly of long monologues by Putin. In the fortnight that followed, Vladimir Putin did not really deviate from his course. “He had the cards in hand from the start, he could have used all the possible room for maneuver that we had left him”, they say at the Elysée.
After the call, Emmanuel Macron calls his partners
In the wake of this break, during which Putin tried to re-explain that he was acting thus constrained and forced, that everything was the fault of the West and NATO, Emmanuel Macron did not try to catch up by the sleeve the one who had just announced to him the violation of the Minsk agreements for peace in Donbass, yet stamped with the seal of Russia. The French president immediately called the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, then the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the European leaders Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen and finally Joe Biden.
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Move on to the next phase, right away, to fight back, punish and, above all, stay united. Three days later, when the bombardments were already being heard around the major cities of Ukraine, it was Emmanuel Macron this time who called the Kremlin, at the request of the Ukrainian president. It was 1 a.m. in Moscow but Putin picked up the phone. Nothing will come of this brief exchange. “I hope that one day we will speak again”, Putin would have said to Macron. If it’s to silence the guns, it could be sooner than you think.