Marcon makes a total fool of himself on French TV
President Macron of France is interesting. When Russia started their military actions in Ukraine in February 2022, Marcon was sticking his neck out, calling Putin and, in general, going much further than other Western leaders in looking for a diplomatic solution. Now, he is at the forefront of the European aggression. He recently gave a speech to the French public on TV. The speech by Macron contained a long list of charges against Russia; from meddling in Romanian elections to sabotage operations in Europe. What seems especially stupid is that Macron does not realise that most of these actions, certainly any sabotage, are in response to the fact that France has been sending weapons to Ukrainian nationalists which they are using to kill Russians. In this speech Marcon made the claim that “Who can believe today that Russia would stop at Ukraine?”. This is the line that Putin is engaged in an expansionist, imperialistic, project to rebuild the Russian Empire and after Ukraine he will attack Poland or one of the Baltic States. We have discussed the question at length on this website. The main point is; there is no actual evidence for this. All the evidence, on the other hand, is consistent with Russia’s aims being pretty much what Putin says they are; to remove the strategic and unacceptable risk to Russia posed by putting Ukraine into NATO, and to secure the rights of the people in Eastern Ukraine who are, ethnic Russians or, loosely speaking, “pro-Russian” against a fervently Ukrainian nationalist regime in Kiev. Macron even has the nerve to say: “Nor can it mean a ceasefire that is too fragile. And why not? Because here too we have the experience of the past. We cannot forget that Russia began invading Ukraine in 2014 and that we then negotiated a ceasefire in Minsk. And the same Russia did not respect that ceasefire”. This is after former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel openly claimed that she had signed Minsk in bad faith to buy Ukraine time to arm. [2] The OSCE monitoring mission seems, in a rather opaque way, to have acknowledged that violations of the Minsk agreements were committed by both sides. But no one went as far as Merkel in simply claiming that the whole thing was a fraud.
It looks to me like Macron’s chief driver is that he wants to be seen as a world diplomat. A real player. Now, however, he has permanently embarrassed himself by repeating the entirely non-credible line about “Russian imperialism” being the cause of this war in a public address to the entire French nation.
The no-fly zone makes a brief come-back
There has been a lot of acting tough in recent days. The idea of a Euro-Ukraine army is still being touted. Though there are already signs of back-tracking. Certain off-stage players like former US General Breedlove, (who seriously thought Ukraine had a realistic chance of re-taking Crimea in the abortive Spring 2023 offensive), are pushing for an ‘air-shield’. These ludicrous and dangerous ideas are dutifully being publicised by the liberal media war machine. [3] All these ideas suffer the same flaw. Russia is hardly likely to agree to them as part of peace negotiations, which means that any forces or air-assets will have to be inserted under fire, and then we, that is Europe, are at war with Russia. Lavrov suggested today that Russia would consider that as being at war with NATO. I would guess this is an attempt to get the US to call their European allies into line.
“Strengthening Ukraine’s position at the negotiations”
I have never seen anything looking like a credible path to victory for Kiev by continuing the war. If there is none; and even the war party seems totally unable to produce one, then all they are doing is just prolonging the defeat and ensuring the deaths of tens of thousands more people. One current line is about “strengthening Ukraine’s position” at the negotiation table. For that to work, it would imply that continuing the war will see Kiev make significant gains and Russia becoming, militarily or economically, significantly weaker. But, there are no grounds to believe any of these things. The opposite is the case. It is the Ukrainian army which is suffering a crisis of manpower. Russia does not have a problem populating its army. The Russian economy is surviving. [4] Even if none of that were true, the idea of “strengthening Ukraine’s position at the negotiations” still shows a complete failure to grasp the Russian point of view. Russia’s demands are not bargainable. The theory that they are depends on a weak theory about how states make foreign policy decisions; that everything is calculated based on cost-benefit analysis. This theory is utilised by two leading theories of international relations, rational choice theory and political psychology. It is roundly criticised by John Mearsheimer in his book, How States Think – The Rationality of Foreign Policy. Mearsheimer argues that states do not, and in fact, could not, due to the lack of sufficient information, make decisions on this basis. People who talk about “strengthening Ukraine’s position at the negotiations” think that Russia launched their military operation in Ukraine, (which has since turned into a full-scale war with the West), on a cost-benefit basis. They are supposed to have thought; “well, we can grab some more land, and push NATO back and it won’t cost us too much because the response of the West will be weak”. And so, if they are caused enough pain and cost, they will change their calculations, and settle for less land, or more NATO, or both. But this is to attribute to the Kremlin a kind of merchant consciousness. It completely fails to understand that NATO in Ukraine is a question of existential significance for Russia. They cannot let that happen. It is not negotiable in any way. Concerning, Eastern Ukraine; at one point they were happy to settle the question of the rights of their fellow-travellers in the East of Ukraine by the implementation of the Minsk agreements. However the implementation of the Minsk agreements were blocked in Ukraine by right-wing paramilitaries in 2019. [5] Beyond that, figures in political circles in Kiev were, supported by voices in the West, openly beginning to repudiate Minsk in late 2021. With these considerations in mind it is hard to see how the incorporation of at the least Donetsk and Luhansk into Russia can now be negotiable. And, following from that, there are simply military advantages to take land up to the Dnipro. It is hard to see that Ukraine can press any significant levers here. (Crimea, with it majority ethnic Russian population and strong support for having been annexed by Russia is a done deal; it seems that more or less everyone accepts that. How would Kiev govern it?). The idea of “strengthening Ukraine’s position at the negotiations” is just detached from reality.
What is Europe really afraid of? The Russian “threat”, or, conversely, the fact that Russia is not a threat?
As I have mentioned in a previous post, we have to allow the possibility that they are doing this – talking about a Euro-Ukraine army/peacekeeping force – with the deliberate intention of sabotaging the US-Russia negotiations. I am not sure though, that they are this sophisticated. It is more likely that they simply have zero grasp of the political realities. They are so entranced by their own press releases and propaganda that they really think they can implement the idea, (which has been around for some time), of allowing Russia to hold what they have already taken, while they flood the rest of Ukraine with weapons. They are trying to look strong in defeat. But, beyond that, they are trying to save the narrative. The very worst thing that could happen to them now would be that Trump and Russia agree a settlement of the war. Russia settles down and administers its “new territories”, does not engage in any provocations over an agreed line, shows no signs of attacking Poland. Reduces its army as Ukraine reduces theirs and does not block Ukraine joining the EU. That would be a disaster for the war party, because the “Russian is a threat to Europe” narrative they have been selling their publics would, very openly, collapse. The problem is that they are trying to insert this option, “strong in defeat”, under cover of Trump’s peace negotiations. And that isn’t going to happen. At some point they are going to have to face reality.
Worrying levels of involvement of Ukrainian nationalists in European decision making
It seems noticeable that European political leaders, at least publicly, and the liberal media take Kiev seriously. Wild claims, for example, about comparative losses on the battlefield by Russia and Ukraine, made by Ukrainian intelligence, are published as fact by the Guardian. Figures connected to Ukrainian intelligence, present or former actors, make claims about Russia planning expand the war to Europe. For example; the Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK, their former army commander, gave a lecture today which included, of course, “Ukraine is de facto defending not just the eastern border of NATO, but definitely the eastern border of Europe, which can become a confrontation line … the existence of independent Ukraine today is indeed one of the critical factors for you, for the European security and safety”. [6] And all this, obviously a piece of misinformation by Ukrainian intelligence who I would credit with understanding the nature of their fight with Russia, appears to be taken by European leaders at face value.
Meanwhile the leaders of the Baltic states have completely lost their heads. Consider this from the Lithuanian President: “Ukraine buying the precious time for us every day, paying with their blood.”. Buying time has a rather ominous ring to it given Merkel’s confession/retrospective claim.
The security dilemma is well-known. But European leaders do not appear to be thinking about it. All this talk of borrowing hundreds of billions and arming themselves to the teeth, of flooding Western Ukraine with weapons, the quite extreme statements from some of the Baltic states, Macron’s new (“I am a statesman”) initiative to expand the French nuclear umbrella to other European states, all contains a possibility of starting WWIII.
It seems amazing to me that Europe risks throwing itself away on the hill of a few fascists and corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine.
Update – just when you thought they couldn’t get any more ridiculous
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni seems to be another European leader who has misplaced their brain:
On the side-lines of an EU summit in Brussels on Thursday, Meloni said extending NATO’s Article 5 collective security agreement would be a more “lasting solution” than sending European peacekeepers or granting Kyiv full membership. [7]
Russia started their operation primarily because of the strategic threat posed to them by Ukraine being in NATO. As Putin explained in his speech on the day he launched his operation the risk is that if Ukraine were to join NATO some hotheads in Ukraine could start something over Crimea and then we would all have WWIII on our hands. (Highly ironically, Putin’s comments are no different from Obama’s made after the annexation of Crimea when he said: “Can we be certain that any lethal aid that we provide Ukraine is used properly, doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, does not lead to over-aggressive actions that can’t be sustained by the Ukrainians?” [8] ). If Ukraine were granted Article 5 protection this is almost certainly what would happen. They would start something with Russia and then NATO would be obliged to come to their aid, i.e. get straight into a war with Russia. Whether the NATO troops were already in Ukraine or had to be rapidly shipped in from Poland and Romania is totally besides the point. Even by the very, very low standards of intelligence evinced by European leaders in recent days, this really is something. At the same time, this idea, like the (rapidly being rolled back idea) of “British boots on the ground”, has zero chance of getting anywhere. In this case Hungary would surely block this idea; as would, probably, quite a few other NATO members who do not want WWIII right now.
Notes
- https://www.frenchdispatch.eu/p/en-macrons-french-transcript-eu-security-russia-ukraine-trump
- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/06/european-led-ukraine-air-protection-plan-could-halt-russian-missile-attacks
- https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russias-wartime-economy-isnt-weak-it-looks
- More menacingly, several Ukrainian nationalist militias, including the Azov Battalion that was then fighting in the Luhansk region of Donbas, compromises necessary … they preferred to fight than give one centimetre.’ The threat of a nationalist Maidan implacably opposed to any kind of compromise with the Kremlin had destroyed Zelensky’s attempt to bring peace in 2019 – and would remain a major threat to any future negotiated peace in the endgame of the 2022 war”. Matthews, Owen. Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine (p. 149). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/mar/06/eu-leaders-summit-defence-ukraine-russia-macron-zelenskyy-europe-news-live?filterKeyEvents=false&page=with%3Ablock-67c9712d8f084101516f7a84#block-67c9712d8f084101516f7a84
- https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kyiv-seeks-more-information-about-meloni-proposal-security-guarantees-2025-03-07/
- https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/didnt-us-allies-provide-ukraine-better-air-defense-system-rcna17317