top Russia-Ukraine crisis: France Prez Emmanuel Macron tries to avert a European war and reshape European security

For Macron, the chance to lead the effort to create a new European security architecture has placed him front and center on perhaps the biggest stage of his presidency, just two months before elections. It has given him an opportunity to step into a larger leadership role for all of Europe and to put some flesh on his sometimes grandiose visions for a Europe allied with, but more independent of, the United States. The standoff with Russia over Ukraine enters a critical phase this week. The United States has snapped NATO to attention and moved forces east. Moscow has readied still more forces on the Ukraine border. But beneath those tensions, diplomatic avenues are being feverishly explored and the outlines of potential solutions, still amorphous, may be taking form: President Joe Biden meets Monday with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and President Emmanuel Macron of France, at the same time, will visit his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow before traveling With the Biden administration staking out a hard line, Germany lying low, and Putin seemingly determined to force a solution to Russia’s security grievances, it is Macron who has positioned himself at the center of the diplomacy in Europe. To Moscow, he is a “quality interlocutor,” For Macron the chance to lead the effort to create a new European security architecture has placed him front and center on perhaps the biggest stage of his presidency, just two months before elections. It has given him an opportunity to step into a larger leadership role for all of Europe and to put some flesh on his sometimes grandiose visions for a Europe allied with, but more independent of, the United States. “Do we want a Russia that is totally aligned with China or one that is somewhere between China, and Europe?” Bruno Le Maire, the French economy minister, who is very close to Macron, said Friday as Russia and China declared “no limits” to their friendship and called on NATO to abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches. The risks are as great as the potential payoffs for Macron. Solutions to the crisis seem fiendishly elusive for now, even if Putin has appeared less directly threatening toward Ukraine over the past week. The French president has a double purpose: to stop the war that a massive Russian troop concentration at the Ukrainian border threatens; and to allay the festering Russian grievances that NATO’s expansion eastward in 1999 and 2004 provoked, with the eventual aim of integrating Russia Instability is the Russian strength. Stability is our strength, he said. NATO and the European Union expansion were a very powerful way to secure democracy in Eastern European countries. But we got out of it what we could. If you believe in the superiority of the Western economic and political model, as I do, stability makes that evident, and spheres of influence are a pretty good way to establish that. The chance to lead the effort to create a new European security architecture has placed him front and center on perhaps the biggest stage of his presidency, just two months before elections.