Barely on board, Emmanuel Macron, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the Italian President of the Council, Mario Draghi, held a small meeting of three, in order to immortalize the moment in a very “Orient-Express” atmosphere. Ten hours later, the train left the Polish border with the three men on board arrived Thursday, June 16, early morning in kyiv, after a long night crossing of the west of the country. The leaders were to spend the day in the Ukrainian capital, in order to finally show their solidarity on the spot with a country which has been resisting for almost four months the invasion launched by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The visit, the subject of a thousand unconfirmed rumors since the weekend, allows first of all to catch up, for some as for others, some missed opportunities. For weeks, Ukrainian officials have been urging the head of state to come before the end of the French presidency of the Council of the European Union, on June 30. But he was procrastinating, officially for electoral reasons, also anxious to be “useful” through this trip with strong symbolic value.
As for Chancellor Scholz, he was late in making the trip due to recurring tensions between Berlin and kyiv. As a result, since the start of the conflict, Mr. Macron and his traveling companions have been preceded in the Ukrainian capital by many of their continental counterparts, including the Briton Boris Johnson, the Pole Andrzej Duda and the heads of the institutions of the European Union. . It had become difficult for each of them to come alone, this late.
Trio from “old Europe”
On arrival, the Romanian President, Klaus Iohannis, who came by another route, joined his counterparts in kyiv, just to give a touch of Central Europe to the trio from “old Europe”. Together they first had to go to one of the localities in the suburbs of kyiv, where the Russian army committed atrocities against civilians, before withdrawing, failing to have succeeded in taking the capital, at the end of March. President Volodymyr Zelensky was to be with them during this tribute to the victims of the conflict. Later in the day, Emmanuel Macron was to meet French officials sent to kyiv to investigate the war crimes of which the Russian army is accused.
To make up for lost time, the quartet had above all to seek, in particular during an interview with Mr. Zelensky at the presidential palace, to multiply words and gestures of support. It is for them to overcome the doubts expressed, in Ukraine as in the Baltic and Polish capitals, by their relative moderation since the outbreak of the Russian invasion on February 24. Both support kyiv in its war effort, which does not prevent a number of frictions between allies.
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