France and Germany tried to get Russia and Ukraine to ease up on each other on Wednesday, ahead of planned talks between the French and Russian presidents on Friday. They brought together senior Russian and Ukrainian officers.
Taking pictures at a rocket factory in Ukraine stokes tensions. People from France and Germany met in Berlin on Tuesday to talk about the Ukraine crisis. President Macron of France is on the left, and Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, is on the right.
Senior diplomats at a group called the Normandy Format, which is made up of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine, talked about ways to lower the temperature of their standoff. This group has met a lot since 2014.
They released a statement after more than eight hours of talks in Paris. They said that they will support the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine that was agreed to last until 2020, even if it doesn’t go into effect until then.
The statement didn’t say anything about fears about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead, it talked about the cease-fire agreement called the Minsk Accord, which the Normandy group helped broker. When they meet again in two weeks, the diplomats will do so at a meeting in Berlin.
A senior official in the French presidency said the talks were “troubling,” but they were also very encouraging. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with French government rules, said the meeting was a way to “see how willing the Russians are to trade.”
There was the sign of re-engagement that we had been looking for, an official said.
For President Emmanuel Macron of France, the assembly was a chance to show off Europeans who were trying to solve Europe’s problems. He has made the idea of “European strategic autonomy,” which means more independence from the United States, a big part of his presidency, while claiming to be Europe’s real leader.
The Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, Dmitri Kozak, and the Ukrainian president’s adviser, Andriy Yermak, were both in attendance on Wednesday. Mr. Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have been joined by their top diplomats.
Ukraine should not become a member of NATO at all, which is what Russia wants. In 2008, NATO leaders said that Ukraine and Georgia, two countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, “will become members of NATO.”
The date for such membership was left open, and there has been little or no progress on it in the nearly 14 years since. However, the claim has remained a problem for Russia. For Putin, it was one of a series of humiliating things that happened to Russia after the Soviet Union broke up. As NATO moved east and lands that had been under Moscow’s control moved into the Western world, Putin saw it as one of these things. The Russian leader now looks like he wants to make his own decisions for the people on the ground.
Separate talks between the U.S. and Russia on Ukraine have made France nervous. They’ve mostly been in Geneva in the last few months. Jacques Rupnik, a well-known political scientist, said that Biden and Putin’s meeting in Geneva about Europe “outshines” Macron. “So, right away, this meeting was important for him on a symbolic level.”
With a presidential election coming up in April, longtime German Chancellor Angela Merkel gone, and France taking over the rotating presidency of the European Union for the first time since 2008, Mr. Macron wants to show decisive European management, which he hasn’t done in a long time. It’s not clear, however, whether the rest of Europe will be able to watch him.
In 2014, Russia took Crimea from Ukraine. This led to a group called Normandy. It set the stage for talks that didn’t include the United States but did not slow down U.S.-Russia disagreements. Its name comes from the date the group was formed, June 6, 2014, which was the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France, during World War II.
