Russia Ukraine war, page-209814

"According to the newspaperMarianne, which interviewed several French soldiers, the military reportedly estimates that the Ukraine war is irretrievably lost already. Marianne quoted a senior French officer saying derisively, “We must make no mistake facing the Russians; we are an army of cheerleaders” and sending French troops to the Ukrainian front would simply be “not reasonable” . At the Élysée, an unnamed advisor argued that Macron “wanted to send a strong signal… (in) milli-metered and calibrated words”.

Marianne’s editor Natacha Polony wrote: “It is no longer about Emmanuel Macron or his postures as a virile little leader. It is no longer even about France or its weakening by blind and irresponsible elites. It is a question of whether we will collectively agree to sleepwalk into war. A war that no one can claim will be controlled or contained. It’s a question of whether we agree to send our children to die because the United States insisted on setting up bases on Russia’s borders.”

The big question is why Macron is doing this nonetheless — going to the extent of cobbling together a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Europe. A range of explanations is possible starting with Macron posturing and trying to earn political points at minimal cost, motivated by personal ambitions and intra-European friction with Berlin.

But then, until fairly recently, Macron was a supporter of dialogue with Moscow. The perception in most European capitals, including Moscow, is that Macron is making an attempt to bring the Ukrainian crisis to a new level by announcing western combat deployment against Russiapublicly as an obvious political manipulation.

The geopolitical salience is that Macron who once not too long ago called for dialogue with Moscow and offered his mediation in it, who made the famous declaration of a “Greater Europe” in 2019 and maintained contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin thereof; who as of February last year, while speaking about Russia’s “certain defeat” in Ukraine, called for avoiding Moscow’s “humiliation”; who repeatedly underscored his commitment to the matrix of diplomacy attributed to Charles de Gaulle, which assigned France the role of a “bridge between East and West” — has now swung to the other extreme of harsh Euro-Atlantic rhetoric. "
France all dressed up and nowhere to go - Indian Punchline