Wednesday 21 / January / 2026
French President Emmanuel Macron opened his speech Tuesday in Davos with a joke, saying "It's a time of peace, stability and predictability," to laughs from the chamber.
"It's clear we are reaching a time of instability, of imbalances," he said, citing global shifts towards autocracy from democracy, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and more wars around the world — "even though I understand a few of them were fixed," in a dig at US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly boasted of ending several wars since entering office last year.
The French president warned against "a world where international law is trampled underfoot," and a world where the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must.
In reference to the latest disputes about Greenland, Macron described the threat of further sanctions from the US towards Europe as "fundamentally unacceptable, even more so when they are used as leverage against territorial sovereignty."
He said he wanted to rule out two approaches to the new threats in the world, firstly to "passively accept the law of the strongest," saying it didn't make sense to accept "a sort of new colonial approach."
But Macron also warned against adopting "a purely moral posture," saying this path "would condemn us to marginalization and powerlessness."
"France must defend effective multilateralism," he said, as his government takes up the G7 presidency in 2026.
"We do prefer respect to bullies," he said towards the end of his address. "We do prefer science to conspiracy. We do prefer rule of law to brutality."
Trump and Putin envoys meet in Davos
Representatives of the US and Russian governments met in Davos to discuss the war in Ukraine. The group sat down for two hours to discuss a possible future peace deal and an end to the war. The talks were described as "very positive" and "constructive."
"Dialogue is constructive and more and more people understand the fairness of Russian position," Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev said.
Dmitriev met US President Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner in the "USA House" at Davos.
"We had a very positive meeting," Witkoff said, according to Russia's RIA news agency.
The full-scale war in Ukraine began when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, triggering the biggest conflict between Moscow and the West in decades.
Currently, Russia controls 19% of Ukraine, including the Crimea peninsula, which it illegally annexed in 2014, as well as most of the eastern Donbas region, much of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, and slivers of four other regions.
https://p.dw.com/p/579Ek
