The West’s decision to continue arming Ukraine threatens to turn the conflict into a long and brutal conflagration, French opposition leader Marine Le Pen has warned.
“There aren’t fifty different solutions; apart from a peace agreement, all the rest will be bad. Ukraine will not be able to win unless NATO comes to its aid. But if NATO enters the conflict on Ukraine’s side, the whole world will be at war. China will likely also enter the conflict,” the senior National Rally politician said in an interview with French radio on Thursday.
“If we continue to send weapons – which we don’t have, by the way, depriving our own army, then what we have before us is a Hundred Years’ War,” Le Pen warned, referencing the brutal series of conflicts between France and England during the Middle Ages between 1337 and 1453, which cost the lives of between 2.3 and 3.3 million people, and culminated in England’s loss of nearly all of its continental European possessions.
The politician reiterated her previously voiced call to take the delivery of “offensive weapons” to Ukraine off the table due to the danger they pose in escalating the crisis. “The supply of offensive weapons worries us, because it could become an element contributing to the escalation of the territorial conflict into a global one,” she said.
Le Pen also urged Paris to take the lead organizing a peace conference, and to take part in searching for a negotiated settlement, including by putting pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to come to the negotiating table.
France has sent hundreds of millions of euros’ worth of military equipment to Kiev over the past year, including advanced anti-tank, anti-air and anti-ship missiles, heavy self-propelled artillery, armored fighting vehicles and light tanks known as the AMX-10 RC, plus landmines banned by the Geneva Conventions, radars, and more. Paris has also provided Kiev access to its French satellite intelligence, and has reportedly deployed “dozens” of intelligence agents to the Eastern European country.
French President Emmanuel Macron has touted himself as a potential top peace negotiator in the Ukrainian crisis, engaging in back-and-forth shuttle diplomacy before the long-running Donbass crisis going back to 2014 escalated into the current conflict in February of the 2022. Macron has recently taken a more aggressive approach, however, saying Paris will not rule out any arms supplies to Kiev, including Leclerc heavy tanks and aircraft.
Marine Le Pen became the runner up in last year’s presidential elections in France, taking about 41.5 percent of the vote in the runoff vote. The politician has repeatedly taken aim at the delivery of French heavy weapons to Kiev, and condemned France’s “inappropriate, reckless” sanctions against Russia amid soaring global energy prices.
Le Pen’s National Rally party filed a motion of no confidence in the French government last month to protest its controversial pension reform plans. Hundreds of thousands of French men and women have spent weeks protesting the reforms, announced in January, paralyzing the country in rolling strikes.