“We must not hide it, the situation is very serious”. Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian returned to RTL’s microphone on Friday on the growing tensions between Washington and Moscow over Ukraine. While tens of thousands of Russian soldiers are massed on the Ukrainian border, “there is a real risk of invasion” from Moscow, insisted the minister.
“We have faced this crisis with three basic principles: firmness, a desire for dialogue and solidarity between us”, he continued, recalling the importance of the meeting scheduled for this Friday morning between Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron. “We are ready to consult with Russia, but it still takes two to be able to do it,” he noted.
“The ball is on Putin’s side”, judged Jean-Yves Le Drian, recalling certain statements by the Russian president “extremely strong”. “Russia wants to develop the concept of limited sovereignty (with Ukraine). However, Ukraine considers that it is sovereign autonomous, and we support it,” the minister stressed. Thus, “any attack on the integrity of Ukraine will generate massive repercussions for all Europeans and the transatlantic whole”, warned Jean-Yves Le Drian, even if “for the moment, we believe that dialogue can still develop”.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers at the border
Some 100,000 Russian soldiers have been camping on the Ukrainian border with their armored vehicles since the end of 2021. Russia denies any plans for an invasion, but considers itself threatened by the expansion of NATO as well as by Western support for its Ukrainian neighbor. She demanded the formal end to the enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance, in particular to Ukraine, and a return to Western military deployments at the 1997 borders.
For their part, the United States and NATO, unsurprisingly, formally rejected these key demands from Moscow on Wednesday, while again opening the door to negotiations on reciprocal limits on the deployment of short and medium-range missiles from two rival nuclear powers in Europe. The West therefore continues to put pressure on Russia, which has shown itself to be reserved, to say the least, following the responses to its demands to break the current impasse.