Emmanuel Macron angered Britain by ‘sending mixed messages’ to Putin, Liz Truss reveals
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Liz Truss has said Emmanuel Macron angered Britain by sending “mixed messages” to Vladimir Putin in the months after he invaded Ukraine.
The former prime minister said Downing Street was left “frustrated” by his insistence on keeping negotiations open with the Russian leader.
The French president carried on holding phone calls with Putin long after other Nato countries had cut ties with the Kremlin over its illegal war.
He repeatedly defended his actions at the time, arguing that he was keeping diplomatic relations with Moscow open on behalf of the West.
Mr Macron said just before Christmas that he was open to resuming talks if Putin calls him, telling journalists: “I haven’t changed my number.”
Boris Johnson feared bad peace deal
But in a new BBC documentary to be aired on Monday, Ms Truss, the then foreign secretary, reveals that his efforts went down badly in Downing Street.
She told Putin vs the West: At War she was “frustrated” with Mr Macron “because I thought it sent out very mixed messages about the West’s resolve”.
Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, revealed how he feared in Spring 2022 that Kyiv would come under pressure to accept a bad peace deal.
He said: “I didn’t think that such a trade-off would be right. You can’t negotiate with a crocodile that’s bitten half your leg and is proposing to bite the other leg.”
In the documentary Ms Truss also admitted that the UK had not taken strong enough economic measures prior to the invasion to deter Putin.
“We realised the weapons and the sanctions were the real levers that we had over Russia but we were behind the curve in terms of our sanctions,” she said.
Mr Johnson told the programme that there is “deep institutional guilt” within Nato that it had not put Ukraine on a path to membership earlier.
The former prime minister said that the military alliance’s dithering over whether Kyiv would be allowed to join had been a “fatal” error.
He said: “If Nato had followed through on the things that it had said and actually put the Ukrainians on a proper path to membership, there’s an argument to say that Putin would not have done what he did.
“It was our collective ambiguity for so long, endlessly sucking and blowing at the same time, that was so fatal because Putin thought, ‘right well, they’re not serious’.”
Mr Johnson also lifted the lid on conversations he had with Ben Wallace, the then defence secretary, about Ukraine’s plea for a Nato-enforced no-fly zone.
He said that Britain and other Western allies had been unable to agree to the request because they were warned it could start “World War Three”.
“Ben Wallace was very clear that it would mean me giving orders, or him giving orders, to our pilots to shoot down Russian fast jets,” he said.
Putin ‘needs to be put back in the box’
Ukraine formally applied to join Nato in September 2022, with the alliance’s members unanimously agreeing that it should be allowed to join.
But that will not realistically happen until after the war with Russia has ended.
In the meantime individual countries including the UK are supplying Kyiv with money and weapons and helping to train its armed forces.
Mr Johnson said the invasion of Ukraine should “mark the end” of the West’s soft approach towards Putin who he said needed to be “put back in the box”.
Charles Michel, the president of the EU Council, added that Nato was “clearly embarrassed” by its inability to intervene in the conflict to help Ukraine.
“It can condemn this war with press releases, but it can’t enter the war so as not to provoke World War Three,” he added.
