French President Emmanuel Macron said it is paramount to provide Ukraine with “tangible and credible guarantees”. Speaking at the Globsec summit in Bratislava, Macron said: “It will be the subject of collective discussions in the coming weeks.”
Ahead of the NATO summit scheduled for July in Vilnius Macron said Kyiv today “protects Europe” and it is in the interests of all Westerners that it “has credible security guarantees with us in a multilateral framework”.
The French leader was forced to backtrack from claims he made in 2019 about NATO being “braindead”.
He said: “In December 2019, I said a harsh sentence towards NATO – I remind you of the divisions that existed within it, between Turkey and various other powers – speaking of ‘brain death’.
“I can say today that Vladimir Putin woke him up with the worst electroshock.”
The French leader then travelled to Moldova on Thursday for the European Political Community meeting, which embraces all European nations other than Russia and Belarus.
At the gathering, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky asked for more support from European allies to defend his country against Russia’s invasion.
The meeting gathered the heads of state and government from 47 countries but its attention was on the continent’s south and east — a region pushed to a turning point in its relationship with Moscow because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.
The 27-nation EU wants to use the summit to reach out to many Eastern European countries that spent decades either within the Soviet Union or under its immediate sphere of influence, and to bolster the continent’s unified response to Russian aggression.
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The choice to hold the summit in Moldova, a former Soviet republic of around 2.6million people, is seen as a message to the Kremlin both from the EU and the pro-Western Moldovan government, which received EU candidate status in June of last year at the same time as Ukraine.
As he addressed the gathered leaders at an opening ceremony, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte noted the significance of the summit’s location, only around 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Ukraine’s border.
“Our meeting today in Moldova speaks volumes. The country borders on Ukraine and here, the Russian threat is palpable,” Rutte said.
Moldova, Europe’s poorest country which is cradled by Ukraine on three sides, aspires to join the EU by the end of the decade, and has consistently signaled its support for Ukraine and taken in refugees fleeing the war.
Zelensky was the first foreign leader to arrive at Thursday’s summit venue, a 19th-century castle and vineyard around 35 kilometres (21 miles) from the capital, Chisinau. Dressed in his trademark olive green shirt and cargo pants, he sought to dispel doubts about his country’s accession to the EU and NATO, and told the assembled leaders that such doubts would be exploited by Moscow.
Since the start of the invasion, he said, “the limits of security in Europe have in fact been the limits of our determination, our ability to act together for the sake of the interests of our peoples and the whole of Europe. As much as we can reject doubt, we can reject the evil of aggression.”
Zelensky called for a continuation of Western military aid to Ukraine, saying it was saving lives and “literally accelerating peace.” He insisted that all countries that border Russia should be full members of the EU and NATO, since Moscow “tries to swallow only those who are outside of the common security space.”
“When there are no security guarantees, there are only war guarantees,” he said.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Macron will join European Council President Michel for one of the summit’s major meetings: discussions with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, two former Soviet Caucasian neighbour nations that have fought wars over a contested territory.
