“What is NATO doing? Is it led by Russia?”: with each speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a little more impatient with Westerners, at the risk of blurring their message of unity and solidarity with Ukrainians.
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Since the beginning of the Russian offensive on February 24, he has constantly called for a no-fly zone to stop the bombing of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure and reverse the course of the war.
Volodymyr Zelensky, who has become the symbol of Ukrainian resistance, is also calling for more weapons, including planes, beyond the thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles already delivered by the Americans, the British and the countries of the European Union.
“You have at least 20,000 tanks (…) Ukraine demanded one percent of all your tanks! Give them to us or sell them to us!”, he launched on March 24.
The countries of the Atlantic Alliance stubbornly refuse to commit to enforcing a no-fly zone, which would mean their direct involvement in the conflict against the Russians.
Ditto for the delivery of planes or tanks to Ukraine. “Today, nobody crosses this limit because it is obvious that it characterizes a cobelligerence”, summarizes Emmanuel Macron.
“Fear of Russia”
The French president is one of the few Western leaders to still speak to Vladimir Putin and to offer his mediation in the conflict, in agreement with Volodymyr Zelensky.
If France remains discreet about its military aid to Kyiv – so as not to give, it says, information exploitable by the Russians – it has also delivered anti-tank missiles to Kyiv, according to the daily Le Monde.
The Ukrainian president nevertheless had rather harsh words towards his French counterpart in an interview with the British weekly The Economist broadcast this weekend.
Emmanuel Macron is “afraid of Russia”, he launched, after the French president’s remarks on non-cobelligerence. “To be honest, (Boris) Johnson helps more,” he added.
In the process, the French presidency saw fit to recall that all Westerners, including the British, had the same position, namely “to provide defensive and lethal weapons”, but with “a red line”, non-cobelligerence.
In the same interview, President Zelensky also clearly singled out Germany as one of the countries for which “it would be better if the war ended quickly because Russia is a big market for them and their economy in suffers”.
“Founding Act”
Hungarian President Viktor Orban, reputed to be close to Russia, is not spared either, even if he has rallied to European sanctions against Russia. “You have to decide once and for all which side you are on!” he heard himself say.
For Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, political communication specialist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, in this crisis, “everyone compensates by the violence of their expressions, their words, the absence in a certain way” of results.
“You have to go very far (in the arrest, editor’s note) to be credible,” she told AFP. But the risk is also to go “too far” and to “discredit”, she warns.
For now, however, Volodymyr Zelensky retains a key advantage in terms of image. “He gets angry because he thinks it’s not going fast enough. But he made the choice to stay in Kyiv, he is there, he resists. Everything else is positive by this founding act”, adds the researcher.
His speech also risks fueling the divisions that still threaten to resurface in Europe even though the EU has managed to display exemplary unity since the start of the war in Ukraine.
In Eastern Europe, Germany and France are still suspected of wanting a “de-escalation at any price” with Moscow, underlines Wojtciech Lorenz, analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) in Warsaw.
“When you define red lines, you give the opponent leeway to do what they want,” he told AFP. “The risk is great that European unity will evaporate when Russia shows itself ready to negotiate,” he anticipates.