The announcements of the Russian military command, which announced on Friday March 25 that it was going to concentrate its offensive on eastern Ukraine, do not change anything in the posture and the demands of France, as of its allies.
“Our objective is not to qualify, our objective, our obsession, is the ceasefire”, retorted Emmanuel Macron, at the end of the European summit the same day in Brussels.
“And the ceasefire on the entire territory”, he specifies, thus including the Donbass region claimed and occupied by Vladimir Putin.
The objective therefore remains the “complete withdrawal of Russian troops” from all of Ukraine.
There is therefore no question of being satisfied with a hypothetical withdrawal and even less of endorsing a partition of the country between its Russian-speaking part and the West facing Europe.
Read also“A form of defeat for Putin”: why Russia is heading for eastern Ukraine
The declarations of the Russian Deputy Chief of Staff are therefore in no way seen as an outstretched hand, and the action in support of the Ukrainians and their President Volodymyr Zelensky will continue.
"We will continue relentlessly, through sanctions, aid to Ukraine, negotiations", insists Emmanuel Macron, who dedicated a "particular thought" to the inhabitants of the martyred city of Mariupol.
“The heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people”
If the president-candidate refuses to analyze and comment on this military evolution of Putin's army, which looks like the beginning of an admission of impotence, it is because he knows that his words are watched so much by the Ukrainians , who continue to expect a lot from Europe, than by the Russians, on the lookout for any pretext to denounce Western co-belligerence.
"I never want to be provocative, saying that it's the beginning of a withdrawal or defeat", he specifies, adding nevertheless: "This indicates very clearly that an operation carried out on all flanks in a simultaneously was thwarted by the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people".
Concretely, the time has not come to encourage Zelensky to negotiate with Putin on these bases, that is to say with a view to an agreement that would seal Russian control, after Crimea in 2014, of all Donbass and the Sea of Azov.
The European diplomacy activated by Macron intends to help the Ukrainians to decide their own future, not to push them to such a status of neutrality-Finlandization or to the partition of their country in order to bring peace to Europe.
A humanitarian evacuation operation from Mariupol
Emmanuel Macron, who holds the half-yearly presidency of the European Union, announced a "humanitarian operation" to evacuate Mariupol, the port city in the south-east of the country besieged in atrocious conditions by Russian troops, "in all next days ".
Greece and Turkey - President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has himself engaged in recent weeks in mediations between Russians and Ukrainians - will participate in this mission, in which Macron, who has scheduled several telephone interviews this Saturday related to the war, hopes to involve other partners as well.
He had "very concrete discussions" this Friday with the mayor of Mariupol, and should have Vladimir Putin on the phone "within 48 hours, 72 hours at the most" to define the modalities and advance the operations in the best - or less bad — safety conditions: “the faster, the better”.