Emmanuel Macron spoke to his people last night in a television address and told them that the future of Ukraine cannot be decided by America and Russia alone.
It can, and it probably will, after Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky signalled his intention to sign Donald Trump’s minerals deal, the first step in the peace plan drawn up by the USA. One of the curiosities of Macron’s speech was that he spent most of it warning about war, as America, Russia and Ukraine talk about peace. Putin’s bellicosity ‘knows no borders’, declared the French president, adding: ‘Who can believe today that Russia would stop at Ukraine?’.
The martial tone of Macron’s address provoked accusations of war-mongering from the French left and right
The martial tone of Macron’s address provoked accusations of war-mongering from the French left and right. Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise claimed the president’s intention was to ‘scare us in order to impose a new round of social sacrifices on the people’
Laurent Jacobelli, an MP in Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, took a similar line, charging the president with ‘playing on fears and using the war in Ukraine to accelerate his federalist agenda’.
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