It's a summit meeting taking place in Germany on Friday, February 17. World leaders gathered at the Security Conference in Munich. On this occasion, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke about the Ukrainian conflict. He said Europe needed to "intensify" its support for Ukraine to move towards "credible negotiations" while saying the time was "not for dialogue".
"We must absolutely intensify our support and our effort to help the resistance of the Ukrainian people and army and allow them to carry out the counter-offensive which alone will allow credible negotiations on the conditions chosen by Ukraine, its authorities and its people," he said.
"Today, very clearly, the time is not for dialogue", admitted the one who has long tried to maintain channels of discussion with President Vladimir Putin, sometimes attracting strong criticism from European countries, Ukraine in particular. head. "This is not the time for dialogue because we have a Russia that has chosen war, which has chosen to escalate war and which has chosen to go as far as war crimes and attacking infrastructure civilians,” he admitted.
"Russia cannot and must not win this war and Russian aggression must fail, because we cannot accept the trivialization of the illegal use of force, because otherwise it is all European security and more generally the global stability that would be jeopardized,” he said.
He said he was "ready for a protracted conflict" even if he "does not want it". "But especially if we don't want to, we must collectively be credible in our ability to last in this effort," he insisted. "That's the only way to bring him back to the table in an acceptable way," he said of the Russian president.
According to him, talking about negotiations "is not a spirit of compromise, it is a spirit of responsibility". "This peace will be all the more possible and credible if we are strong today if we know how to be strong over time," he said.
Emmanuel Macron also returned to the necessary effort of European war industries to support the military effort of the continent. He announced that he wanted to organize a "conference on the air defense of Europe" in Paris, bringing together Germany, Italy and Great Britain in particular.
This summit "will make it possible to approach this subject from the industrial angle, with the participation of all the European industrialists who have solutions to offer, but also from the strategic angle and I would say perhaps first from the strategic by including the issue of "nuclear" deterrence, he said.
In this regard, he made "a call to reinvest massively in our defense if we Europeans want peace".
