Every morning, after short hours of sleep, the diplomatic advisers at the Elysee Palace repeated the same formula, like a mantra: “Each day without war is a day won for peace.” For weeks, they grabbed their phones to call Kiev, Moscow, London, Washington or Brussels. At the start of 2022, war is on Europe’s doorstep: some 200,000 Russian soldiers surround Ukraine and haunt the nights of French diplomacy.
Emmanuel Macron dreamed of repeating his December 2019 coup, when he managed to place Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky around a table in Paris. After this meeting – the only one between these two Heads of State on a war footing – the horizon seemed to clear: prisoners had been exchanged and the ceasefire in the Donbass, to the east of the ‘Ukraine, seemed to hold. Two years later, the French president kept, until the last moment, the mad hope of stopping a war which, at the time of writing these lines, threatens to spread.
The Kremlin’s broken promises
But opposite, Macron no longer had the same Poutine. “During his visit to the Kremlin, the president met a different man from December 2019, stiffer, more isolated, gone into an ideological and security drift which is confirmed today”, describes an adviser to the Elysée. However, almost every day, the French kept in touch with the Russian, going from disappointment to disappointment.
Monday, February 21, the Elysée thus congratulated itself on having snatched a “summit” between Joe Biden and Vladimir Poutine after a night of negotiations. Upon awakening, Moscow freezes everyone and judges such a meeting “premature”, before recognizing in the evening the independence of the Ukrainian separatist regions and sending its soldiers there. The peace process has had its day, as has French diplomatic strategy.
With the Kremlin, for weeks, Macron has accumulated beautiful promises and cold showers. In Moscow on February 7, after a five-hour meeting with the master of the Kremlin, he congratulated himself on having obtained “guarantees of de-escalation” and a ceasefire in the Donbass – they were never respected . Same observation for the 30,000 Russian fighters who were to return home after ten days of exercises in Belarus: in the end, they remain on the western front of Ukraine. “Putin had promised us their return to Russia, but he was careful not to give a date”, blows a French diplomat.
Ungrateful and sometimes humiliating, this diplomatic work of the French head of state was mocked by British sources, who accused him of playing the card of appeasement excessively, raising the specter of the Munich agreements of 1938. Macron , in any case, was the only one to offer Putin a way out, when Washington and London were already beating the drums of war.
“France is not naive, Emmanuel Macron has done essential diplomatic work, which he was the only one to be able to do, believes Jean-Dominique Giuliani, president of the Robert-Schuman Foundation. The Russians remain on a policy of testosterone , the Americans respond on the same register while the Germans have a diplomacy hampered by their past and their trade.
The Russian and French heads of state, Vladimir Poutine and Emmanuel Macron, on February 7, 2022, at the Kremlin, in Moscow.
SPUTNIK / AFP
Firmness and discussion
In this crisis, too, the French president tried to apply his “at the same time” policy. “We have to walk on two legs. This implies showing firmness vis-à-vis Russia. In parallel with the reinforcement of NATO’s resources and the preparation of collective sanctions, Emmanuel Macron reminded Moscow of the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of European nations, including Ukraine, underlines Pierre Vimont, special representative of France for Russia. But the other leg is to be able to discuss until the end to avoid the war.”
And the diplomat to welcome the French decision in 2019 – much criticized, at the time, by NATO partners and the Europeans – to renew the dialogue with Russia, which made it possible to oil the channels of communication. But the head of state’s diplomatic efforts have hit a wall. Resolving now to raise his voice, he condemned, on Monday, Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of the pro-Russian separatist regions of eastern Ukraine and called for “targeted European sanctions” against Moscow. .
Did Macron have a chance to weigh against Putin? “On the issue of security in the Euro-Atlantic area, Moscow considers that the real interlocutor remains the United States: Putin thinks that Europe has no strategic autonomy and that it always ends up aligning itself with American positions”, points out Igor Delanoë, deputy director of the Franco-Russian Observatory, in Moscow. But on the Ukraine file and the implementation of the Minsk agreements, signed in 2014 by Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France, “Putin obviously considered – for a time – that he could put take advantage of the energy deployed by Macron to try to get things moving,” continues this expert.
Unless the latter was only a pawn in the plan of the master of the Kremlin. “Putin only reasons in terms of power relations. He seeks to assess the extent to which Europeans are more malleable than Americans and to test the solidarity of Westerners”, adds Françoise Thom, lecturer emeritus in history at the Sorbonne. “But his ultimate goal was to force the West to force the Ukrainians, whom he sees as the puppets of the United States, to capitulate.” In short, to implement the Minsk agreements, which provided for the organization of elections in the Donbass.
A complicated personal relationship
Despite their many interviews, it seems that no particular alchemy has operated between Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Poutine, two men of a different generation, that everything opposes. Putin has probably never forgiven Macron for the fact that in his presence, in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles, he accused the media Russia Today and Sputnik of being “organs of influence which spread shameful untruths about [sa] nobody”, says Françoise Thom. And when Macron tries to convince him that the Europeans have their own political will, “it is completely contrary to his vision of the world”, she analyzes.
At the same time, Russia has increased the pressure on France in the Sahel, where the paramilitary troops of the private group Wagner, close to the Kremlin, compete with the French army. When Paris announces the withdrawal of its Barkhane force from Mali, hundreds of Russian mercenaries are already deployed there.
Faithful to the Gaullist tradition, the president will nevertheless have cultivated the dialogue with Moscow. A year after his tete-a-tete with Putin at Versailles in 2017, he flew to Saint Petersburg. His “dear Vladimir” gives him a five-star welcome at the Constantin Palace. The tenant of the Elysée discusses the common history between the two empires of yesterday. “We flew in the same sky”, he recalls – a nod to the Free France squadron “Normandie-Niemen”, which lent a hand to the Red Army in 1944. And to plead that the dialogue with Russia is an element of the “independence” of French foreign policy. In Eastern Europe, commentators are choking.
“A big misunderstanding”
Recriminations burst into the open when, the following summer, Emmanuel Macron received his Russian counterpart at Fort Brégançon and declared, without consulting his allies, that he wanted to “reinvent a security architecture” between the European Union and Russia. On the Old Continent, everyone wonders what concessions could hide this new order.
“There remains a great misunderstanding between Macron and Central Europe and the Baltic countries, believes Michel Duclos, special adviser at the Institut Montaigne. They have always considered that the Russian threat was topical, while the French tended to consider that this was no longer the case.”
Two years after his shock statement, almost everything has changed. The specter of war, which forces the allies to close ranks. But also the Elysée method. On January 1, France took over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. No more acting alone. The president consults Washington, Berlin, London, Warsaw, before and after his phone calls with the Russian and Ukrainian leaders.
The President’s activism is welcomed. But beware of naivety, recently warned Kaja Kallas, the Estonian Prime Minister, to Financial Times: “I tried to explain to President Macron: ‘You see things through the prism of a democratic country. You think a war will be very costly for Russia. But Putin doesn’t care.’ ”
Two months before the elections, the opposition is watching for the slightest misstep. Especially since the beautiful promises of the Kremlin have already earned one of his predecessors a humiliation in order. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had met Leonid Brezhnev in the USSR to negotiate a de-escalation, which had promised a partial withdrawal of his troops. The president had hastened to spread the news… which turned out to be perfectly untrue. In the middle of the presidential campaign, his rival François Mitterrand had jumped at the chance to mock “the little telegraph operator from Warsaw”. An antiphon already taken up by Marine Le Pen.