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On the front page of the press, the continuation of the war in Ukraine, where the Russian army no longer seems to be progressing.

Is Russia getting bogged down?

Is a "war of attrition" taking place?

According to

La Croix

, it now appears that "Moscow has underestimated the Ukrainian combat capabilities and the resistance of the population", and that "without a diplomatic solution, the conflict could last for months more".

On the diplomatic front, precisely,

The Financial Times

affirms that Russia, whose emissaries are meeting their Ukrainian counterparts today in Turkey, no longer demands the "denazification" of Ukraine and that it would be ready to let Kiev join the EU, provided that Ukraine remains "non-aligned militarily".

Le Figaro

notes that Moscow now seems to be "focusing on the separatist provinces of Donbass" and that Kiev seems to "renounce integrating NATO".

The newspaper affirms, nevertheless, that "weapons will continue to take precedence" and even wonders if "the negotiations intervene too early to have a chance of succeeding".

In Switzerland,

Le Temps

reports kyiv's mistrust, faced with the threat of a possible "future non-respect of its promises by Russia".

The newspaper evokes a precedent still vivid in the memory of Ukrainians: the agreement signed with Moscow in 1994, which did not prevent Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine.

According to this agreement, called the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine renounced the nuclear weapons present on its territory and inherited from the Soviet Union, in exchange for Moscow respecting its borders.

It is in this context that

The Wall Street Journal

claims Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian negotiators suffered possible "poisoning" after meeting in Kyiv in early March.

According to the sources of the American daily, this attempt could be the work of partisans of a hard line in Moscow who would seek, according to them, to sabotage the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

The Russian-Ukrainian talks which begin on Tuesday are taking place in Istanbul – a way for Turkey to place itself at the center of the diplomatic game.

According to the Emirati newspaper

The National

, Ankara has even become "the privileged point of support of the West", because of its "close links with the belligerents".

The daily also notes that Turkey, a member of NATO, however did not adhere to Western sanctions against Russia and that it even rolled out "the red carpet" for the Russian oligarchs - "an attempt to stay within the good pardons of Vladimir Putin,” according to

The National

.

The Kremlin boss, with whom Emmanuel Macron spoke on the phone 17 times in the past four months, calculated

The New York Times

, which evokes "the interminable Russian diplomacy" of the French president.

"No one can accuse President Macron of having spared his efforts to avoid, defuse or stop the war in Ukraine", writes the newspaper, which gives a mixed assessment of this intense diplomatic activity: "If diplomacy is measured by perseverance , Mr. Macron is a supreme diplomat. If it is measured by his concretizations, the verdict is less favorable".

The American daily is ironic, finally, on the fact that the French president devotes "so many hours (to the conflict in Ukraine) that he has little time for the little business of the presidential election which takes place in less than two weeks ".

A word, also, from the summit which brought together the American Secretary of State and his counterparts from Israel and four Arab countries on Monday, in the Negev desert, in the south of the Jewish state.

The handshakes between the heads of diplomacy of the United States, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain make the front page of the

Jerusalem Post

, which salutes their displayed unity in the face of Iran and reports that a participant in this summit was delighted to see the formation of a "mini-Middle Eastern NATO", bringing together countries facing the same security challenges.

Ha'aretz

, another Israeli daily, is much more skeptical.

"This childish fantasy, that open normalization with the Arab world would cause the Palestinians to evaporate, was addressed by the US Secretary of State, who recalled what most Israelis would rather forget: the Abraham Accords are not 'a substitute for progress between Palestinians and Israelis'," the paper warns.

Finally, we discussed on Monday the scandal of the slap administered by actor Will Smith to his comrade Chris Rock, during the Oscars ceremony.

The photo of the incident made the front page of many daily newspapers around the world on Tuesday morning, but we preferred to retain for you the press cartoons inspired by it.

In Blower's for

The Daily Telegraph

, the Hollywood sign, after slapper Will Smith has passed, finds itself totally ransacked.

Will Smith was also awarded the Oscar for best actor on Sunday evening – or rather the Oscar for “the normalization of violence”, according to Matt Golding, whose drawing is published by

The Age

.

Brian Adcock, for

The Independent

, instead recommends that the American actor undergo anger management therapy – therapy also advised to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.

Ben Jennings, for

The Guardian

, shows a TV presenter launching her war correspondent "live from the Oscars".

This is an opportunity for me to salute the remarkable work of our colleagues, correspondents and special envoys from France 24 on the real conflicts, particularly in Ukraine.

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