French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal that Russia receive security guarantees as part of future talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine was met with sharp criticism in Kyiv and the Baltic states on Sunday, the Financial Times reported.

The subject of these security guarantees was raised by Moscow late last year, a request that was then, until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the subject of intense and ultimately failed diplomatic negotiations, a request Washington deemed unacceptable.

Russia specifically demanded the withdrawal of NATO’s military infrastructure into position by 1997, that is, before the Alliance’s eastward expansion, and a promise that there would be no further expansion of NATO to the former Soviet states, especially Ukraine. .

Now the French President Emmanuel Macron drew attention to this topic again. In an interview given to the TF1 TV channel, recorded during a state visit to the United States, the Elysée leader said that Europe should prepare its future security architecture, and the West as a whole should consider how to solve Russia’s security problems if Russian President Vladimir Putin agrees to negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine.

“This means that one of the essential points that we have to address – as President Putin has always said – is the fear of NATO reaching its gates and deploying weapons that can threaten Russia,” Macron explained, according to Reuters.

“This topic will be part of the topics on peace, so we have to prepare what we are ready to do, which is how we will protect our allies and member states and how we will give guarantees to Russia on the day it returns to the talks. table,” the French president continued.

But his proposal was met with sharp criticism in Kyiv. “Does anyone want to give security guarantees to a terrorist and murderous state?” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the NSDC, wrote on Twitter. “Instead of Nuremberg, shall we sign an agreement and shake hands?” he added, thus proposing to create a tribunal that would judge Russians guilty in the same way as the Nazis were judged after the Second World War.

Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi, in turn, claimed that the whole world needs security guarantees from Russia, and the latter should bear responsibility. “The civilized world needs ‘security guarantees’ in the face of the barbaric intentions of post-Putin Russia,” Podolyak also wrote on Twitter.

Baltic officials also disagreed with Macron’s proposal. “The idea that the West can stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine by providing Russia with security guarantees forces us to fall into the trap of Putin’s narrative that the West and Ukraine are responsible for this war and Russia is an innocent victim,” said the vice-premier of Latvia. According to Minister Artis Pabriks, quoted by the Financial Times.

For his part, former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius also stated on Twitter that currently “Russia has all security guarantees as long as it does not attack, annex or occupy its neighbors” and “if one wants to create a new security architecture that would allow a terrorist state to continue its methods of intimidation, should think again.”

As the war in Ukraine enters its tenth month, Russian-Ukrainian negotiations remain at an impasse, according to all sides. The US and other allies of Ukraine say that President Zelenskyy must decide on what terms he will be willing to negotiate with Moscow, which, however, believes that Washington forced Kyiv away from the negotiating table in the hope that Western military aid would allow Ukraine to end the conflict. , defeating Russia on the battlefield. So far, Zelenskyi is making any new negotiations with Russia conditional on the withdrawal of its troops from Ukraine, and US President Joe Biden is also not open to negotiations with Putin.

(Source: Agerpres)