With a Fifth of Ukraine Under Russian Control, Macron Cool on Letting Country Join EU
Ukraine wants future security guarantees, and if it cannot find them with Brussels or NATO it will likely look in other places.

The messages from two European leaders could not contrast more starkly: Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that as of today a fifth of Ukrainian territory is under Russian control, while France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, earlier in the week threw cold water on the idea of EU expansion to include Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky’s admission to the Chamber of Deputies of Luxembourg via video was halting in its bluntness. Mr. Macron’s explanation of why Ukraine won’t be joining the European Union for the foreseeable future was as silky and looping as the River Seine.
If Ukraine still harbored any hopes of a fast-tracked membership in the EU — a move that would likely infuriate an already belligerent Kremlin — they appeared dashed by Mr. Macron, who is seen as the de facto leader of the bloc, at Brussels this week. He was responding to a question regarding whether France supported EU candidate status for Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.
Mr. Macron suggested the creation of a “European political community,” an idea he first proposed in May, as a way “to rethink our way to frame the Continent” because, as he explained, “it cannot just be through EU enlargement.” Ukraine isn’t buying it, though. “No alternative to EU membership for Ukraine would be acceptable,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said last month.
Earlier this week Mr. Kuleba called on Mr. Macron to visit Ukraine before the end of France’s EU presidency, which runs through June. More than 48,000 square miles of sovereign Ukrainian territory is currently under some form of Russian military occupation.
In his video message, Mr. Zelensky said: “This is much larger than the area of all the Benelux countries combined,” adding that the eastern Donbas region is “simply devastated.” He called it “once one of the most powerful industrial centers in Europe.”
The next EU summit takes place at Brussels June 23. Then, the EU’s current 27 member countries will decide whether to grant Ukraine candidate status for accession to the bloc, a step that would be necessary for formal negotiations to begin.
Ukraine wants future security guarantees, and if it cannot find them with Brussels or NATO it will likely look in other places. The British prime minister’s recent reported talk of forming a European Commonwealth could be one avenue for that. London has to date provided far more materiel to Ukraine than has Paris.
Call him gullible, misguided, or simply glib, but Mr. Macron dug in his heels at Brussels when pressed on his mostly discredited phone call diplomacy with the Kremlin, defending his many conversations with Vladimir Putin even as Russia has kept eating away at Ukraine’s territory — with all the bloodshed, death, and destruction that Mr. Zelensky assiduously reminded the world that that entails.