Emmanuel Macron’s Overtures to Vladimir Putin, and the Race to Prevent War in Ukraine

Emmanuel Macron has been battling on all fronts to prevent an actual war. On Monday, the French President visited the Kremlin, where, speaking across an inordinately long white table, he tried to sell his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on the need for “de-escalation” at the Ukrainian border, where Moscow has recently positioned more than a hundred thousand troops. Speaking from Kyiv, the next day, Macron reassured the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, of France’s determination to “consolidate” his country’s sovereignty, just before flying to Berlin for a meeting with the new German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the Polish President, Andrzej Duda. This frantic itinerary was just one element of Macron’s diplomatic and political agenda of late. In the past two weeks, he has had more than a dozen conversations with world leaders. Since mid-December, he has talked to Putin by phone five times—more than twice the number of calls between Moscow and Washington in the same period.

Beyond the palpable sense of urgency, what Macron is trying to achieve looks more like a balancing act. On the one hand, with the French Presidential elections just two months away, he seems intent on establishing himself as Europe’s leader—a role previously held by Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor. On the other, he is following the hard line adopted by the United States and its NATO partners, including the rejection of Russia’s demands that NATO limit its military activity in Ukraine and that it bar the former Soviet territory from ever entering the alliance, while remaining more open than the Biden Administration and some other European nations to considering Putin’s security concerns. The situation seemed to escalate on Friday, with the Times reporting that Russia and its separatist allies in eastern Ukraine are, according to Kyiv and Washington, ramping up military preparations. Can Macron’s frenetic mediation help resolve the crisis, or will it simply be what the French call un coup d’épée dans l’eau, or a sword stroke in the water—an action that produces no effect?

The French President has a history of trying to cultivate personal ties with autocratic figures. He did it with Donald Trump—initially, at least—in a number of bonding events that included a “double date” at Mt. Vernon, with the First Lady, Melania, and the Première Dame, Brigitte. “It’s always important for Macron, the personal side of relationships,” Tara Varma, the head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “He wants to open a new chapter of French foreign policy,” she said, one that includes rekindling relations with Moscow.

At first, Macron’s eagerness to engage directly with Russia caused some concern among France’s allies. Only two weeks after being sworn in, in May, 2017, he invited Putin to the Palace of Versailles, greeted the former K.G.B. officer on a red carpet, and held a joint news conference with him in the palace. While Macron did not shy away from discussing subjects such as the war in Syria and the role of Russian media in spreading disinformation, he insisted on maintaining an open dialogue with Moscow. Macron welcomed Putin again, in 2019, at the Fort of Brégançon, the Presidential summer retreat on the Mediterranean, where he acknowledged “this great power that is Russia” and offered to build, together, “a new security architecture for our Europe.” He doubled down a week later at a gathering of French Ambassadors. “Pushing Russia away from Europe is a profound strategic error, because we will push Russia either into an isolation that increases tensions or into alliances with other great powers such as China,” Macron said.

At the time, Macron’s policy troubled his European partners, who felt that he had not sufficiently taken into account their security concerns with Russia. “There are many countries in Europe for which Russia is an existential threat, and they must be involved in the decision-making process,” Varma said, referring to Poland and the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which fear becoming the next target of Putin’s expansionism. Along with Germany and the Netherlands, these countries were made uneasy by any initiative that could lead to the lifting of economic sanctions that the European Union imposed on Russia after the invasion of Crimea. “There was a hint of complacency,” Varma said, pointing to Macron’s failure to coördinate with his European partners.

France has been a somewhat unruly ally to the U.S. since the Cold War, often trying to assert its independence on the world scene, as when Charles de Gaulle decided to pull out of NATO’s integrated military structure in the nineteen-sixties. Macron shocked his Western partners in 2019, when, in a blunt interview with The Economist, he declared that NATO was experiencing “brain death.” He later explained that he’d meant the comment as a “wake-up call” to prompt a reflection on the alliance’s strategic goals. But it came at a time when the relationship between Europe and Washington was already severely strained. Trump, accusing the E.U. of taking advantage of the U.S. in trade agreements, had imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from the Continent, and threatened additional taxes on eleven billion dollars of European products. The Biden Administration brought a softening of tone—and a rollback of tariffs—but also a shift in the U.S. geopolitical focus to Asia, and to China in particular, which further rankled Europeans. Last October, Biden’s announcement that the U.S. and the U.K. would help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines to counter China in the region led the Australian government to withdraw from a sixty-six-billion-dollar deal to buy French-built submarines, infuriating Paris. Biden soon patched things up with Macron, acknowledging that the U.S. had been “clumsy.”

Now NATO—and U.S. engagement in Europe—has been revitalized by the threat of a potentially full-scale war on the Continent. And Macron is striving to leverage his personal connection with Putin to prevent it. But he seems to have learned the lessons of 2019, taking care to conduct some preliminary consultative diplomacy. A French official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that Macron had the U.S.’s full support. “They tell us what they are doing, and we debrief them on what we do,” the official said. Muriel Domenach, the French Ambassador to NATO, retweeted a list of calls that Macron had with other heads of state in the lead-up to his Moscow visit. They included discussions with Biden, Zelensky, and Putin (several with each); the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson; and the leaders of the three Baltic states and a few other nations. This inclusive stance was on full display on Tuesday, in Berlin, when Macron debriefed Scholz and Duda on his visit to the Kremlin, resurrecting an old, informal compact, the so-called Weimar Triangle, which had been instituted after the Cold War to boost over-all coöperation between the three countries.

One of Macron’s proposals to solve the current crisis is to revive the “new security architecture” that he pitched to Putin in 2019. “These next few weeks should lead us to bring to fruition a European proposal to build a new order of security and stability,” he told the European Parliament in Strasbourg, last month, after France assumed the rotating, six-month presidency of the E.U. But he was careful to add, “We must build it among Europeans, then share it with our allies within the NATO framework. And then offer it for negotiation to Russia.”

Exactly what this new order would look like and how it could prevent a war remains unclear. “It’s a bit ambiguous,” Anne de Tinguy, a senior researcher at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, in Paris, said. “This is part of his desire for strategic empowerment of Europe vis-à-vis the United States, and therefore vis-à-vis NATO,” she said, “but still in coöperation with NATO and the U.S.” A more concrete option, which France and Germany have been promoting in recent days, would repurpose a moribund peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, known as Minsk II, to de-escalate the crisis. Minsk II, which was negotiated in the Belarusian capital in 2015, was meant to resolve a conflict in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas, where Russia-backed separatists had seized swaths of territory. It offered a path to reintegrate the separatist areas into Ukraine, while giving Russia some avenues to influence Ukrainian politics. But disagreements between Kyiv and Moscow over such matters as the degree of autonomy granted to the Donbas rebels, and whether they would have the ability to block Ukraine from joining NATO, prevented Minsk II from being fully implemented. Still, Macron said on Tuesday, after speaking with Putin and Zelensky, that both leaders were open to pursuing this solution, calling it the “only path on which peace can be built.”