The French Minister of Foreign Affairs called on Monday not to prejudge what the future Trump administration will do on Ukraine while the American press mentioned a telephone conversation between the president-elect and his Russian counterpart.
Since his victory in the American presidential election, Donald Trump has increased his calls regarding the war in Ukraine, with the Washington Post even reporting an exchange with Vladimir Putin two days after the election. Information denied Monday morning by the Kremlin.
“Faced with speculation about what the positions or initiatives of a new American administration will be, I believe above all that we should not prejudge and that we should give ourselves the time to work with it,” declared Jean -Noël Barrot, during the opening of the Paris Peace Forum.
He further stressed that France stood “ready to work with the new administration and with ambition because we believe that Ukraine must be given the means to repel Russian aggression.”
“The European Union and France have taken and will continue to take their full place,” he continued, noting the need to continue to support kyiv because the international community would have “too much to lose from the imposition by Russia of the law of the strongest.
He also insisted that “nothing could be done on Ukraine without the Ukrainians” when it came to peace negotiations.
He recalled that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had already met Donald Trump.
“I have no doubt that a strong relationship will be established with the new administration,” also commented Jean-Noël Barrot.
According to the Washington Post, American President-elect Donald Trump spoke last Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and asked him not to provoke an escalation in Ukraine, according to anonymous sources cited by the daily.
A spokesperson for the US president-elect's transition team said in a statement to AFP that it would not “comment on private calls between President Trump and other leaders”.
The Kremlin denied Monday morning that the Russian president and Donald Trump had spoken since the latter's victory in the American presidential election. “This absolutely does not correspond to reality, it is a pure invention”, “it is simply false information”, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
Donald Trump, who will return to the White House on January 20, has regularly claimed to be able to end the war in Ukraine “in one day”, without ever detailing how he would do it.
For her part, Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen, who is also participating in the Peace Forum, called for pragmatism from Europeans, urging them to do more to ensure Ukraine's victory against Russia.
“We can only focus on what we have influence on, and that is certainly why we Europeans must do more” to help Ukraine, she said, even if she “still hopes good news from the United States this year”, referring to the fact that Washington should use the billions in aid voted earlier in Congress before Trump arrives at the White House.
“We have the money. We have the industrial capacity” to do it, she said, recalling the astronomical financial efforts made when it came to fighting the Covid pandemic.
