With the online forum, Macron continued his crusade to try to have the interests and concerns of the European Union (EU) considered by Washington and Moscow in the eventual peace negotiations, a process in which Brussels and Kiev have been marginalized, starting with the break with the anti-Russia stance of the White House after Donald Trump’s return to office.

The French president had welcomed a dozen leaders from the EU, the United Kingdom and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) at the Elysee Palace on Monday with the same purpose of exerting pressure on Trump, also with the demand that Ukraine be taken into account.

According to a summary of the video conference published by Macron himself on X, the objective claimed by the US president to stop the war is shared by the participants, including the Netherlands, Romania, the Czech Republic, the Baltic nations and non-EU States such as Norway and Iceland, as well as Canada.

However, they agreed to demand Ukraine’s role in the search for peace and respect for its rights, the achievement of a “credible” peace with security guarantees and that European security concerns be taken into account. The French president wrote that there is a conviction about the need to increase defense spending within the EU, and stated that decisions will be taken in this direction soon.

On Tuesday, the United States and Russia held their first high-level face-to-face meeting in years in Riyadh, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed to resume ties and work together to end the war in Ukraine.

The Washington-Moscow rapprochement and their direct dialogue is worrying the EU, which has been marginalized for the moment from the search for peace negotiations and isolated in the White House’s support for Kiev, after Biden allocated billions of dollars, modern weapons and sanctions to try to get Russia to lose the conflict.

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