After meeting Vladimir Putin in Moscow on February 7, Emmanuel Macron traveled to Kiev the next day to hold talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky. A diplomatic tour, the results of which leave the Ukrainian media perplexed.
Since the visit of Jacques Chirac in 1998, this was the first time that a French head of state visited Ukraine. But the circumstances of Emmanuel Macron’s whirlwind visit to Kiev are quite different: he was arriving from Moscow, where he had spoken at length with Vladimir Putin, and almost immediately had to leave for Berlin.
Even in short, this move is significant, believes the Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Chaliy on the website of Den. “President Macron’s visit to Moscow and Kiev is an attempt at strategic mediation aimed at avoiding a possible large-scale aggression by Russia once morest Ukraine. Of course, he also has domestic goals, with the upcoming presidential election in France, but today he is President of the Council of the European Union, and he is striving to take on a strategic mission in the field of security.” Say “positively assess this desire to achieve a formula for a de-escalation of the situation around the borders of Ukraine”, Chaliy recalls :
As long as the negotiations are going on and the diplomats are talking, the guns are silent.”
From the point of view of the Ukrainian diplomat, Emmanuel Macron “seeks a new approach to building a European security architecture and to resolve, among other things, the key issue of the status and future security of Ukraine”.
The ”Finlandization”, explosive rumor
The intervention of the French president in the crisis between Russia and Ukraine did not unanimously reassure. Far from it. Since the morning of February 8, a rumor has been circulating on social networks and in newsrooms: Emmanuel Macron would have been willing to propose to the Kremlin a “Finlandization” of the
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