PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants to include European partners in a resumption of dialogue with Russian leader Vladimir Putin nearly four years after Moscow's attack of Ukraine. He spoke after dispatching a top adviser to Moscow last week, in the first such meeting since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. "What did I gain? Confirmation that Russia does not want peace right now," he said in an interview with several European newspapers including Germany's Suddeutsche Zeitung. "But above all, we have rebuilt those channels of discussion at a technical level," he said in the interview released on Tuesday. "My wish is to share this with my European partners and to have a well-organised European approach," he added.
Dialogue with Putin should take place without "too many interlocutors, with a given mandate", he said. Macron said last year he believed Europe should reach back out to Putin, rather than leaving the United States alone to take the lead in negotiations to end Russia's war against Ukraine. "Whether we like Russia or not, Russia will still be there tomorrow," Suddeutsche Zeitung quoted the French president as saying. "It is therefore important that we structure the resumption of a European discussion with the Russians, without naivety, without putting pressure on the Ukrainians — but also so as not to depend on third parties in this discussion."
The Kremlin said on Tuesday it welcomed Macron's approach and was awaiting a concrete proposition for further talks. "Russia has always advocated maintaining dialogue, which, in our view and firm belief, can help resolve the most urgent and most difficult problems," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. After Macron sent his adviser Emmanuel Bonne to the Kremlin last week, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had said Putin was ready to receive the French leader's call. "If you want to call and discuss something seriously, then call," he said in an interview to state-run broadcaster RT.
The French and Russian presidents last spoke in July, in their first known phone talks in over two-and-a-half years. The French leader tried in a series of phone calls in 2022 to warn Putin against attacking Ukraine and travelled to Moscow early that year. He kept up phone contact with Putin after the attack but talks had ceased after a September 2022 phone call.
Meanwhile, Russian forces killed an 11-year-old girl and her mother in bomb strikes on the embattled city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine, local authorities announced on Tuesday. Seven more people were wounded in the attack on the industrial hub that Russian forces are slowly clawing their way towards. "The dead are an 11-year-old girl and her mother. Among the wounded is a 7-year-old girl," regional official Vadym Filashkin wrote on social media. He posted images showing several buildings on fire and windows blown out from rooms scattered with debris.
Filashkin said rescue workers were at the scene and that the number of casualties was still being determined. "Everyday in (the) Donetsk region brings new and ongoing war crimes by the Russians," he added. The wider Donetsk region, where Sloviansk is located, is one of five regions the Kremlin claims as part of Russia. In 2014, Kremlin-backed separatists briefly captured Sloviansk amid the war in eastern Ukraine that erupted following nationwide pro-democracy protests and the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula.
Ukraine and France have agreed to start joint weapons production, Ukraine's defence minister said, after hosting his French counterpart in Kyiv.
France has been an important ally for Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion nearly four years ago, supplying Kyiv with military aid and political backing. The two countries signed a letter of intent paving the way for "large-scale joint projects in the defence-industrial sector", Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote on Telegram after meeting his French counterpart Catherine Vautrin in Kyiv. — AFP
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