French President Emmanuel Macron has said he has understood from his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin that the conflict over Ukraine will not escalate further.

 

Macron spoke to Putin in Moscow on Monday and travelled to Kyiv on Tuesday to meet with Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky.

Macron says he has offered Russia “concrete security guarantees” without making them concrete. And Putin has said his government will do everything it can to try to find a compromise that everyone can live with.

Nevertheless, the contraction of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border has led to a crisis since late last year. Macron has since become the first Western leader to visit Putin in Moscow. Macron hopes to play a pioneering role in solving the crisis.

According to Putin, Western powers are escalating tensions by supplying arms to Ukraine and planning for Ukraine’s NATO membership. However, Putin said it is not Russia that is moving towards NATO’s borders. Instead, according to him, NATO is threatening Russia by expanding with former Soviet republics.

Moreover, Russia considers the pro-Western change of power in Kyiv in 2014 as a coup d’état, mainly concocted by the US, against an elected pro-Russian president of Ukraine. The West argues that there was a popular uprising and that the president was overthrown.