Emmanuel Macron has called it “fake news” that Ukraine is losing against Russia as he rejected any attempt to push Kyiv into conceding land.
The French president, who joined Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders for talks with Donald Trump in the White House on Monday, said that in the last 1,000 days of war, Russian forces “took less than one per cent” of Ukrainian territory.
“So, all those who are saying…‘the Ukrainians are lost. They will lose’. It’s total fake news,” he told NBC News.
Dismissing Mr Trump’s repeated suggestions that Kyiv would have to cede land, Mr Macron added: “I don’t see any, any swap in the proposal of the Russians, except a swap in comparison with what they wanted at the beginning.”
Putin – who Mr Macron believes is not “willing to get peace” – has demanded that Ukraine give up large swaths of its territory, including the entire Donbas region, as a precondition for a deal.
