The talks between the presidents of Russia and France, Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron, ended late last night in the Kremlin. They discussed the crisis around Ukraine for almost six hours.
The French president told a press conference after the talks that he and Putin had discussed some specific points of contact and ways of de-escalating the crisis, which he, Macron, would discuss further with Kiev, Washington and his EU and NATO allies. What these points and ways are, Macron did not decipher and only noted that the fate of these proposals will probably be decided in the near future.
"The next few days will be decisive and will require intense discussions that we will have together," the French president said after talks with Putin.
The Russian leader also did not say exactly what issues were in question, but he considered some of Macron's proposals promising.
"A number of his ideas, proposals, which are probably still too early to talk about, I still think are quite possible to put them as a basis for our further joint steps," Putin said.
The French president noted that there are still disagreements with Putin on crucial issues, such as the principle of an open door for NATO. Russia demands that the Alliance pledge not to accept Ukraine (and Georgia), but NATO and the aspiring Eastern European countries vigorously reject this demand, saying that the accession or non-accession should be decided between a specific sovereign country and the bloc itself.
Putin also spoke about this disagreement at a news conference. He reiterated that NATO and the U.S. had completely ignored key demands for him in their written responses.
"On all the key issues - the non-expansion of NATO, the non-deployment of strike systems on our borders, the return of NATO infrastructure to the 1997 borders - not just no position, not even an answer: yes or no. We see political cliches there, and not an answer to our questions," Putin said.
As a reminder, as soon as Russia publicly and in writing put forward these demands in mid-December, the NATO countries and Ukraine said that they were impossible to implement and it was impossible to negotiate about them.
