MUNICH — President Emmanuel Macron of France on Friday called for an “intensification” of Western support for Ukraine, but, unlike other leaders addressing the Munich Security Conference, he also underscored that peace negotiations were the ultimate goal.
Mr. Macron declared that the “neocolonialist and imperialist” aggression against Ukraine unleashed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “must fail,” calling Russia’s war “catastrophic and unjustified.”
At the same time, he used words like “dialogue” and “re-engagement” to describe an eventual interaction with Russia in the future, terms that Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, avoided in a speech immediately before Mr. Macron that was uniformly resolute and offered no prediction of an end to the year-old war.
“Now the question is how to resist? How to help the Ukrainians to make on the ground something which will force Russia to come back to the table on the conditions of Ukraine,” Mr. Macron said in English, answering questions after a speech delivered in French. Mr. Macron told the audience that “none of us will change geography” that places Russia “on European soil.” Given that, “we will have to negotiate,” he said.
The goal of such a negotiation, he said in response to questions, would have to be “an imperfect balance” that preserves “something sustainable for Russia itself.” But he added that it was far too early to try to formulate any security arrangement that would end the war on terms acceptable to Kyiv and Moscow.
“This is not the time for dialogue,” he said.
The West must face the fact that although the “weeks and months” ahead could be “decisive,” the war might last much longer. It was critical, Mr. Macron said, for Europe and the United States “to be credible over the long term,” if Russia was to come to the negotiating table in an acceptable way.
Of all the Western powers, France has most persistently alluded to the inevitability of negotiation with Mr. Putin’s Russia. This has sometimes irritated Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, as well as frontline European Union states on the border of Russia whose leaders are convinced that only an outright defeat of Mr. Putin — whatever that may mean — is acceptable.
Mr. Macron appears to have traveled some distance since declaring last year that it was necessary to avoid “humiliating” Russia and telling Ukraine it would have to wait “decades” to join the European Union. While he spoke to Mr. Putin on a regular basis during the early months of the war, Mr. Macron has not spoken to the Russian leader since September.
A meeting this month in Paris between Mr. Macron and Mr. Zelensky was effusive in its tone of mutual friendship and support. But an interview given just before the meeting by Mr. Zelensky to the French newspaper Le Figaro and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel revealed lingering tensions.
In response to a question about whether Mr. Macron had changed, the Ukrainian leader said: “I believe he has changed and that this time he has changed for real.”
Mr. Macron has insisted that his views have remained largely constant: denunciation of Russia’s illegal aggression against a sovereign state; support for Ukraine’s war effort to the point of “victory” (a word Mr. Scholz has declined to use to describe the objective of German support for Kyiv); and insistence that peace negotiations will be needed one day with Moscow.
Russia, he told the audience in Munich on Friday, had failed on several fronts since invading Ukraine: Its conviction that victory would be quick proved baseless; it had become a force for “disorder” in the world,; it had consolidated the very Ukrainian nationhood it denied; and it had bolstered a NATO alliance that Sweden and Finland have decided to join.
Still, Mr. Macron noted, Russia endures — as does Mr. Putin.
“I don’t believe for a second in regime change” in Moscow, Mr. Macron said, describing regime changes around the world in “the past decades” as “a total failure.”
