Security over solidarity: how the war is reshaping French views of Ukraine

At the Cannes Film Festival this year, Ukraine was not the official subject. Yet it kept returning.

It returned in Vesna, a film about forbidden funerals in occupied Ukraine.

It returned in Minotaure, the Grand Prix winner by Russian director Andrei Zviaguintsev, where the war appears through the moral collapse of a society sending men to the front.

It also appeared more indirectly in other films haunted by Europe’s old wars. Coward, set in the trenches of the First World War, follows two soldiers caught in the mud and fear of a conflict that was supposed to belong to the past.

Seen in 2026, its images of men trapped in trenches inevitably recall the conditions still faced by some Ukrainian units on the front line.

Even La Bola Negra, awarded for best direction alongside Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, added to a selection marked by history, violence and the return of political cinema.

Ukraine returned most clearly on the stage of the Grand Théâtre Lumière, when Zviaguintsev, now living in exile, called on Vladimir Putin to end the "carnage".

The moment mattered because it did not come alone. The 2026 edition of Cannes was widely described in the French press as political, humanist and marked by resistance.

On the Croisette, Ukraine was not forgotten. The war still had a name, a face and a moral place. The audience heard a Russian dissident address the man responsible for the invasion. French media covered the speech. A film about occupied Ukraine found its place in the official selection.

But Cannes also tells only part of the story.

French paradox

The festival shows that Ukraine remains present in France’s cultural conscience.

It does not show how far French society is still willing to go politically. Four years after Russia’s full scale invasion, French opinion on Ukraine is harder to read than it was in 2022.

It has not turned pro Russian. It has not become indifferent. But it is no longer carried by the same sense of emergency.

The latest Ifop survey, conducted in February 2026, shows the new balance. A majority of French respondents support a major increase in the defence budget. Yet only 47% now approve the supply of weapons to Ukraine by European countries,

down from 65% in March 2022.

That is the French paradox. The country increasingly accepts that Europe has entered a more dangerous age. But its public is more divided on how far France and Europe should go for Ukraine.

Before 2022, Ukraine was still distant for many French people. After the beginning of the Crimea crisis in 2014, French support for financial aid to Ukraine was limited.

Support for Ukraine’s entry into the EU was even weaker, with fewer than one in three French respondents in favour. For many voters, Ukraine looked like a difficult crisiis on Europe’s eastern edge, not yet like a question of French security.

The full scale invasion changed the picture.

In 2022, Ukraine entered French public consciousness in a different way. The war was no longer an obscure geopolitical dispute. It was a brutal invasion, watched in real time, on European soil. The reaction was not only diplomatic. It was human. In May 2022, 84% of French respondents supported welcoming some of the Ukrainians fleeing the war.

For comparison, only 46% had supported receiving migrants crossing the Mediterranean in 2015.

Arms deliveries divide the French public

That first movement has not disappeared. But it has changed.

Humanitarian support remains the easiest. Financial help is still easier to defend than weapons. EU accession opens a more difficult debate. Direct military involvement remains the hardest line of all.

The change is clearest on arms deliveries. In the first weeks of the invasion, sending weapons to Ukraine looked like an emergency response to an obvious aggression.

Four years later, it has become a dividing issue. Approval has fallen below the majority threshold. Disapproval has almost doubled.

The French have not become sympathetic to Moscow.

They have become more reluctant about the means used to support Kyiv.

That reluctance does not mean France ignores the Russian threat. It means that threat perception no longer settles the political debate. Many French voters accept that Europe must become stronger. Fewer accept that France should be directly exposed in Ukraine.

The same 2026 survey makes the hesitation visible. If a ceasefire were reached, 40% of French respondents would approve sending French soldiers to Ukrainian soil to provide security guarantees to Ukrainians. 43% would oppose it.

French wants guarantees for Ukraine, but not an uncontrolled escalation. It wants a stronger Europe, but not a Europe left alone facing Russia.

This is also why the question of the United States remains so important.

When asked who should help ensure Ukraine’s security after a ceasefire, most French respondents wanted other countries, including the United States, to participate alongside Europeans.

Very few wanted Europe to carry the burden alone.

To make Ukraine visible

That is what Cannes can still do: return a distant war to the realm of human experience.

The festival is a place of images, emotion and moral recognition. It can make Ukraine visible again.

It can remind a French audience that occupation is not an abstraction.

Vesna does this with particular force. In the film, the Russian occupier forbids the burial of civilians who resisted.

A priest and his parishioners try to offer the dead a grave despite the orders of the occupier. The image was striking, simple and brutal; even mourning becomes resistance.

Minotaure approaches the war differently. It does not place Ukrainian suffering at the centre. It looks at Russia from within.

The film follows the disintegration of a Russian bourgeois world while the "special military operation" sends men into the machine of war.

Zviaguintsev’s speech gave a direct political voice to a film built on moral decay.

The film and the speech do something useful for the French debate. They break the lazy confusion between Russia and Russians.

They show that a Russian artist can stand against the war without pretending that the war is leaderless or abstract. Zviaguintsev did not ask "both sides" to stop. He addressed Putin .

That distinction is crucial in France, where the tradition of dialogue with Moscow has long survived changes in government.

In the French political imagination, speaking to an adversary is not always seen as weakness.

The Fifth Republic has often treated dialogue as a way to preserve influence, even when trust is absent.

From Kyiv, dialogue with Putin can look like ambiguity. From Paris, it often looks like a way of keeping control over risk.

What Ukraine in the EU means for the French

The same caution appears on EU accession. For Ukraine, accession is about justice, survival and security. For many French voters, it is also about money, agriculture, institutions and the future shape of the Union.

Ukraine’s possible accession would not be a routine enlargement. It would give the EU’s expansion a new geopolitical weight, while forcing the Union to rethink its budget, institutions and major policies.

None of this weakens Ukraine’s case. It changes the way the case has to be made.

The French public can support Ukraine and still worry about what a larger Union would become. Saying that Ukraine belongs in Europe is important. Explaining how Europe would adapt iis now just as necessary.

On screen, Ukraine still appears as a moral fact. In polling, it appears more and more as as a political choice.

In 2022, the images were enough to move people: tanks crossing the border, families fleeing, cities under bombardment, a country refusing to disappear. In 2026, those images still matter, but they no longer settle the debate.

The French public now asks what support means in practice, how long it will last, what risks it carries, and what place Ukraine will occupy in Europe’s security architecture.

For Ukraine, the situation is therefore more complicated than in 2022.

France has not stopped caring. But sympathy alone no longer carries the debate. The war is now also seen through questions of risk, costs and European security.

That does not make Ukraine a burden. It simply shows how much the war has changed Europe.

Cannes can still make people listen, as Zviaguintsev’s speech showed.

But outside the festival hall, the harder question remains: whether France is ready to see Ukraine not as a distant tragedy, but as a war that also concerns its own future in Europe.

Charlotte Guillou-Clerc,

Journalist (France)