“We must step up our support” to Ukraine. It is a voluntary and determined Emmanuel Macron who spoke at the Security Conference in Munich, in front of the Western allies. Long in favor of maintaining the channels of discussion with the Kremlin, even if it meant attracting criticism from Volodymyr Zelensky, the French president acknowledged that “the time is not for dialogue because we have a Russia which has chosen war , which has chosen to escalate the war and which has chosen to go as far as war crimes and the attack on civilian infrastructure”.
“Russia cannot and must not win this war and Russian aggression must fail, because we cannot accept the trivialization of the illegal use of force, because otherwise it is all European security and more generally the global stability that would be called into question,” he insisted. “We must absolutely intensify our support and our effort to help the resistance of the Ukrainian people and army and allow them to lead the counter-offensive which alone will allow credible negotiations on the conditions chosen by Ukraine, its authorities and its people,” he said.
A call to “reinvest massively in our defense” at European level
Emmanuel Macron said he was “ready for a prolonged conflict” even if he “does not want it”. “But especially if we don’t want to, we must collectively be credible in our ability to last in this effort,” he insisted. “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, it is a spirit of responsibility”. “This peace will be all the more possible and credible if we are strong today if we know how to be so over the long term,” he said.
The Head of State also returned to the necessary effort of European war industries to support the military effort of the continent. He announced that he wanted to organize a “conference on the air defense of Europe” in Paris, bringing together Germany, Italy and Great Britain in particular.
This summit “will make it possible to address this subject from an industrial angle, with the participation of all European industrialists who have solutions to offer, but also from a strategic angle and, I would perhaps say, first of all from a strategic angle including the issue of nuclear deterrence, he said. In this respect, he launched “a call to reinvest massively in our defense if we Europeans want peace”.