Russia Undercuts Macron’s Report of Putin Deal on Ukraine
Macron said he’s won agreement from Putin that Russia won’t escalate the standoff with Western nations over Ukraine.
(Bloomberg) -- French President Emmanuel Macron said he’s won agreement from Vladimir Putin that Russia won’t escalate the standoff with Western nations over Ukraine. The Kremlin spokesman said that’s not so clear.
Macron met with Putin for more than five hours in Moscow on Monday and at a joint press conference the two leaders said they had agreed to work toward a “new security order” for Europe. But they offered little detail on what that new arrangement might involve and Putin’s spokesman denied the two leaders had reached any deal.
The Russian government has repeatedly denied that it has any plans to invade Ukraine.
While Macron’s aides have been trying to portray the president as a key figure in the western engagement with Putin, his visit to Moscow added a dose of confusion to the picture as a French official talked up an agreement and then backed away from their comments.
“For me, it was about blocking the game to prevent escalation,” Macron told reporters on the plane to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskiy. “This target is accomplished.”
But in a press conference later on Tuesday, Macron said it would take time to see the results of his diplomatic action. He also insisted that it was important to resume in-person meetings in the face of Putin’s strategy to send letters to communicate with Western partners.
The French leader made a strategic decision to build a relationship with his Russian counterpart when he came to power almost five years ago and needs to demonstrate that he has something to show for that investment as he aims to win re-election in April.
Yet most western diplomats recognize that the situation will ultimately hinge on what Putin decides to do with more than 130,000 troops stationed near to the Ukrainian border and, except for those in Belarus, he’s given no indication that he’s ready to pull them back.
The official in Macron’s office, who asked not to be named, at first said that Putin had agreed not to undertake any new military initiatives in the region and to withdraw Russian troops from Belarus once they have concluded the exercises they are involved in. The official didn’t give a timeline for the soldiers to leave Belarus.
The French official later said Putin’s commitment on military initiatives was not firm, but rather conditional on his view of the evolving situation.
Putin’s spokesman declined to comment on any assurances about military deployments and said that Russian troops were already due to leave Belarus on Feb. 20 once their exercises have been completed. Belarusian officials have also said the Russian troops will leave.
En route to Moscow on Monday, Macron had told reporters the “Finlandization” of Ukraine was one option that could help ease the tensions. That’s a reference to the Soviet Union’s influence over Finland during the Cold War even as the government in Helsinki remained formally independent. Yet during his Tuesday press conference, Macron denied even making a reference to the “Finlandization” of Ukraine.
Monday’s talks in Moscow show there is potential for diplomacy, even though huge differences remain, said Andrey Kortunov, head of the Kremlin-founded Russian International Affairs Council. Both Moscow and Kyiv will need to make some concessions in order to resurrect the Ukraine peace process, he said.
Meanwhile, the talks with the U.S. so far have yielded no apparent progress but the demands made by Russia for a halt to NATO enlargement and a pullback of the alliance’s forces from central and eastern Europe are a starting-point for negotiations on security guarantees in the region rather than an end goal, he added.
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