TOULON, France — Pressure is mounting on Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to bilateral talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with French President Emmanuel Macron weighing in on Friday.
“If that doesn’t happen by Monday, the deadline set by President Trump, it means that once again President Putin played President Trump,” Macron said at a joint news conference with the German chancellor.
Speaking with the press a day earlier, Merz had already expressed his doubts, saying it was “obviously not going to come to a meeting between President Zelenskyy and President Putin.”
Trump has said there will be “consequences” if the meeting does not take place.
At Friday’s ministerial talks in the southern French city of Toulon, Macron and Merz committed to ramping up support for Ukraine, where massive Russian strikes this week have cast further doubt on Putin’s purported desire for peace. They also outlined common priorities on many European policies, from energy to financial services.
Macron announced that leaders of the “coalition of the willing,” a group of Western countries working on security guarantees for Ukraine in case of a ceasefire with Russia, would speak by phone with Trump this weekend and meet with each other next week.
Paris and Berlin also boosted their cooperation on defense matters, launching a “strategic dialogue” on nuclear deterrence and a common project on an “early warning system,” which would provide information about ballistic missile launches to NATO allies.
The two countries also made little to no progress on their stalled flagship fighter jet program, the Future Combat Air System.
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