The applause was sparse at first, then erupted at the end of his speech. Emmanuel Macron tried to pledge his commitment to Ukraine in an address delivered on Wednesday, May 31, in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Invited to the Globsec forum, a strongly pro-West meeting, the French president knew he was in for a rude awakening: This part of Europe is quick to criticize his willingness to engage in dialogue – albeit suspended since September 2022 – with President Vladimir Putin or his efforts to avoid humiliating Russia in order to achieve a peace agreement one day. Without promising a rapid accession for Kyiv to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Macron placed at the heart of his diplomatic counter-offensive the delicate question of the "security guarantees" that are supposed to ensure the continuity of Western support for Ukraine, both before and after the end of hostilities.
"If we want a credible, lasting peace, if we want to have any weight against Russia, if we want to be credible with the Ukrainians, we have to give Ukraine guarantees to prevent any further aggression and include Ukraine in a credible security architecture, for ourselves," he said. "I'm in favor of these guarantees being tangible and credible (...) We need to be much more ambitious than we sometimes are on these issues."
His rather forthright stance comes at a time when negotiations on this issue are intensifying between Kyiv's allies, in the run-up to the NATO summit in Vilnius on July 11 and 12. Discussed at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, the matter is due to be raised again on June 1 by the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Oslo. The same applies to the European Political Community, whose leaders, joined Thursday morning by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, are meeting near Chisinau, Moldova.
'Deterrence by denial'
The issue at stake is of the utmost importance: Ukraine must be promised security guarantees, as it is unable to join NATO at this stage. This is despite the fact that Kyiv has officially applied for membership and that many Central European nations, led by Poland and the Baltic states, are in favor of it joining. The alliance's heavyweights, notably the United States and Germany, reject its enlargement to include a country at war, as it could overnight drag NATO into open conflict with Russia – due to its mutual assistance clause in the event of external aggression (Article 5). It's a prospect that neither US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz nor Macron wants to see, as all three are concerned about avoiding escalation with Moscow.
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