IIt is rare to hear a President of the Republic repent publicly. In Munich, on the occasion of the security conference, Emmanuel Macron admitted that he had sinned by naivety with regard to the Russian president. He admitted to having been fooled by Vladimir Putin, who made him believe that the Wagner militias had nothing to do with the Russian state. But was this confession sincere?
It must be said that Russian officials no longer respect pretense. Evgueni Prigojine, boss of the Wagner group, has himself admitted his total dependence on the Kremlin, including when it interfered in the American elections. The President of the Republic no longer has any choice but to designate the Russian State as a “power of imbalance and disorder everywhere in the world”. He even recognizes that the Wagner militia is the “neomafia way” of a Russia “neocolonial”.
We are far from August 19, 2019, when the President of the Republic welcomed Vladimir Poutine at Fort Brégançon and dreamed with him of a “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok”. Two weeks later, the French president announced to the ambassadors a reset of relations with Russia, against the very opinion of the experts. Emmanuel Macron refused, in fact, the expertise in the name of a “diplomacy to renovate”.
French diplomacy therefore complied and, for two years, wanted to believe in the possibility of implementing the Minsk agreements signed in September 2014 and February 2015. Until January 2022, Emmanuel Macron really believed it possible to organize, as the Russians wanted, elections in the Donbass under the control of the “separatists”. While the Ukrainians explained for years that the said “separatists” were only the antennas of the Kremlin and that such elections could only be a decoy.
This fundamental contradiction of the Minsk agreements, in which the Russians were both judge and party, was fiercely denounced by the experts on the subject, who met in October 2019 within the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission between Russia and the Ukraine. They posted about it a grandstand in West FranceOctober 22, 2019.
The right question
But nothing helped. The position of the Elysée and that of the French government, even beyond the personal position of the Head of State, amounted to considering that diplomacy consisted in maintaining the balance of power in the name of the benefits of the stability of the international order. The problem is that the world is inherently unstable and only the ethical order can prevail over the order of terror. As the history of the XX has showne century, international law, strongly tied to the ethical principles on which it is based, is able to provide stability and thereby protect the strategic interests of democracies.
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