Kremlin rebuffs notion Macron made progress
KYIV, Ukraine — The Kremlin on Tuesday rebuffed the idea that French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin had made meaningful progress toward defusing the Ukraine crisis in their high-stakes meeting in Moscow.
Statements by Russian leaders appeared to undercut French diplomatic authority, and even credibility, just as Macron arrived in Ukraine to continue his shuttle diplomacy, with 130,000 Russian troops just outside Ukraine and the White House warning that an attack on Ukraine could be imminent.
Even before Macron’s plane touched down in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, rejected reports that the two presidents had reached any agreement to de-escalate, suggesting that it was the United States, not France, that had standing to negotiate such a deal.
“In the current situation, Moscow and Paris could not make a deal. France is an EU and NATO member,” he said. “France is not leading NATO.”
He also took issue with news reports quoting French officials as saying that Macron had left Moscow with commitments that Russian troops would not stay in neighboring Belarus after the completion of military exercises this month and that Russia would not conduct any new military maneuvers near Ukraine in the near future.
The deployment to Ukraine was always intended to be temporary, but Russia made no promise about when it would end, Peskov said.
Putin and Macron held a five-hour, one-on-one meeting at the Kremlin on Monday night and then a joint news conference. Putin swung between ominous and something verging on optimistic, keeping his comments vague enough to keep the world guessing.
In Kyiv on Tuesday to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Macron said, “You must not underestimate the tension that surrounds the situation that we are living through, its unprecedented nature.”
Negotiators from France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia are expected to meet again in Berlin this week to continue to work through disagreements around the terms of a 2015 cease-fire.
Zelenskyy said that he viewed the upcoming Berlin meeting positively, although he did not yet see an indication that Russia was willing to end its occupation of Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized in a 2014 invasion, and pull Russian troops from the eastern Ukraine region known as Donbas. Ukraine has said that a Russian withdrawal is a prerequisite for any deal.