Macron's volte-face from 'appeasing Putin' to threatening war

• Macron’s volte-face over Ukraine sees tensions continue to rise with Russia

‘I am not ruling anything out,’ Emmanuel Macron insisted in an interview published today, pressed on whether France would send troops to Ukraine in its hour of need.

The remarks echo a new tone on Moscow in recent months, the French President reiterating pledges roundly rebuffed by his allies in the US, UK and Germany.

Europe and the United States have now committed more than £130bn to Ukraine in aid but NATO members have stopped short of promising boots on the ground – with Putin still willing to exploit the threat of nuclear Armageddon when prompted.

While Macron has argued his comments have been ‘weighted, thought through and measured’, they stand in stark contrast to the pre-war perception of the French President as ‘appeasing’ Russia over Ukraine.

Today, the French leader faces criticism from all sides – polling low at home and agitating allies in Europe over Ukraine. But with the absence of a rival war leader in Western Europe, Macron has found not only a distraction from domestic issues but a new role in facing down a historic foe.

As his rhetoric on the war evolves, experts suggest Macron’s poker face could be using ‘strategic ambiguity’ to unsettle Moscow. But France’s allies will be left hoping Putin does not call his bluff.

His face set in a determined grimace, Macron aimed to show off his fighting spirit and determination after military experts said he is bidding to lead NATO as a ‘Napoleon’

Photos released by Macron’s official photographer Sazig de la Moissonniere show the French leader in a boxing gym in March

Emmanuel Macron could fill Boris Johnson’s shoes as a European leader on Ukraine (File, 2022)

The French President (pictured May 2, 2024) reiterated his controversial pledges to Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has matched Macron’s poker face with repeated threats to use nuclear weapons

The French President had a sombre warning for Europeans last week, telling guests at the esteemed Sorbonne University in Paris: ‘Our Europe, today, is mortal and it can die. It can die and this depends only on our choices.’

In a wide-ranging speech, Macron sought to persuade his listeners that the ‘rules of the game have changed’ – and with them, Europe had fallen behind on the deterrents needed to ensure its future.

‘The fact that war has returned to European soil, and that it is being waged by a nuclear-armed power, changes everything,’ he declared. ‘The very fact that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons changes everything.’

Europe is ‘not armed against the risks we face’ abroad, he insisted. ‘The days of Europe… relying on the US security are over’.

Macron’s pledges cover all of Europe – not just France – and reflect an intention to uncouple from American military hegemony through a planned ‘European defence initiative’.

In his speech on April 25, he gave hints at a bloc unified militarily through the common training of officers and a small rapid reaction force.

These in and of themselves are not revolutionary. But they come against the background of increasingly bellicose statements from the French President, away from warnings to Europe not to risk ‘humiliating’ Russia in vein of Versailles.

In February, Putin warned Macron that if France were to send any troops to Ukraine, they would meet the same fate as Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Armée, whose 1812 invasion ended in staggering defeat and huge casualties.

In March, Mr Macron stood his ground, urging Europeans not to be ‘weak’ and to prepare to respond to the Russian threat, some two years into the war.

‘If Russia wins this war, Europe’s credibility will be reduced to zero,’ Macron said in a television interview, inviting criticism from French opposition leaders.

‘Today, deciding to abstain or vote against support to Ukraine, it’s not choosing peace, it’s choosing defeat. It’s different,’ he said, with a tone and choice of words that appears to have become a mainstay in his political speeches.

Aid donations paint a different picture. In total, Europe has provided Ukraine with some €89.6bn Euros in support as of February 2024, with a further €81.9bn to come, according to the Kiel Institute. The United States, by comparison, had provided €67.1bn in aid by the same period. It also recently passed a bill pledging $61bn (€56.9bn) in aid to Ukraine in April.

But in the same period, January 2022 to February 2024, France was the ninth top donor to Ukraine, pledging €3.85bn in total. This included €0.36bn in humanitarian aid and €2.69bn in military allocations.

Britain was ranked third for total donations, committing €9.09bn in sum, with €0.55bn in humanitarian aid and €5.27bn in military aid.

As a share of GDP, that comes to 0.31 per cent for Britain in sum and just 0.14 per cent for France.

Poland, the Baltic States, Denmark, Sweden and Bulgaria are among those who have shelled out more as a percentage of GDP than France since 2022, clouding the insistence Europe must follow France’s lead or face down its mortality.

Ukrainian soldiers fire with mortar during a military training with French servicemen in Poland, April 4, 2024

Ukrainian soldiers practice trench operations as the war between Russia and Ukraine continues in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine on March 24, 2024

A Ukrainian soldier fires artillery in the direction of Siversk, Donetsk Oblast, on April 1, 2024

Soldiers fire a mortar at a frontline position in the Donetsk region, January 26. 2024

France insists the numbers do not tell the whole story. Lionel Royer-Perreaut, a deputy from French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, said late last year that the Kiel data ‘doesn’t take into account what’s happening on the ground’.

He told reporters pledges from other politicians are not always followed by actual deliveries to Ukraine, and faulted the methodology.

READ MORE: Would Macron’s call to arms pay off? Experts say a NATO force would defeat Putin’s army in Ukraine but intervention would fail without US support…and could even trigger nuclear war 

But Macron’s defiant line on Russia today does jar against comments made at the start of the war. Macron insisted in 2022 that Putin should not be humiliated, urging Europe to show restraint ‘so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means’.

‘I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power,’ he said at the time.

In the early days of the war, it was reported Macron was speaking to Putin regularly in efforts to secure an early ceasefire – while committing weaponry from French army stocks.

Without naming France, then defence secretary Ben Wallace warned in February 2022, before the outbreak of war, that there was already ‘a whiff of Munich in the air’, referencing the failed diplomatic efforts taken to stop World War II.

‘It may be that he [Putin] just switches off his tanks and we all go home but there is a whiff of Munich in the air from some in the West,’ he jibed in an interview with The Sunday Times.

‘The worrying thing is that despite the massive amount of increased diplomacy, that military build-up has continued. It has not paused, it has continued.’

By April 2022, one comment piece in the British press went so far as to call Macron an ‘appeaser jealous of Boris’ standing in Ukraine’.

What changed? Today, an unavoidable issue for Macron is his popularity at home. In 2022, the year of the presidential elections and the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Macron defeated Marine Le Pen after a runoff.

Turnout was just 72 per cent, however, the lowest in a French presidential election run-off since 1969.

At the time of the run off, Macron had an approval rating of 41 per cent. That sank to 35 per cent by the time of the pension reform protests in early 2023, when France experienced a nationwide period of striking, protest and clashes with police over plans to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64.

By this time last year, Macron’s approval ratings had fallen to 27 per cent, before making a slight recovery and stagnating around 30 per cent into 2024.

In Europe, Macron has an opportunity to mould his public image with his position on Ukraine, however, with a poker face inviting Putin to call his bluff.

Macron pushed back a visit to Kyiv amid tensions with his allies over his comments on Russia in March.

A French diplomat told POLITICO the French President would seek to take ‘the necessary time’ for discussions with allies so that he could arrive with ‘tangible results’.

Writing in The Spectator, Gavin Mortimer suggested in February that Macron had seen the ‘opportunity to play the West’s senior statesman, a role that Boris Johnson initially seized’ to his ‘irritation and envy’.

The former Prime Minister went so far as to say Britain would put ‘boots on the ground’ if Russia invaded Sweden – ahead of its accession to NATO – but did not threaten to send troops if Russia broke through Ukraine’s front lines.

Vlad Şutea, founder and lead analyst at early warning and threatcasting group T-Intelligence, told MailOnline that ‘we not not know for sure’ whether France is truly willing to send troops to Ukraine — ‘but that is the point’.

‘Macron is one of the few Western European leaders to understand the value of strategic ambiguity,’ he said.

‘Putin doesn’t take anything off the table; neither should we. And that includes sending troops, in whichever capacity that is feasible.’

Under Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, France’s allies would be bound to assist France were Russia to attack her directly. They would not be obliged to follow France into battle should she send troops to Ukraine.

While Putin has insisted that he has no plans to push through Ukraine into Europe, Mr Şutea says he has ‘no doubt that he harbours ambitions to reclaim as much former Soviet territory as possible under Russian control, whether through direct annexation or by installing puppet regimes’.

While the likelihood of Putin escalating the conflict to a nuclear war is unlikely, Mr Şutea believes, ‘the security of the Baltics and other NATO nations still depends entirely on the willingness of the U.S. and Western allies to defend them’.

French soldiers are seen on Leclerc tanks after crossing as they take part in NATO military exercises in Korzeniewo, Northern Poland

‘I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out,’ Macron said recently, asked whether or not he stood by his pledge to Kyiv.

Macron’s has urged his allies not to be ‘cowards’ over the fate of Ukraine. His comments have inspired military experts to read his positioning as a kind-of ‘enlightened 21st century Napoleon’.

But with problems for the French President at home and abroad, stepping up now invites cynicism from onlookers, critics suggesting it was Boris Johnson, in fact, whose position he coveted as a wartime leader.

The game has changed, Macron insists, and Europe must be ready to play by the new rules. How the turn unfolds, he is acutely aware, will come to depend ‘only on our choices’.

Read more