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Macron on his last trip to Kyiv in early February before the war began
Photo: Efrem Lukatsky / picture alliance/dpa/AP
It was more than three months before a high-ranking French government representative showed up in Ukraine for the first time since the beginning of the war: Catherine Colonna finally traveled to the war-torn country on Monday, and coincidence would have it that the visit of the new foreign minister from Paris came with her coincides with the tragic death of a young French journalist in the Luhansk region.
The TV reporter is said to have been killed by Russian shelling.
Coincidence can be so cynical: On that day, it suddenly brought the war very close to France.
Otherwise it is pursued there intensely, but still like a distant conflict that takes place "at the gates of Europe," as the Paris media always say.
Not:
in
Europe.
Reduce distance, show closeness - dispel doubts.
That's exactly what Catherine Colonna wants to do.
"France is at your side, along with its friends and allies," the minister reassured Ukrainians as she visited the Kiev suburb of Bucha, where the Russian army carried out its bloody massacre of civilians in March.
Colonna points out that France was the first country to send investigators to Bucha to investigate alleged war crimes.
She also has fire trucks and ambulances as party favors;
France is already supplying arms.
Later she met the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj in Kyiv for talks.
France is trying to walk a difficult geopolitical tightrope
That must suffice from the French side for the moment.
Because Selenskyj's counterpart Emmanuel Macron, like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is still a long way off in Kyiv.
Like Scholz, the French President is of the opinion that he will only visit Zelenskyy if he is actually serving peace.
Apart from that, France has been so busy with itself for weeks that – unlike Scholz in Germany – there has been little criticism of Macron’s Ukraine course.
With every week that the war goes on, it is becoming increasingly clear that France is also trying to walk a difficult geopolitical tightrope in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia – to put it mildly.
Viewed less benevolently, the French stance seems like hesitancy towards the Russian aggressor, like an attempt to appease the Kremlin ruler Vladimir Putin.
This ambivalence, in turn, fuels the doubts that Minister Colonna is trying to dispel, both among the Ukrainians and some of the Eastern European partners of the Franco-German EU leadership duo.
It is Macron himself who is causing suspicion.
"Russia must not win" in the war, but must also not experience "humiliation," that is, no humiliating defeat, the head of state said in a speech to the European Parliament in early May.
This will to spare Moscow is reminiscent of Scholz's position and clearly stands out from the US strategy, which is aimed at punishing Putin with a heavy defeat.
Macron obviously hopes to broker an agreement
In contrast to US President Joe Biden and many Eastern European leaders, Macron does not want to isolate Putin diplomatically.
In the winter, the French President had still hoped to be able to avert the war with his domestically tried and tested tactic of talking to people hesitantly for hours.
Macron was constantly on the phone with Putin, probably also in the hope of saving Paris' plans for a "new European security architecture" including Russia.
Since Putin's attack on Ukraine at the end of February, Macron's contacts with the Russian president have been rarer.
But even after France and Russia have expelled several dozen diplomats from the other side, the thread of talks at the highest level should not be broken.
Just like Scholz, Macron obviously hopes
It was only at the weekend that Macron and Scholz spoke to Putin on the phone for 80 minutes.
They urged an armistice and "serious direct negotiations" with Zelenskyy.
In view of the tense food supply in some parts of the world, Putin had assured "that he wanted to enable grain exports from Ukraine, especially by sea," the German Chancellery later announced.
After the meeting, however, the Kremlin made it clear that Putin had not made any such far-reaching promises to the Franco-German duo and that the blame for the looming hunger crisis lay in the Western sanctions against Russia.
Some EU leaders consider Macron's persuasion pointless, if not counterproductive.
Not everyone goes as far as right-wing Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who has a heartfelt dislike for Macron: »President Macron, how often have you negotiated with Putin?
And what have you achieved?” Morawiecki etched in the spring.
"Would you also negotiate with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot?"
After all, although Macron is talking to Putin, his country is supplying weapons so that Ukraine can defend itself.
To what extent exactly, Paris keeps secret.
It is known that France is supplying Milan-type anti-tank missiles and Caesar artillery systems, on which Ukrainian soldiers are being trained in France.
This is also appreciated in Kyiv: "France is providing real help here, which is all the more important because there was no discrepancy in Paris between the political assurances and their implementation," says Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanyschyna.
That can be understood as a dig at Germany.
»Any hesitation would be a sign of weakness«
In the speech, in which he also warned of Russia's humiliation, his boss Macron first made the proposal to create a "European political community", a kind of EU waiting room, into which Ukraine should first step.
This did not go down well with Zelenskyj and his government.
Macron later tried, with more or less success, to explain the idea of a "European political community" to the Ukrainian president over the phone.
"We don't understand what this is supposed to be about," says Deputy Prime Minister Stefanyschyna in an interview with SPIEGEL.
“All we ask for now is candidate status.
There are no arguments against it.
Any hesitation would be a sign of weakness.”
A reproach that must displease Macron - he, who always advocates a maximum strong Europe.
But in his own country, the French president need not fear criticism for his tortuous course in his Ukraine policy: France is still in the middle of the election campaign, and the National Assembly will be re-elected in mid-June.
The main topic of the political debate is the rising cost of living in the country.
The main opposition forces, led by the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far-right Marine Le Pen, are in turn sympathetic to Putin's Russia.
In their view, Macron is too close to the US course rather than too considerate of Putin.
