French president heads to Russia to try to ease Ukraine tensions

French President Emmanuel Macron is set to hold talks in Moscow today in a bid to help de-escalate the tense situation around Ukraine.

Macron, who is set to meet in the Kremlin with Russian President Vladimir Putin before visiting Ukraine Tuesday, said last week that his priority is "dialogue with Russia and de-escalation."

Before heading to Moscow, Macron had a call Sunday with U.S. President Joe Biden. They discussed "ongoing diplomatic and deterrence efforts in response to Russia's continued military buildup on Ukraine's borders, and affirmed their support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," the White House said in a statement.

The French presidency said Macron sought to ensure "good co-ordination" with Biden in the call.

In an interview with French newspaper Journal du Dimanche published on Sunday, Macron said that "we won't get unilateral gestures, but it is indispensable to prevent a degradation of the situation before building confidence gestures and mechanisms."

"The geopolitical objective of Russia today is clearly not Ukraine, but to clarify the rules of cohabitation with NATO and the EU," Macron said. "The security and sovereignty of Ukraine or any other European state cannot be a subject for compromise, while it is also legitimate for Russia to pose the question of its own security."

Continuing the high-level diplomacy, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is set to meet with Biden Monday for talks expected to focus on the Ukrainian standoff. Scholz is set to travel to Kyiv and Moscow on Feb. 14-15.

Scholz has said that Moscow would pay a "high price" in the event of an attack, but his government has faced criticism over its refusal to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, bolster its troop presence in eastern Europe or spell out which sanctions it would support against Russia if it invades.

On Sunday, German Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht raised the possibility that the country could send more troops to Lithuania to reinforce its presence on NATO's eastern flank.

WATCH | The internal threats growing inside Ukraine:

In 2015, France and Germany helped broker a peace deal for eastern Ukraine in a bid to end the hostilities between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists that erupted the previous year following the Russian annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.

The agreement signed in the Belarusian capital of Minsk helped stop large-scale fighting, but efforts at a political settlement have stalled and frequent skirmishes have continued along the tense line of contact in Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland called Donbas.

The leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany last met in Paris in December 2019 in the so-called Normandy format summit, but they failed to resolve main conflicting issues.

Amid the tensions over the Russian military buildup, presidential advisers from the four countries held talks in Paris on Jan. 26, but they didn't make any visible progress and agreed to meet again in Berlin in two weeks.