French President Emmanuel Macron repeated his earlier declaration that Russia “cannot and should not” win the war in Ukraine during a high-profile meeting at Elysee Palace in Paris with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Zelensky visited the U.K. and Paris in hopes to show Western support for Ukraine is still strong. Macron reaffirmed his commitment to the cause and said Kyiv can “count on France” and its European partners to win the war.

“Russia cannot and must not win,” he concluded. 

The French president’s optimism does not match the reality on the ground. Russia has recently increased its ballistic attacks on power stations across Ukraine and Kyiv said it is running out of ammunition. 

“What is of ultimate urgency is… the ammunition and the artillery that we need immediately to make sure that we can operate with the new military equipment we received,” Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said. “We do not have this amount of ammunition that we need.”

Charles Michel, the EU Council president, said the bloc needs to “cooperate with the industrial sector and to ensure that we can speed up the level of production of ammunition and that they can also fulfill the commitments that are needed,” according to the BBC.

Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, also said the bloc is looking “deep into the war machinery of Russia, where we can define either technologies or spare parts that are being used by the military complex.” She said the next round of sanctions will target these technologies.

In June, after an airstrike blamed on Russia killed 18 people inside a shopping mall in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, Macron was quick to call the bombing a war crime. He told his colleagues at the G-7 summit in Germany that the group will support Ukraine by enforcing sanctions against Russia “as long as necessary.”

He said, “Russia cannot and should not win.”

TRENDPOST: As of November, Russian forces have been firing up to 60,000 artillery rounds into Ukraine a day and are amassing hundreds of thousands of troops on the border to seize control of more of the Donbas region. 

Russia has successfully diverted its energy supplies to Asia and Africa and has managed to emerge unscathed from the West’s sanctions. 

The West seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding vis-à-vis regional Russian politics.

Natalia Gavrilita, the Moldova prime minister, announced her resignation as her country faces a massive influx of Ukrainian refugees and an energy crisis caused by the war. Inflation is up 30 percent there.

It’s not easy doing business with the U.S.

The Trends Journal has also reported extensively on how European countries are spending more on their military, led by Germany, which announced a major spending spree last year. (See “HEIL GERMANY AS IT RAMPS UP WAR MACHINE TO BE EU’S TOP FORCE” 28 Jun 2022 and “U.S. OKs $8.4B WEAPONS DEAL FOR GERMANY, MAKING WAR-MACHINE VERY HAPPY” 2 Aug 2022.)

Macron aims to increase military spending from Є295 billion in its last budget cycle, which ends in 2025, to Є400 billion from 2024 to 2030, the paper reported. The jump represents a 40 percent increase in defense spending.