“We were right from the beginning.” This has been the position of the leaders of La France Insoumise (LFI) regarding Ukraine, repeated repeatedly in the media in recent days since Donald Trump’s abrupt halt to Kyiv’s arms supply (officially restarted on Wednesday). Only negotiation, they insist, can end the conflict, and all those who have merely provided material assistance to Ukrainians for the past three years – while denying, according to LFI, the role of diplomacy – have only prolonged the war and the suffering of these people. The result, LFI officials regret, is that negotiations are now taking place under pressure and on terms unfavourable to Ukraine dictated by Donald Trump.

“We might have expected the President of the Republic to make some sort of mea culpa,” said the movement’s coordinator, Manuel Bompard, on 6 March on RMC, the day after Emmanuel Macron’s intervention on the subject. “How did we find ourselves in this situation, where for months and months we were told that the solution to the war in Ukraine would be military? For months we were told we must stand behind the United States, and now we have the impression of a somewhat stunned French political class because the new American administration has turned its back on it. So I think he has a share of responsibility that he should have acknowledged.”

Opposition to the Franco-Ukrainian Security Agreement

“Macron should have almost apologised,” added MEP Manon Aubry on the same day on CNews. “What has France done, what has the EU done for three years? First, they thought there was a military solution to this war. [...] Then, they relied on the United States to try to find a solution to the war, and finally they say they might consider a diplomatic outcome. But how much time wasted! It’s a million deaths [...] on the Ukrainian front, because France and the EU were content with financial support, necessary and welcome, but refused diplomatic solutions.”

Finally, MP Mathilde Panot, on France 2: “For three years, there has been an almost total alignment with the United States. Certainly, now there is a change with Trump, but we have been saying for a long time that France must be independent in the service of peace, and we were right on this point. Emmanuel Macron [should have listened to] Jean-Luc Mélenchon for three years, about building a European framework for negotiations, [that] there should have been a conference to find a diplomatic solution with mutual security guarantees.”

LFI was therefore right, according to them, before everyone else, to the point of apparently having anticipated the demands of the Kremlin’s master. When questioned about their opposition to the Franco-Ukrainian security agreement of March 2024, which supported, in particular, Ukraine’s candidacy for the EU and NATO, Bompard responded on 3 March on TF1: “Everyone has understood that Ukraine will not join NATO because in the security conditions necessary for lasting peace, obviously Russia will never accept it, so we were rather right at the time.”

When asked by CheckNews for more details on what France and the EU should – or could – have done in recent years, Manon Aubry reiterates LFI’s position: “The EU should have been at the heart of this diplomatic initiative to create the framework for discussion and ensure mediation until an agreement was reached. We were excluded from this because the EU was never diplomatically proactive, and we are now spectators of Trump’s diplomatic reality show.” As for the basis of these negotiations, on the concessions that could have been made by either side, “it is not for us, France Insoumise, or me, Manon Aubry, to determine the exact conditions of peace. It is the very logic of a peace process to negotiate between two adversarial parties, here the Russians and Ukrainians, to reach a compromise.”

Have France and the EU, however, really “refused diplomatic solutions” for three years, limiting themselves to sending weapons to Ukraine, to the point of being co-responsible for the continuation of the war? Could a negotiated peace have been achieved earlier?

“Not Humiliating Russia”

From the beginning of the conflict, Emmanuel Macron, particularly targeted by the Insoumis, has in reality spared no effort, at the risk of appearing naive, even weak, on the international stage. On 7 February 2022, as Russian sabre-rattling at the Ukrainian border became increasingly insistent, he went to Moscow. Two weeks before the Russian invasion, the Élysée believed it had obtained a commitment from Putin “not to take new military initiatives, which allows for de-escalation.”

Four days before Russian troops entered Ukraine on 24 February, he was still on the phone with the Kremlin’s master, trying to organise a meeting with Joe Biden in Geneva, which would never take place. In the first months of the war, he would even be criticised for his leniency towards the former KGB spy. In May 2022, a month after the discovery of the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha by the Russians, he stated before the European Parliament that we must “never give in to the temptation of humiliation, nor to the spirit of revenge” towards Russia.

These statements were reiterated in June of the same year in the regional press: “We must not humiliate Russia so that when the fighting stops, we can build an exit path through diplomatic channels.” These remarks would draw fire from several European leaders. “The French president is still looking for ways to spare the war criminal Putin humiliation. What would he say to this little girl in Ukraine?” wondered, among others, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Estonian Parliament, Marko Mihkelson, on his Facebook page, above a photo of a child with an amputated leg on her hospital bed, as reported by La Voix du Nord.

“I thought that through trust and intellectual discussion, I could find a path with Putin,” he would explain in a documentary broadcast on France 2 in late June 2022. “He hoped to change his mind. [He] had met with him a lot in previous years, since the Versailles meeting in 2017. He thought he had certain advantages in this regard. He found that it wasn’t possible, so he stopped the dialogue,” analysed Sylvie Bermann, former French ambassador to Beijing, London and Moscow, to Public Sénat in early 2024. And “when Emmanuel Macron [later] said we shouldn’t humiliate Russia, he was taking a long-term view. At that time, it wasn’t obvious that it would be a long and hard war.” But “when he saw that this war was continuing, Putin’s radicalisation, he stopped his contacts.”

Ukraine “Puppet of the West”

During the same period, in spring 2022, as Russian troops were in great difficulty on the ground, negotiations took place between Russia and Ukraine, first in Belarus, then in Turkey. Before finally breaking off in May. While some believe that the Anglo-Saxons bear some responsibility for this failure, Dimitri Minic, a researcher at IFRI, believes that these exchanges did not succeed “because after failing to subdue Kyiv, Moscow persisted in demanding Ukraine’s capitulation. Putin did not go to Ukraine for territories or the defence of Russian speakers, but to subdue an ’insolent’ nation that wanted to choose its own destiny.”

For this researcher, “accusing Emmanuel Macron of not wanting to find a peaceful solution is therefore not only false but also very revealing of the fact that the agency of Ukrainians is completely erased by the central belief of these far-left personalities, which in fact coincides with that of the Russian elites in power: Ukraine is the puppet of the West.” As for the “peace” rehashed by LFI leaders, according to him, “they seem to assume that this notion is an absolute and non-dialectical category, ignoring the complexity of international relations. We must understand that some states wish us harm and are not ready to negotiate fairly or sincerely; the diversity of rationalities is not sufficiently taken into account.” Especially since “’peace’ can mean everything and nothing: the ’peace’ of Vichy is not the ’peace’ of 8 May 1945.”

For the EU as for France, promoting negotiation also implied, above all, that the belligerents, and in particular the attacking country, Russia, intended to negotiate. Yet nearly a year after the invasion, in late January 2023, international relations researcher Thorniké Gordadzé (Sciences Po Paris, Jacques Delors Institute) noted on The Conversation website, the double speak of the Kremlin’s master: “Putin talks about peace while continuing to pour the most abject propaganda onto the Russian population, through television totally under his orders, which goes as far as calling for the murder of Ukrainians, the destruction of their state and the invasion of the Baltic countries, Poland, Germany, even the United Kingdom and America. These actions are hardly compatible with a genuine desire for peace, and we would be excessively gullible if we did not suspect Vladimir Putin of wanting to use peace as a tactical instrument, without ever renouncing his strategic objective: the destruction of Ukraine and the territorial extension of his state at the expense of his neighbours.”

Budapest Memorandum

Nearly two years after the beginning of the conflict, Gilles Andréani, associate professor at Sciences-Po and former director of the Centre for Analysis and Forecasting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reminded us in an article published in the journal Telos that “not only does Putin display, in his public outings, quiet confidence in the fact that time is on his side, that Western aid will dry up and that Russian forces have regained the initiative, but on two [recent] occasions, he displayed increased war aims; he is further than ever from negotiating.” On 14 December 2023, during his annual review, Putin, Andréani recalls, still repeated: “There will be peace when we achieve our objectives [...]. They have not changed, let me remind you how we formulated them: denazification, demilitarisation and a neutral status for Ukraine.” Denazification remains “relevant”; “as for demilitarisation, if they don’t want an agreement, we will resort to other means, including military ones.” For Andréani, “he is essentially repeating what he had already said in the past: he wants to achieve his objectives through negotiation or by force, it doesn’t matter, but he doesn’t change them. (...) This is exactly saying that he doesn’t want to negotiate.”

This mantra for peace from Insoumis officials is also, and always, accompanied by a relativistic discourse on the causes of the war. Indeed, while LFI leaders begin each of their interventions by assuring that Ukraine is indeed the victim and Russia the aggressor, the evocation of the Russian invasion continues to be surrounded by mitigating circumstances. In his speech on international issues on 6 March, Jean-Luc Mélenchon thus assured: “All this didn’t fall from the sky, the war didn’t start one morning just like that, because Mr Putin is, it seems, mad. [...] All this started because the Soviet empire collapsed in 1991 and for the first time in modern history an empire collapses and there was no discussion about its borders and about [those] of the states that it previously included in its space. That’s how no border was discussed. And when you don’t discuss borders in time, when you don’t sign agreements, borders impose themselves on you. They come back to the table and war starts again.”

A largely false assertion: the 1994 Budapest Memorandum had precisely the objective of guaranteeing Ukraine’s borders, in exchange for the repatriation of Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia. In this treaty, “Russia, as well as the United Kingdom and the United States, reaffirmed their commitment to Ukraine, to respect its independence, sovereignty and existing borders,” explained Thomas D. Grant, an expert in international law, to CheckNews in March 2022. “In the memorandum, Russia also reaffirmed its duty to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine, and committed that no Russian weapon would ever be used against Ukraine, except in self-defence or otherwise, in accordance with the UN Charter.” Thirty years later, Russia annexed Crimea and contributed to destabilising the Donbas.

Still present, finally, in LFI’s discourse, is the idea, or rather the illusion, of a free consultation of the Donbas populations: “The populations must be consulted: if the population of the Donbas decided that it is Russian, then it is Russian!” repeated Mélenchon on 6 March, pretending to ignore that the territory has been occupied by Moscow for ten years, that a million Ukrainians have had to go into exile, and that all pro-Kyiv leaders have had to flee or have been assassinated, as historian Galia Ackerman reminded France 24 last year. And that, incidentally, the two regions concerned (Donetsk and Luhansk) voted 83% for the independence of Ukraine in 1991.

Luc Peillon

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