The European Union has to make bold decisions to defend Ukraine, pre-empting any US decision to withhold or reduce its military support, Emmanuel Macron has said.
In a speech in Sweden, which hopes to be the next country to join Nato, the French president also said the future security architecture of Europe, including arms control agreements covering European territory, could no longer be settled simply by the US and Russia, and Europe had to have a right to determine its own future.
His remarks were designed as a warning to Europe that it needs to ramp up its whole defence effort and prepare for the possibility that either Joe Biden will be unable to push his military assistance budget for Ukraine through Congress, or that later in the year he is defeated in a presidential election by an isolationist Donald Trump.
But Macron also argued that if Europe did step up, and helped to prevent a Russian victory, the US through Nato could no longer have a monopoly in determining future relations with Moscow.
Speaking at the Swedish defence academy alongside Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, Macron said: “This is a decisive and testing moment for Europe. We must be ready to act to defend and support Ukraine whatever it takes and whatever America decides.”
He added: “Europe had been lucky to have America as a partner but we have to be lucid. Ukraine is part of the European continent and whatever America decides we have to take the right and bold decisions to support Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.”
Insisting that Europe must do whatever it takes for years to come, and at whatever cost, he said it must be made impossible for Russia to win, since if it did then Europe would be without a functioning security architecture with consequences in Nato’s eastern flank, the Caucasus and central Asia.
Macron said: “The real cost to us of a Russian victory in the short and long run is too high for all of us.”
He said it would require Europe scaling up its own defence production effort so that Ukraine can be in a position to negotiate a sustainable peace
The French president praised the way the EU had responded to Russian aggression for two years, including by putting the European defence industry on a war footing, increasing spending and developing more common capacities.
But he said: “Even though we can be proud of recent decisions, we have to do much more.” If the EU compared spending on defence with the way Vladimir Putin had readapted his entire defence budget, the EU had not done enough, he said.
Macron said: “Russia managed to completely readapt that system, so we have to react and even overreact to be alongside with Ukrainians.” Calling for a strengthening of production, he said Europe had to be ready to take national and European decisions that pre-empted any US decision to minimise vulnerability. He insisted his call for greater European defence interoperability need not be seen as undermining Nato.
He also called for greater European cooperation and autonomy on energy. “For years and years we thought trading and exchanging energy with Russia was the best way to prevent a war,” he said. “This was a mistake. It was the best way to suffer from a war and suffer from a unilateral decision.”
Macron said that in future European energy needed a greater diversity of suppliers.
He said the invasion in Russia occurred in part because Europe had been a geopolitical minority with strategic defence negotiations conducted solely by the US and Russia, leaving the EU largely excluded.
The arms controls and security treaties “affecting our territory were decided by the big guys, and not by the Europeans”, he said.
“In the future when it is about the intermediate nuclear range forces treaty, when it is about deployments, when it is about arms control for today and tomorrow, when it is about designing an architecture of security, we have to be the one to decide.
“Our involvement with Ukraine is not just to prevent a Russian victory but for us to decide our own future and to be around the table because Ukraine is part of our continent.”
Macron added: “There is no future for ourselves and our children if we are not in a situation to build the new architecture of security of arms control in our neighbourhood. We have to be the one who decides for ourselves and not delegate it to others, even if they are very good allies, because they live on the other side of the ocean.”
