For the past few weeks, embattled French President Emmanuel Macron has been positioning himself as Ukraine’s foremost defender on the international stage.
In a press conference at the White House 9 days ago, he took the unexpected step of interrupting Trump and correcting his (false) claim that European countries have been merely loaning money to Ukraine. Since then, he has floated the idea of sending French troops to enforce a peace deal, while stating forcefully that Europe must “continue to help Ukrainians resist” because peace “cannot mean Ukraine’s capitulation or collapse”.
That all sounds very noble and Churchillian. Yet it flies in the face of what France has actually done to help Ukraine, which is… not very much.
The Kiel Institute provides detailed data on aid to Ukraine via its ‘Ukraine Support Tracker’. This database reveals that, since the start of the war, France has given Ukraine 0.18% of GDP in bilateral aid. (That’s 0.18% of 2021 GDP, not 0.18% of GDP in each year of the war.) How does this compare to Ukraine’s other allies? Well, it’s less than the % given by Estonia, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Croatia, the US, the UK, Czechia, Canada, Germany, Romania, Belgium, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Japan, Austria and Iceland.
In fact, both Estonia and Denmark have given a remarkable 12 times more bilateral aid than France (as a % of GDP). Even Germany, which received a lot of stick at one point over its lacklustre support for Ukraine, has given 2.4 times more. Now, France has also given aid to Ukraine via the EU institutions, but so has every other EU country.
France’s rather paltry contributions are particularly noteworthy given that France has the most powerful military in the EU. According to the Global Firepower Index, the French military is the seventh most powerful in the world. The next highest EU country, Italy, is ranked tenth.
Let’s suppose that France had given the same % of GDP as Denmark, that is, 2.17%. French GDP in 2021 was €2.75 trillion. 2.17% of that figure is €60 billion. Subtract the amount France actually gave (€5 billion) and you get €55 billion. That’s a huge figure, amounting to 73% of the Russian defence budget in 2022. I imagine Ukraine could have found some use for an extra €55 billion.
Not only has France given far less aid than most of Ukraine’s allies; it’s also been importing billions of euros of Russian energy. According to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, France imported €3.5 billion in Russian energy last year. Which means that it actually sent more money to Russia in the form of energy payments than it sent to Ukraine in the form of aid (the €5 billion France sent to Ukraine came over three years).
Note that I’m not arguing France necessarily should be giving substantially more aid to Ukraine. As regular readers will know, I’m sceptical of the policy Western countries have pursued. My point is that Macron is engaging in cheap talk.
The French President has described Russia as an “existential threat”. Yet his actions belie this. Would you buy billions of euros of energy from a country you considered an “existential threat”? If Macron really wants to help Ukraine’s armed forces, he should stop posturing and give them what they say they need. And other leaders should start criticising his lack of action.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
That amount of money would buy Zelensky a lovely yacht I’m sure!
Perhaps, it already has..?
I’m only kidding. I’m sure they have the receipts for everything…
The dog ate all the receipts. It’s not Zelenski’s fault. Honest.
Or they were all destroyed when one of their own missiles hit a building while they blamed Russia.
The more unpopular liberal European leaders are, they become more bellicose.
Starmer’s ratings have gone up with his warmongering statements.
Russia are no threat to Europe or anyone.
Liberals love to virtue signal to save their own skins and blame Trump for Ukraine’s inevitable defeat. Macron is no different.
“The theater piece directed by Starmer at Lancaster House with an assembly of 15 European heads of government (and Justin Trudeau of Canada) was not really choreographed to try to convince Trump to reverse course, which appears unlikely, but as an elaborate presentation to save the hides of politicians who invested so much of their own political capital and wasted so much of their citizens’ money in the inevitable and humiliating defeat of Ukraine.
That Ukraine would lose was obvious two years ago to Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz when they both gently broke that news to Zelensky privately in Paris in February 2023.
The private remarks clashed with public statements from European leaders who had routinely said then, and still say today, that they will continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes to achieve victory on the battlefield. That was Joe Biden’s line too.
Indeed Ukraine’s losses have become unbearable. Macron and Scholz tried to tell Zelensky at that Élysée Palace dinner in February 2023 that he must consider peace talks with Moscow, the Journal reported.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/03/05/europes-facing-saving-theater-on-ukraine/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=6e151c42-dc2a-4956-a041-c5171bb4b9dc
The clue is that Two-Tier has made it absolutely clear that “his” Coalition of the Willing relies on the USA giving Ukraine Security Guarantees.
Trump’s already ruled that out and Putin has made it absolutely clear he will not accept NATO “peacekeepers” on Ukraine soil.
TTK and the EU Ghouls are just grandstanding for the cameras and are desperately trying to pivot their taxpayer-funded money-generator from the “Saving the Planet-Net Zero SCAM” to a massive increase in defence spending and “Saving Europe from the Big Bad Putin.”
It will end in disaster for any EU troops sent to Ukraine.
When they come back in body bags the liberal elite deluded politicians will be pilloried.
Two Tier’s little boost will be history come the 2029 election when Ukraine will be forgotten about. As much as the Blob, Soros and the WEF would want the war to still be going on in 2029, there are just not enough Ukrainians left to fight it and not enough mercenaries willing to go there either. Missing from most of the legacy media is that the much vaunted Kursk salient is about to be cut off in a pincer movement.
Agreed.
It’s so easy to give away money you steal from your population.
“Here Zelensky, have a bit more money – sorry “support”. We’ll just take it from the giant pool of tax money that we collect and which everyone has lost track what it’s all used for.”
Actually, they don’t take it from that either, because that’s all spent and then some. They do it by issuing more debt. More debt, which no one actually buys except the central bank, which is really another way of saying printing money – so more inflation – and institutional investors which are bound by mandates to have certain amounts of public debt.
The whole thing is a giant fleecing operation. That’s why the posturing and the rhetoric the Ukrainian flags, the media control. The population, who are going to pay for it one way or another, need to be riled up to hate Putin and love Ukraine and Zelensky.
Draw a circle around France and Germany and that’s where every major conflict in Europe has originated over the last 300 years – including two that involved the whole World.
So now they want another war.
This statement is seriously misleading because most of these ‘major conflicts’, however that’s defined, have been (or started as) wars between France and Germany¹. Especially, the so-called world world wars of the 20th century started as joint Franco-Russian revenge war (revenge for 1870/71, that is) against Germany, with the original coalition informally joint by Britain years before hostilities broke out.
It’s also factually very dubious because while France has existed as united country during all this time, Germany didn’t. Until 1806, the Holy Roman Empire still nominally existed although it was composed of a myriad of middle-sized, small and smaller de facto sovereign entities which were usually at war with each other. Napoleon eliminated this pseudo-state but he was ultimately conquered by the British strategy of starting one coalition war against France after the other until one of them finally succeeded. Afterwards, there was a loose confederation of German states but no Germany and these states weren’t involved in military conflicts outside of their respective territories until the Franco-German war of 1870/71 which begat a united German state which enjoyed a peaceful existence in Europe for the next 43 years, until the Entente set forth to destroy it at any cost, see above.
¹ Single example: The seven years war. In continental Europe this was a war of a coalition of Russia, Austria and France against Prussia which took place entirely inside of Germany. In parallell with this, there was global war of England against France for colonies and to help with that, England subsidized the Prussian war effort on the continent.
I’m glad that France hasn’t given much money at all to fund that clown and that sh*tshow.
And Macron isn’t France. He is a t***.
Please don’t use the ‘Global Firepower Index’.
It is a ‘Fred in a shed’ operation that bases its rankings on raw data (military strength, number of frigates, number of tanks, number of missiles, etc.).
It does not take into account other key factors: the condition of equipment, standard of military training, natural resources, economic resilience, alliances, the proportion of GDP devoted to the army, whether or not it has signed up to security pacts, whether or not it possesses nuclear weapons and so on.
Use of such a superficial index makes it difficult to take this article seriously.
Use: https://www.janes.com/
or
https://www.iiss.org/publications/the-military-balance/
instead.
As I’m sure you will know, ‘The Economist’ is also a good reference in this regard.
https://www.economist.com/china/2024/11/04/in-some-areas-of-military-strength-china-has-surpassed-america
You wouldn’t want this prat on your side. He is all over the place. God knows what constitutes the attraction of this man. His ‘wife’, I mean come on.
What are your connections to Russia, Noah? How much have they paid you, through RT or otherwise?
What has happened to the ‘Stop the War Coalition’? Once ‘led’ by Comrade Corbyn & Comrade MacDonald … but the ‘left’ seem to be in favour of war now?
Be fair ….. Zelensky’s apparently got a bolt hole lined up in France. I wonder how he paid for that?
They say we are doomed to repeat our mistakes if we forget history. The situation in Ukraine is shaping up to be the Vietnam of our age.
Perhaps Tump is learning from the mistakes made then while others are not?