“We must increase our support” for Ukraine. It is a willing and determined Emmanuel Macron who addressed the Western allies at the security conference in Munich. The French president has long been in favor of maintaining channels of dialogue with the Kremlin, even if it meant criticizing Volodymyr Zelenskyy, acknowledging that “the time is not for dialogue because we have a Russia that has chosen war who chose to escalate the war and who chose to go as far as war crimes and attacking civilian infrastructure.”
“Russia cannot and must not win this war and Russian aggression must fail because we cannot accept the downplaying of the illegal use of force because otherwise the whole of European security and global stability in general would be called into question,” he said. “It is imperative that we increase our support and efforts to help the resistance of the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian army and allow them to conduct the counteroffensive, which alone will enable credible negotiations on the terms chosen by Ukraine, its authorities and its people is called,” he said.
A call to “invest massively in our defense” at European level.
Emmanuel Macron said he was “ready for a prolonged conflict” even if he “doesn’t want it”. “But especially if we don’t want that, we have to be credible together that we can persist in this effort,” he emphasized. “It’s the only way to bring him back to the discussion table in an acceptable way,” he said of the Russian president. According to him, talking about negotiations is “not a spirit of compromise, but a spirit of responsibility”. “That peace becomes all the more possible and credible if we are strong today, if we know how to be long-term,” he said.
The head of state also returned to the necessary efforts of Europe’s war industry to support the continent’s military efforts. He announced that he wanted to hold a “Conference on Air Defense in Europe” in Paris, which would be attended in particular by Germany, Italy and Great Britain.
This summit “will make it possible to approach this issue from an industrial point of view, involving all European industrialists who have solutions to offer, but also from a strategic point of view and, I might say, above all from a strategic point of view, including the issue of nuclear deterrence,” he said In this context, he launched “an appeal to invest massively in our defense if we Europeans want peace”.