Bormes-les-Mimosas (France) (AFP) - French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday there was a "real opportunity" for peace in Ukraine following the election of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
"There
is a real opportunity to put an end to the conflict that has been going on for
five years," Macron said at the start of talks with Russian President
Vladimir Putin who voiced "cautious optimism" about Zelensky.
The Russian
and French leaders met at Macron's summer holiday retreat -- a medieval fort on
an island in the Mediterranean -- with the conflict in Ukraine set to be one of
the main issues during their discussions.
Macron said
he hoped to attend a four-way summit with the leaders of Ukraine, Russia and
Germany -- the so-called Normandy format -- "in the next few weeks"
to try to end the fighting which began in 2014.
The
European Union has imposed several rounds of sanctions on Russia after it
seized Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, an annexation the international
community deemed illegal.
It sparked
a war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian-backed
separatists which has so far claimed the lives of more than 13,000 people.
"Relations
between Russia and the European Union have an irritant, a subject of
disagreement, which is Ukraine, which is a problem we have to resolve,"
Macron told the Russian leader.
"We
need to keep up our pressure, our energy to resolve this problem," he
added.
Putin said:
"I will talk (with Macron) about my discussions with the new Ukraine
president. There are things that are worth talking about and that give grounds
for cautious optimism."
Zelensky
has offered to meet Putin for face-to-face talks and was known to have spoken
to him by phone in recent weeks.
"President
Zelensky has made offers to which -- it seems to us -- President Putin should
respond in an encouraging way," a French official said ahead of the
meeting between the leaders on condition of anonymity.
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