Waltz vs. Sarkozy's
Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy are arguing on the pages of leading French media about helping Ukraine, BBC reports. The former calls for Ukraine to be provided with all the necessary weapons and admitted to the EU and NATO, while the latter insists on negotiations with Russia and an end to the arms and war that, according to his personal estimate, has claimed 500,000 lives on both sides.
Although both politicians have not been leaders of French politics since 2017, when Emmanuel Macron was elected president, their opinions are listened to.
The course of this debate, which also discusses the price of French aid to Ukraine, may affect the French attitude to the war. Polls show that support for Ukraine is gradually decreasing.
For example, according to a poll conducted by Ifop and the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, while in March 2022, 82% of French people had a positive attitude toward Ukraine, in June 2023, the figure was 70%. Support for sanctions against Russia has also decreased by 6% over this time, from 72% to 66%, and support for arms supplies has decreased by 7%, from 65% to 58%.
It is important for Ukraine to maintain France's support, as Paris provides both weapons (e.g., Caesar and SCALP missiles) and money (over €1 billion in aid). France also supported Ukraine's status as an EU candidate and its accession to NATO. All of this was unimaginable 10-15 years ago, when France's relations with Russia were much more important.
In an interview with BBC Ukraine during the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv, Manuel Valls explained why he believes it is necessary to bring Ukraine into NATO and the EU and explained why Nicolas Sarkozy's views are still supported in French society.
Manuel Valls believes that it took Western leaders a long time for the wars to reveal the true intentions of the Russian leadership.
"We 'bought' Russia's speech that the West treated Russia badly... We have been blackmailed by Putin for 20 years so that he could advance in Chechnya, Ukraine, Georgia and Syria every time. Russian gas and oil were very important, especially for our German friends," he admitted in an interview with BBC Ukraine.
"In February 2022, public opinion, especially Western leaders, finally realized what Vladimir Putin's real project was," Waltz said.
In his opinion, the memory of such events as the USSR's participation in the victory over Nazi Germany contributed to a positive attitude toward Russia.
"There has always been a current of favorable attitudes toward Russia. However, it is one thing to have ties with Russia, to spread culture, to look at the country as a global and nuclear power, but this should not close our eyes to the nature of the regime," the politician believes.
In his opinion, French society could not be called pro-Russian even before the full-scale invasion, but there were pro-Russian sentiments among political and intellectual elites.
"The French political and intellectual elites continued, mostly until recently, to accept the theses of Moscow and the Kremlin as their own theses."
"I never criticize French political leaders abroad, but it is obvious that Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, continues to defend these theses, which do not justify aggression, but try to give it a clearer form. And then this leads to the idea that Ukraine should be a neutral country and that it cannot join the European Union," Waltz notes.
In Ukraine, the name of Sarkozy, who was president of France in 2007-2012, has long been associated with sympathy for Russia. He cannot be forgiven for refusing to provide an action plan for Ukraine's membership in NATO at the Bucharest summit in 2008. According to some experts, this untied Putin's hands with regard to Georgia and Ukraine.
Instead, Sarkozy has always considered himself the man who stopped Russian tanks 25 kilometers from Tbilisi and prevented Russia from being provoked by Ukraine and Georgia's accession to NATO.
The former president has also repeatedly emphasized that Crimea belonged to Russia until 1954 and that the majority of the population there considers itself Russian.
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