LONDON, July 7. /TASS/. Peace talks on Ukraine are impossible unless the Ukrainian army has some success on the battlefield, France’s former President (2012-2017) Francoise Hollande said in an interview with The Times posted on the newspaper’s website on Friday.
"There can be no possible negotiated solution before there has been Ukrainian progress on the battlefields and so the only thing we can do today is to offer massive help to the Ukrainians to reconquer the most possible territory," he said, commenting on Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
According to the newspaper, he denied being naive when working on the Minsk agreements, along with then German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in late 2015 - early 2015 as, in his words, it was important to "freeze" the conflict to give the Ukrainian army some breathing room.
He noted that the EU leaders hoped until the last moment that "reason will carry the day" and that the conflict in Ukraine would be avoided. "Emmanuel Macron did everything possible to woo [Russian President Vladimir] Putin for a time" until Russia launched its special military operation," the former French president said. "And then, after a few weeks, Emmanuel Macron understood that we had to be tough, and now he is tough."
He also said that after the outbreak of the conflict, French politicians who used to sympathize with Russia changed their position. Thus, in his words, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally parliamentary faction and presidential candidate, who allegedly viewed herself as a French version of Putin, is now trying to downplay her ties with Russia.