![]() In Berlin on Tuesday, the French president said he was still planning to talk to the Russian leader this week, but only about de-escalation. ![]() ![]() In June last year, in conjunction with Angela Merkel, he blindsided other EU leaders by offering Putin a summit. Faced by Trump’s isolationism, Macron, in a major speech in 2019, called for an end to the “frozen conflicts” with Russia. Photograph: Charles Platiau/ReutersĮmmanuel Macron invited Putin to Versailles alongside an exhibition about Peter the Great in May 2017. It was only after sustained American pressure that François Hollande cancelled a £1bn contract signed by his predecessor as French president to sell to Russia mistral-class helicopter gunships bound for the annexed Black Sea ports in Crimea.Īt a summit in Paris in December 2019, from left to right: Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel the French president, Emmanuel Macron and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Boris Johnson visited Moscow as foreign secretary in 2017 and, despite the Salisbury poisoning, has been extraordinarily lax about Russian money in London.įrance too has blown hot and cold in the wake of Russia’s occupation of Crimea in March 2014. ![]() Tony Blair also had to be disabused that Britain could lure Putin into the western camp, and was an enthusiastic supporter of Russia joining the G8. The US under Bill Clinton was as reluctant as anyone to let the four Visegrád countries – the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia – into Nato and made his belief about the risks absolutely clear at the organisation’s summit in January 1994, saying the Atlantic Alliance could not “afford to draw a new line between east and west that would create a self-fulfilling prophecy of future confrontation”. The differing assessments in Berlin, Washington, Paris and London of how to construct something stable out of the rubble of post-Soviet Russia have always been in flux, with different capitals taking different views at different points. The tensions reflect two different interpretations of how, even now, Russia can be prevented from becoming a force hostile to the west, interpretations that have dominated politics after the cold war. In the US, the German question is increasingly riling Republicans, leading to commentary in the Wall Street Journal with the headline “Is Germany a Reliable American Ally? Nein.” In Poland, the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said in a Facebook post that he remained concerned by the block on Estonia. Speaking in Berlin on Tuesday, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, defended the decision, saying it was rooted “in the whole development of the past years and decades”. The idea of Germany providing weapons to be used against Russia for the first time since the second world war is anathema. In Britain, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has been openly critical of Germany for leaving itself so dependent on Russia for energy, and Berlin’s recent refusal to allow Estonia to send German-manufactured arms to Ukraine. France, looking at the same intelligence provided by the CIA, does not see an imminent invasion, or a gathering of forces equipped to invade in the next three weeks – an assessment shared by the best Ukrainian defence analysts. ![]()
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