PARIS — France's President Emmanuel Macron welcomed Joe Biden at Paris' Arc de Triomphe at the start of the United States leader's state visit to the West European country on Saturday as the two nations seek to tighten ties.
Biden has been in France since Wednesday and took part in this week's commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings that changed the course of World War II.
During a welcome ceremony in the French capital, Macron and Biden laid a wreath and rekindled the flame on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The two leaders also walked down the Champs-Elysees, accompanied by the Republican Guard.
Biden was due to meet Macron for talks at the Elysee Palace later in the day, followed by a state banquet in his honor, with the war in Ukraine the dominant topic.
In a speech on a clifftop in northern France that was the scene of a bloody confrontation between US troops and occupying Germans on June 6, 1944, Biden on Friday drew parallels between D-Day and the present.
The president is set to face his Republican rival and predecessor Donald Trump later this year in presidential elections that commentators predict will subject American democracy to a severe test.
Biden invoked the ghosts of the heroes of the assault on the Pointe du Hoc, a clifftop promontory where German bunkers were attacked by US troops. No surviving veterans remain alive.
"They [the veterans] are summoning us," said Biden. "They ask us: What will we do? They're not asking us to scale these cliffs. They're asking us to stay true to what America stands for."
Biden's speech also came under the shadow of Russia's Feb. 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which has left war again raging in Europe eight decades after the end of World War II.
There are also fears that Trump will scale down US participation in international alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and reduce support for Ukraine if he wins.
"American democracy asks the hardest of things: to believe that we're a part of something bigger than ourselves. So democracy begins with each of us," Biden said.
'They did their job'
Biden, a Democrat, was unmistakably invoking the memory of a famous speech given by late Republican president Ronald Reagan at the Normandy clifftop in 1984, where he saluted the American "boys" of the Pointe du Hoc.
"The rangers who scaled this cliff did not know they would change the world but they did," said Biden. "They came, they did their job, they fulfilled their mission.... They were part of something greater than themselves."
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged the West earlier on Friday to do more to achieve a fair peace as Ukraine battles the Russian invaders, telling Biden that Kyiv was counting on "shoulder-to-shoulder" support.
Meeting Zelenskyy in Paris, Biden pledged his support for Ukraine and announced another $225 million in aid to Kyiv.
Zelenskyy thanked him for the "tremendous support, comparing it to Washington's coming to Europe's aid during World War II.
Kyiv has been pushing Europe to increase military assistance, with Russia gaining the upper hand on the battlefield in recent months, in particular in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region.
After his own talks with Zelenskyy in Paris on Friday night, Macron said he wanted to "finalize" the creation of a coalition of military instructors to train Ukrainian troops in the coming days.
He hoped for Kyiv's European Union accession talks to start "by the end of the month."
Macron also lashed out at what he called a "camp of pacifists" and the "spirit of defeat" over Ukraine's fight against Russia, vowing Ukrainian resistance would not end with capitulation.
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