“Cursed be the war”, “Putin bombs my beautiful Ukraine”: in France, 21,700 demonstrators, according to the Ministry of the Interior, protested on Saturday in a hundred rallies against the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and shouted the Russian president, very worried about knowing “how far he can go”.

In Strasbourg, headquarters of the Council of Europe, 3,100 people according to the prefecture gathered with Ukrainian flags and placards proclaiming “Putin killer” (“Putin killer”) or “Stop the war”.

Vladimir “Putin and all his clique will have to pay the price for this aggression and will have to face an international tribunal,” Borys Tarasyuk, permanent representative of Ukraine to the Council of Europe, told the crowd.

On the Place de la République, in Paris, 5,000 demonstrators, according to the police headquarters, chanted “Putin assassin”, “Putin terrorist”. Like Liliya Gryshuk, a 29-year-old Ukrainian living in Paris, who decides: people in France “didn’t expect it (at war). We were right: Poutine is garbage”. “And no one is going to help us?” asks the young woman.

At the podium of the “No to war in Ukraine” rally, convened in particular by SOS Racisme and Mrap, journalist and European deputy (Renew Europe) Bernard Guetta evokes Ukraine attacked by Russia, assuring that “David will win against Goliath”.

“People seem to have forgotten the Second World War,” said protester Tatiana Silvanovitch, from Belarus, in Lille, who discovered: “Putin wants to recreate the Russian empire and we don’t know how far he can go. . .”.

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“Stop War, stop Poutine” (Stop the war, stop Poutine), “Nato act” (NATO, act), “Europe do more” (Europe, do more), could we read on the placards brandished in Marseille, twinned with Odessa (south-western Ukraine).

In the second city of France, the demonstrators were 700 according to the prefecture.

“My family is bombed these days, it seems so unlikely,” says AFP Ludmila Tonka Fannière, 31, Ukrainian living in France, wearing a crown of flowers like many other compatriots in the gatherings.

“We must stop the war. It is always possible to find a solution to win,” said the national spokesman for the Peace Movement, Roland Nivet, to AFP, among a thousand walkers in Rennes. “War cannot be the solution because we know when it starts but we don’t know when it ends”.

The demonstrators were also a thousand to have gathered in Nantes, around 350 in Clermont-Ferrand, 250 in Montpellier, 300 in Grenoble, Saint-Etienne or Bordeaux, 200 in Chambéry or a hundred in Puy-en-Velay.

In Saint-Etienne, Grigori, a Ukrainian conductor living in France since 1991, believes that “Europe must go beyond words in the face of the one who will destroy many lives”, Vladimir Poutine, whom he describes as “21st Century Hitler”.

In Bordeaux, the rally was held in the presence in particular of the PS candidate for the presidential election Anne Hidalgo. Placards demanded the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT international banking system or denounced Europe as a “slave” to Russian gas.

“I don’t want French soldiers to go and die in Ukraine, but I want us to do everything to stop Putin!” Argued Kostia, 25, a doctoral student in chemistry, dressed in a traditional shirt with embroidered patterns. He himself says he is thinking of returning to Ukraine: “to fight”.

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