2024-03-14 19:40:14
After his controversial comments on the possible sending of Western soldiers to Ukraine, Emmanuel Macron tried this Thursday evening to explain French strategy. During an interview with 20 hours of TF1 and France 2, the head of state said he “takes responsibility” for his statements, judging that “Russia cannot and must not win this war”. A conflict which is “existential for our Europe and for France”, he declared. “We will never lead an offensive, we will never take the initiative,” he explained, while believing that options should “not be excluded”.
“If Russia were to win […] we will no longer have security” and the “credibility of Europe will be reduced to zero”, he said. “Faced with Moscow’s “escalation”, “we must say that we are ready to respond,” he added, warning in passing that “if Russia wins this war, Europe’s credibility will be reduced to zero.”
“Who can think that Putin will stop there?
“If faced with someone who has no limits, has crossed all the limits that he had given us, we naively tell him ‘I will not go further than this or that’, at that moment- there we are not deciding on peace, we are already deciding on defeat,” he assured this Thursday evening.
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“Who can think for a single second that President Putin, who has not respected any of his commitments, will stop there?”, he added, in reference to Russia’s repeated assurances before the launch of its offensive in Ukraine on February 22, 2022.
Those who set “limits choose defeat”
Emmanuel Macron also affirmed that those who place “limits” on the commitment to support Ukraine “are not choosing peace but choosing defeat”. “They are choosing to abandon sovereignty because they are choosing now to say: we have limits,” he said, while his recent remarks were severely criticized at the foreign by allied countries.
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Emmanuel Macron also stressed that the Europeans’ immediate priority was the accelerated supply of munitions which Ukraine is sorely lacking in the face of Russia. “We are going to survey all the countries in the world […] their available stocks and we offer them to buy it back,” he explained. The Europeans are also working on the coordinated supply of different materials, from artillery to anti-aircraft defense, including through the direct production of equipment in Ukraine, he recalled.
The Head of State is also going to Berlin this Friday to try to ease tensions, fueled in particular by these declarations, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on the occasion of a three-way summit devoted to Ukraine, also including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
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