Call it the new French resistance … to tightening the vise on the reviled Russian president. In remarks that underscore the difficulty of building a meaningful European consensus on the Russian war on Ukraine now lurching toward its third bloody month, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, yesterday urged European leaders to spare Vladimir Putin from any kind of “humiliation.” 

Mr. Macron’s seemingly odd admonishment comes amid growing criticism of his failure to visit Kyiv as have other political leaders, including the British prime minister and the U.S. House speaker. 

Following a speech to the European Parliament yesterday, Mr. Macron told reporters: “Tomorrow we will have to build peace. Let us never forget that,” adding, “We will have to do this with Ukraine and Russia around the table.” 

According to the Times of London’s longtime Paris correspondent, Charles Bremner, Mr. Macron at Brussels implicitly defended his regular calls to President Putin since the invasion by emphasizing that peace in Ukraine would not be served by putting excessive pressure on Russia. Also, in remarks that could be seen as attempts to placate Mr. Putin, the French president, whose second term started on Saturday, also told Ukraine that it must wait decades to join the EU.

Ironically, Mr. Macron made his speech on Europe Day, a day of “peace and unity,” according to the EU. Social media posts included one from the European Commission that read in part, “Europeans feel that they belong to one European family” and “peace is our daily goal that has been achieved thanks to the determination of many Europeans.” 

Despite a stream of platitudes and hashtags to the contrary, recent events show that asserting peace in Europe has been achieved strains credulity.

If claiming that Mr. Macron has cozied up to Mr. Putin might be an overstatement, his reluctance to call out the Russian’s leader’s demonstrably despicable behavior as the British defense secretary, Ben Wallace, and others have very consistently done since late February could undercut his credibility as a peacemaker. It certainly has not always stood him in good stead in Kyiv. 

Only last month the Ukrainian president denounced Mr. Macron’s refusal to call Russian killing of civilians in Ukraine “genocide” and the French leader’s reference to Russians as a “brotherly” people.

Much of the French media, though, certainly has Mr. Macron’s back. An article in the left-leaning Le Monde newspaper under the headline “Ukraine: Washington’s unspoken euphoria vis-à-vis Moscow” posits that while America “disputes any idea of ​​co-belligerence, it is committed wholeheartedly to supporting Kyiv, whether financially, militarily or in the intelligence field” and that Washington “dreams of a lasting weakening of Moscow.” A further assertion — that “waging war by sponsorship, without losing soldiers, is not without risk” — could be construed as a defense of Mr. Macron’s more cautious approach to the war.

There is also subtlety in the French newspaper’s outlook. It identifies, beyond and above political gestures and arms shipments, an “invisible war” of intelligence sharing between Washington and Kyiv that has helped cement Ukrainian battlefield successes such as the destruction of Russia’s Moskva ship of war. That could be seen as a nudge to Mr. Macron to put pressure on the French intelligence service, the DGSE, to step up to the plate and do a better job. While British and American intelligence predicted Russia would invade Ukraine in February, the DGSE took a well-publicized contrary stance that did not do much to enhance its stature.

At Moscow in the meantime, Russian state TV has been allowing experts to voice objections to all-out war in recent weeks, the Telegraph reports. That dovetails with Mr. Putin’s rather subdued Victory Day speech yesterday, in which he pointedly did not call for a full mobilization of the country against Ukraine. 

The newspaper cites a recent appearance on Russian television by a retired lieutenant colonel, Mikhail Khodarenok, who said, “Let’s imagine the fanfare as mobilization is declared — when would we receive the first fighter regiment? We don’t have the reserves, the pilots or the planes.” Another Russian military expert, Kirill Mikhailov, said, “The forces currently in Ukraine are badly depleted by recalling conscripts and ‘kontraktniki’ [professional soldiers] refusing to go. It is even worse than the actual losses.”

It is not just the lack of Russians willing to go to Ukraine that are proving to be a thorn in Mad Vlad’s side: There is a growing lack of Russians in Russia. According to The Moscow Times, nearly 4 million Russians high-tailed it out of Mother Russia between January and March 2022.  Kazakhstan, Georgia, Tajikistan, and Estonia are among the more popular landing spots. Agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service have reportedly started asking the relatives of Russians who have fled the country to persuade them to come back.