Emmanuel Macron reiterated Thursday night that the warplanes Ukraine claims could be delivered “under no circumstances” “in the coming weeks,” ensuring his preference for “more useful” and “faster” weapons.
“I’m excluding absolutely nothing,” the French president assured the press about deliveries of fighter jets.
But “it does not meet today’s needs,” he assessed after a European summit meeting in Brussels in the presence of his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
During his European tour on Wednesday and Thursday, the Ukrainian president insisted his country needs warplanes to end the Russian-led war.
President Macron asserted that his “very in-depth and very precise talks” with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday in Paris emphasized that the priority must be “doing everything to help (Ukraine) resist in the coming weeks.” ‘ and ‘to wear’. carry out meaningful operations in spring-summer, if we then want to carry out diplomatic actions in parallel”.
“We mainly talked about military strategy and diplomatic strategy,” he added of his dinner with the Ukrainian head of state at the Elysée Palace, to which he had also invited Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
“There is no way fighter jets can be delivered in the coming weeks because the training and delivery times (…) are incompressible for aircraft unknown to Ukrainian pilots,” he argued.
“It is important that the allies favor the materials that are most useful” and “fastest,” he added, since the French-supplied Caesar guns and medium-range MAMBA surface-to-air defense system met those criteria.
It may be necessary to intensify deliveries of “artillery elements” that will make it possible to launch ground offensives or resist,” he stressed, promising to “work on it in the coming days”.