Three years after its brutal invasion by Russia, Ukraine is preparing for difficult negotiations around a potential ceasefire. In addition to having paid for this war with its blood – several hundred thousand dead and wounded – seen its economy ravaged and its population leave the country en masse, it risks being forced to cede territories and see those responsible for the multiple crimes committed by the Russian army escape justice.

Beyond these concrete losses comes a double symbolic defeat.

The first is the flood of insults inflicted on Ukraine by the new president of the United States in recent days. Donald Trump maintains cordial relations with Vladimir Putin, repeats to anyone who will listen that this war is “ridiculous” and, in a complete reversal of history, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, this “dictator”, would be responsible for triggering it. The adoption of this narrative and the manifest desire not to sanction Vladimir Putin have consequences that go well beyond Ukraine and constitute, according to some historians, “the most important challenge to the international order since 1939”.

The second is the growing distrust from the rest of the world: from being relatively consensual across Europe, aid to Ukraine is now contested to the point of becoming one of the most powerful fuels for far-right movements across the continent. In many countries in Latin America and Africa, the war in Ukraine has become a demonstration of Western hypocrisy and has paradoxically helped make Vladimir Putin a champion of the struggle for the emancipation of non-Western peoples.

All this has happened despite billions of euros in military and financial aid provided to Kyiv by its partners. France, which participated in this movement of support, could consider having done its part: it gave money, sent military equipment – wasn’t that all it could do?

In reality, a different kind of support for Ukraine was possible. More attentive to the concrete needs of Ukrainians, better understood and accepted by Europeans, more transparent and more coherent. It might not have been able to prevent Vladimir Putin’s relentlessness and the catastrophe of Donald Trump’s capitulation to him. But it would certainly have made European societies collectively stronger to face it.

“Isolate Putin: insulate homes”

To achieve this, it would have been necessary to pay more attention to the fate of Ukrainians, and less to that of French multinational energy, transport or defence companies.

Because having no words harsh enough for the Russian Federation, an “existential threat to Europeans” according to Emmanuel Macron, is one thing. Buying record volumes of liquefied natural gas from Russia at the same time is another. France increased its LNG imports by 81% in 2024, ensuring Moscow at least €2.68 billion in revenue.

This hypocrisy benefits TotalEnergies, which supplies Europe with Russian LNG. A different kind of support for Ukraine would have consisted of finding solutions to do without Russian liquefied gas, and fossil fuels in general. One solution exists: the energy transition. “Isolate Putin: insulate homes”, as a campaign by the European Greens effectively summarises. Europe is clearly not taking this route: the Strasbourg Parliament, under the impetus of its conservative majority, wants to dismantle the most ambitious European text on the subject, the Green Deal.

Fifteen days before the Russian invasion, Paris was putting its energy at the service of another French multinational: Alstom. As Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing to go to war, Emmanuel Macron, on a visit to Kyiv, was pressing him to finalise the signing of a contract worth nearly €1 billion between the Ukrainian state and the French railway giant. The images of this moment, immortalised in a documentary, provoke clear discomfort. Sincere support for Ukraine would have meant understanding that there are times when diplomacy and business do not mix well.

Once the Russian invasion was actually launched, Paris never stopped looking after its defence industry. French “donations” of military equipment quickly became sales. The €400 million of French “support funds” for Ukraine are equally misnamed: they are in fact purchases directed towards French defence industries. The French Minister of the Armed Forces even bluntly admitted it: the war in Ukraine creates “opportunities for French industries”.

One might respond that this is almost always how international aid works, that disinterested generosity does not exist, granted, but it is not forbidden to wish for a better world. Failing to change it right away, truly supporting Ukraine could have consisted, at the very least, of not publicly rejoicing in these “opportunities” shortly after paying respects at the “wall of heroes” of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, where hundreds of photos of Ukrainians killed during the war are lined up. This is called decency.

Pressing to improve workers’ rights

If France had paid more sincere attention to the Ukrainian population itself, what would it have seen?

That Ukrainians have, besides the war itself, a major concern: the dismantling of labour law in their country, accelerated over the past three years due to the conflict. Even the very large Ukrainian trade union confederations, which know how to be accommodating with the state and employers, believe that the situation is no longer tenable.

The Ukrainian left and civil society have been calling for over a year for European governments to try to influence these reforms carried out by the Ukrainian state by making certain aid conditional on compliance with international labour standards. They have not been heard.

Instead of this real solidarity with Ukrainians, the French government, like so many others, has supported aid and reconstruction programmes designed by liberal elites for other liberal elites. Reconstruction as envisaged today has not been imagined by the inhabitants of places destroyed by Russian artillery and aviation but by architectural firms eager to sell their smart city prototypes. The martyred city of Bakhmut had not finished counting its corpses before salespeople armed with rolling suitcases were already trying to sell the municipality new sewage systems.

Many Ukrainians hope that the reconstruction period will be synonymous with their country’s entry into the European Union. But, so far, this accession process has too often consisted of dictating profound reforms of the state apparatus to them from the outside and at a fast pace.

Really helping Ukrainians also means not further darkening their future by putting the noose of debt around their neck. It is urgent to ease Ukraine’s external debt and ensure that the millions of euros of “donations” announced to support and rebuild Ukraine are truly donations. For now, they are mostly loans that have increased the country’s external debt from $48 billion before the war to $115 billion by the end of 2024: 60% of the increase consists of EU loans.

International solidarity and social justice

Hanna Perekhoda, a Ukrainian left-wing historian and activist, goes even further. For her, there can be no truly effective support for Ukraine as long as there is not more equality and social justice in the societies of the countries concerned. “The aid that Western countries can offer to Ukraine lies not only in the military or economic domain, but in resolving their own internal legitimacy crisis”, she analyses for Mediapart.

This involves “urgent redistribution policies” that can “restore citizens’ trust”: “A solidary society is better able to support international commitments and increases in defence budgets (the necessity of which is now impossible to deny). Acting quickly for social equality is therefore not only an internal priority, but an essential condition for helping Ukraine.”

This will come at a price. American or European taxpayers, especially the most modest ones, should not pay it alone – at the risk that aid to Ukraine continues to be perceived as a distant policy decided by “an elite that makes the people pay”. Among the options for financing these donations: using the billions of euros in revenue from the frozen assets of the Bank of Russia in G7 countries, the European Union and Australia, as the EU has begun to do.

Not compromising on democracy

To prevent support for Ukraine from being seen as the decision of a few “elites”, it would have needed to be framed in a truly democratic context. In France, over the past three years, this has not always been the case.

Instead of involving the French people and their elected representatives in decisions, the executive has often preferred to present them with a fait accompli. At the end of February 2022, it committed the French army to a military operation in Romania (the Aigle mission, launched by NATO in response to the Russian invasion) without having it validated by Parliament, as provided for in Article 35 of the Constitution. In March 2024, it deemed it appropriate to ask Parliament for its opinion on a bilateral security agreement between France and Ukraine after having signed it.

A truly democratic framework is not limited to these essential public debates.

Military spending, whether French or European, has sharply increased since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The need to arm oneself to be able to defend oneself without being dependent on allies with an extremely worrying political trajectory, such as Donald Trump’s United States, is now quite widely shared, including on the left.

By proving unable to denounce Israel’s genocidal logic in Gaza as firmly as Putin’s murderous madness in Ukraine, Europe and the United States have shown their inconsistency.

But different support for Ukraine would have, at the very least, ensured that the control and transparency procedures for this spending were up to these challenges. Yet, they seem quite ineffective. Paris was able to inflate the figures of its military aid to Ukraine for months, as Mediapart revealed in March 2024, without anyone reacting. It also took press investigations to reveal that ten European states (including France until 2020) had continued to export weapons to Russia after the 2014 embargo.

Further from Ukraine, but symptomatic of the shortcomings of these control policies: the French people still do not have the right to know what precise weapons their state has sold to the Israeli authorities engaged in a probable genocide in Gaza. Paris nevertheless delivered €30 million worth of weapons to them in 2023.

As for knowing whether this money, when used to equip the French army, is well employed, we’ll have to try again later. These decisions are made in a closed circle of insiders, where the interests of the state and large private companies mix and sometimes merge. Without political will and independent control bodies, efforts towards a “European defence” will only result in building a Europe that gives more and more money to defence industrialists.

Finally, determined, progressive and democratic support for Ukraine would have hammered home that the defence of international law is not only valid when it comes to denouncing the actions of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

By proving unable to denounce Israel’s genocidal logic in Gaza as firmly as Putin’s murderous madness in Ukraine, Europe and the United States have shown their inconsistency, made themselves inaudible to the rest of the world, and given Vladimir Putin a dream opportunity to point out the hypocrisies of the “West”. He probably couldn’t have asked for more.

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Justine Brabant

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