Macro: Putin has decided not to stop

France's President Emmanuel Macron said today that Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “decided not to stop” in Ukraine after he needed a military “for himself, even though he realized Ukraine would not be subject to”.

In an interview for the French weekly Le Point, Macron said that Mariupol, a town in eastern Ukraine where the Russian Army focused, “could be an obsession with Putin because it is a symbol of Ukraine resisting it”.

Focusing on the offensive in Donbas, the Russian president is trying “to achieve victory and target the glorious military parade on 9 May (marking victory over Nazism), a very important date for it and for Russia, Macron added.

He said that because of that, he had little confidence in collective efforts to place Putin at the negotiating table in the short term.

Macron also tried to justify his numerous telephone conversations with Putin.

If he doesn't talk to anyone anymore, then we don't know how far he can go. This is my obsession. I told him that when someone gets into a cycle of violence, the hardest thing is to stop. It is a danger and a turning point to enter irreversible”, he said.