Romania and France will continue their strategic partnership, and France's military footprint in Romania will increase, acting president Ilie Bolojan announced after meeting his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in Paris on February 19.

The French president continued the consultations with the European partners for a "fair and equitable" peace in Ukraine achieved by negotiations that would necessarily include Ukraine and the EU, as US and Russian presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin prepare for a high-level meeting dedicated to normalizing relations. France's effort started on February 17 with a meeting where Romania was not invited.

"We have reconfirmed the strategic partnership with France. We have also reconfirmed the stability of the French military presence in Romania at the request of our country. We have a significant French contingent that contributes, alongside the other contingents of allied countries, the US, to the security of our country. We confirmed that this presence will be strengthened in the coming period," said Bolojan, as quoted by G4media.ro.

Romania already hosts the main French deployment on NATO's eastern flank, with around 1,600 soldiers, and France acts as the lead nation in the country, overseeing the other NATO contingents stationed in the area since 2022.

The French army plans to temporarily increase its forces in Romania to 5,000 soldiers, or a brigade, for the "Dacian Spring" exercise in 2025. As the US is shifting focus to Asia, France would regain a central place by completing its own turn towards Europe and Romania can play a key role.

President Bolojan also stressed that Romania's development over the past decades was facilitated by its EU and NATO membership.

Separately, he stressed that the support that Romania [and Europe] is giving Ukraine is not only for humanitarian reasons but also for strategic reasons. 

In his first foreign policy speech on February 18, Ilie Bolojan said that Romania "will maintain its natural course, as a member of the European Union and NATO, having a Strategic Partnership with the US" and that "the main directions of foreign policy remain unchanged."

Romania has a strategic partnership for security with the US and is building the largest NATO military base in Europe on the site of the US/NATO airbase, Mihail Kogalniceanu, at the Black Sea. 

But the speculations about Donald Trump's plans for downsizing the US military presence in Europe (even if so far denied by president Trump) and the "non-intelligible statements" that question the "coherence" of the US administration in relation to the Ukraine dossier, in the words of  French government spokeswoman Sophie Primas, raise question marks and leaves room for multiple strategic partnerships on the side of Romania.

iulian@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Presidency.ro)