The closed-door meeting, held on Thursday, February 20, at the Elysée Palace, had been decided just the day before, but it was nonetheless dense and long. Ahead of the third anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister François Bayrou and a dozen representatives of political parties and parliamentary groups met for four hours to share highly sensitive information on the geopolitical context. This context has recently been rocked by a Russian-American rapprochement, which has been underway since Donald Trump's return to the White House, and by the repeated attacks levied by the US president and his administration on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's legitimacy.

This "sort of discharge given by the US to Russian aggression in Ukraine," as was denounced by former foreign and defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, on Wednesday, February 19, has now led the US' European allies, committed to transatlantic relations, to fear the worst. The government wants to prepare French society for the start of a major war effort, one not seen since 1945. For Macron, it was a matter of rallying public opinion around the need for European security, after a week that had started with talks with his European and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) partners.

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