Macron not to let Russia win Ukraine war, backs IAEA mission to ZNPP
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French President pledges continuous support for Ukraine to prevent Russia from winning the war or strengthening Kiev to enable it to achieve “a negotiated peace.”
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French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the French ambassadors' conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Thursday, Sept.1, 2022 (Mohammed Badra, Pool via AP)
French President Emmanuel Macron vowed on Thursday to carry on with France’s economic, humanitarian, and military support to Kiev and to boost European unity in order to pile pressure on Russia and prevent it from winning the war in Ukraine.
In a speech to French ambassadors at the Elysee presidential palace, Macron said, “We cannot let Russia militarily win the war," setting the goal of enabling Ukraine to either win militarily or putting it in a strong position to achieve “a negotiated peace.”
He added, “We must get prepared for a long war,” adding that this would involve rising tensions over Ukraine’s nuclear plants.
Macron said his country strongly supported the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission that arrived on Thursday at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (ZNPP) to assess its safety and suggested he would call his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin after the IAEA mission concludes.
He said he would “keep talking” to Russia despite criticism from some countries that defend a hardline stance against Moscow. “We must do everything to make a negotiated peace possible” when Moscow and Kiev will be ready to sit for talks, he said, adding, “We must not let Europe get divided” over the war in Ukraine and its consequences, and the EU must not align itself with “warmongers” or allow eastern Europe countries to act alone in support of Kiev.
Read: French President urges respecting Russia, its people
In a nearly two-hour speech aimed at outlining the French diplomacy's goals in the coming year, Macron called on Europe to “defend” its values and freedoms and to “fight” for them and urged French diplomats to work aggressively against fake news and propaganda spread on social media.
He said that France needs to use some communication tools to “break the Russian, Chinese or Turkish storytelling” and be able to “say when France is wrongly attacked, to say what France really did."
