Nobody should doubt Paris, under any circumstances. There is growing anger at the Élysée that France is being criticized for its supposedly meager and opaque military support for Ukraine. Piqued – that probably sums it up best.
If you use the figures from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which totals the countries’ pledged support for Ukraine, France, with its military aid of just over half a billion euros, is pretty low in the donor rankings. For a long time, criticism came almost exclusively from abroad, especially from Germany, which does many times as much. In France itself, the matter was ignored, which was also due to the fact that the estimate of a parliamentary commission was passed around in the country: last November it came to 3.4 billion euros. That was still much less than the more than 17 billion euros from Germany. But it immediately sounded like much more.
Macron has postponed his trip to Ukraine – without a fixed date
But now, in the run-up to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to Paris on Friday evening, where he was supposed to sign a bilateral security pact, as he had previously done in Berlin, the French president’s political advisors had to work hard to make the discrepancy seem somewhat plausible to the French explain.
This was all the more complicated because Emmanuel Macron actually wanted to travel to Ukraine in the first half of February, but postponed the visit without explanation and without an appointment. There’s no need to make a big deal out of it, the palace says; that’s just feeding into the propaganda from Moscow. Macron has been very close to Zelensky for a long time. This closeness has only become stronger. It is no coincidence that Macron is one of Ukraine’s biggest advocates when it comes to its candidacy for membership in the European Union.
But what about military aid numbers? For Le Parisien It is now “finally” time for the palace to present clear figures. The newspaper also writes that France has remained “fairly discreet” so far Les Echoes.
There should be a bit of something concrete and numerical in the pact, but not much, more synthetic. Macron’s entourage says that they are not interested in this “guerre des chiffres”, i.e. in this war of numbers. Numbers are “difficult to read.” The “quality” of the help also needs to be looked at, then it quickly becomes a bit more “complex”. This once again suggested that the Germans were not delivering the very best, immediately usable goods to Ukraine in terms of quality. Each country helps with the resources it has. France, for example, is “in a leading role in artillery and air defense,” while other countries are strong in other areas – the British, for example, with their drones.
And fighter jets from France? There are none for now
France also wants to be measured by the fact that it has already trained 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers since the beginning of the war. And pilots will soon also be trained. Fighter jets of the type Mirage 2000 But they won’t be delivering any for the time being, they say, because the Ukrainians are relying on the use of F-16 concentrated. It is pointless to break this “coherence”; this has already been said often enough. The tone matches the pique.
Macron recently announced that national defense production would be ramped up, as is the case in a “war economy” – and that production would be geared directly to Ukraine’s needs. At the center of the effort will be the Nexter company, which has the so-called super cannon Caesar manufactures. Nexter said it could be 78 quickly Caesar’s deliver to Ukraine, but it has only received 18 binding orders. It can’t be due to a lack of advertising: a month ago, Paris made an appeal to foreign countries to buy cannons for Ukraine in France.