German, French and Polish leaders meet to discuss support for Ukraine
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00:00 For more, we can speak to our foreign editor, Ketivan Gordzisztany.
00:03 Hello to you, Ketivan.
00:05 Tell us just how urgent is this meeting?
00:08 Well, it is urgent in the sense that all of these three leaders want to show this European
00:15 unity when it comes to the support for Ukraine.
00:19 And these three countries are really the sort of leaders in supporting Ukraine.
00:23 Germany, of course, is the second largest supplier of military aid after the United
00:28 States.
00:29 Poland, because of its geographic proximity with Ukraine, has been at the forefront of
00:34 helping those who have fled Ukraine.
00:37 And France, of course, is playing a big role strategically and politically.
00:41 But you have seen a sort of stagnation in that support for Ukraine because of some of
00:48 the disagreements that you've talked about.
00:50 For example, there is the pressure on the Germans, who have so far refused to send those
00:54 long-range missiles.
00:57 And they've frustrated a little bit some of the other European members with that.
01:02 So there'll be a lot of discussion showing unity and working out how they can best and
01:08 better help the Ukrainian, given what is happening right now, especially in the United States,
01:14 where you're seeing that Congress is blocking that extra military aid for the Ukrainians.
01:20 And the Europeans sort of see the need for Europe to step up, given the sort of stagnation
01:27 in the United States.
01:28 And so they want to also work out some of their differences, but also look forward as
01:33 to how they can step up, put some more pressure on Russia and help Ukraine more right now,
01:40 at a crucial moment for the Ukrainians.
01:41 Yeah.
01:42 And let's listen to a clip from that interview that Macron gave.
01:45 He reiterated his position that no support for Ukraine could be ruled out, even sending
01:50 Western troops.
01:51 Take a listen.
01:52 If we decide to be weak in the face of someone with no limits, someone who has crossed all
02:01 the lines he himself once set, if we naively tell him we won't go any further than X or
02:08 Y, that's not choosing peace.
02:10 That's choosing defeat.
02:13 We have limited our vocabulary too much.
02:16 We are not escalating things.
02:18 We are not at war with Russia, but we must not let Russia win either.
02:22 We must not let Russia win.
02:25 Kelvin, where do Germany and Poland stand on the issue?
02:28 Well, Germany is really opposed to that idea.
02:32 And Olaf Scholz was really one of the main leaders who came out to sort of contradict
02:38 Emmanuel Macron and said that there was no plan on sending European troops or NATO troops
02:44 to Ukraine.
02:45 And there seems to be a sort of a discord, a disagreement between sort of Western Europe
02:51 and Eastern Europe and the United States joining the Western Europeans by saying we do not
02:57 have plans to send any troops on the ground in Ukraine.
03:01 And Emmanuel Macron is sort of the outlier in Western Europe, putting this out there.
03:06 But the polls are sort of in between because you had the initial reaction from the prime
03:12 minister, Donald Tusk, that was we do not have plans to send troops on the ground in
03:18 Ukraine.
03:19 But his foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, has been making the rounds this past week,
03:24 especially in the United States, saying basically that he supported Emmanuel Macron's idea.
03:31 And during a breakfast with reporters, he actually said, I think President Macron feels
03:35 that we've been deterring ourselves, that we've been a little too helpful to President
03:40 Putin in saying what we will not do.
03:43 So he is supporting this idea of strategic ambiguity about what we will do next when
03:48 it comes to reacting to Russia.
03:51 And it seems that Emmanuel Macron is also gaining the support of some of the Baltic
03:56 states, for example, with the Lithuanian president saying we have to stop drawing red lines for
04:03 ourselves.
04:04 And this sort of echoes the message from the other capitals in the Baltic states.
04:09 So you're seeing this discussion, and I think that is what the French president was trying
04:14 to do, is put this out there to insist on the negotiation, to show maybe some of these
04:21 disagreements, but to put Vladimir Putin on the back foot so that he doesn't know exactly
04:26 where the Europeans will go next.
04:29 And you're seeing there the Eastern Europeans who are facing Russia more clearly and who
04:35 know that the threat is much closer for them than it is for Western Europe.
04:39 And you're seeing that disagreement play out in public.
04:43 And I think this meeting is also about sort of showing that, yes, there might be strategic
04:47 disagreement, but they're united in helping Ukraine.
04:49 All right, Ketivan, thank you very much.
04:51 Ketivan Gorjastani, our foreign editor.