President Emmanuel Macron of France met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Monday, embarking on a round of shuttle diplomacy that aims to defuse the Ukraine crisis and encourage European countries to play a bigger role in the continent’s defense.

After a flurry of phone calls this weekend with President Biden and other allies, Mr. Macron traveled to Moscow before heading to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He was also coordinating with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who met with Mr. Biden later Monday.

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President Emmanuel Macron of France met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Monday, embarking on a round of shuttle diplomacy that aims to defuse the Ukraine crisis and encourage European countries to play a bigger role in the continent’s defense.

After a flurry of phone calls this weekend with President Biden and other allies, Mr. Macron traveled to Moscow before heading to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He was also coordinating with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who met with Mr. Biden later Monday.

The diplomacy comes as relations between Russia and the West are on a knife’s edge. Mr. Putin has massed more than 100,000 troops along the border with Ukraine in what Western officials fear is a prelude to an invasion that would be Europe’s biggest land war since World War II. His demand: that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization scale back its military presence in Eastern Europe to 1997, before most of the eastern countries joined the alliance.

“Russia’s geopolitical objective today is clearly not Ukraine, but to clarify the rules of cohabitation with NATO and the EU,” Mr. Macron said in an interview with French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche published on the eve of his Russia trip. “The security and sovereignty of Ukraine or any other European state cannot be compromised, just as it is legitimate for Russia to raise the question of its own security,” he added.

The diplomacy allows Mr. Macron to burnish his credentials as a statesman before he faces re-election in April. The French public has long expected its leaders—from Gen. Charles de Gaulle to former President Nicolas Sarkozy —to act with autonomy on the world stage. France is the European Union’s only major military power with its own nuclear arsenal.

“Mr. Macron needs to bolster his record,” said Tatiana Kastoueva-Jean, an analyst at the Paris-based think tank IFRI.

Ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a summit, underscoring their deepening ties as Russia confronts growing tensions with the U.S. and NATO over Ukraine. Photo: Alexei Druzhinin/Associated Press The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

Mr. Macron is also filling a leadership void in Europe left by the departure of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her successor, Mr. Scholz, has come under fire at home for his relative absence from the diplomatic scene since the start of the Ukraine crisis while other European leaders have been more visible.

France and Germany share the view that the U.S., the U.K. and some Eastern European states have been too alarmist about the buildup of Russian forces. France and Germany are eager to demonstrate unity with the U.S. and other NATO allies, but both countries have been historically skeptical of the prospect of Ukraine joining the alliance. Germany was also slower than the U.S. to show support for the protests of 2013 in Kyiv that eventually led to the departure of pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych.

What sets Germany apart is its high dependence on Russia for its energy supplies and the economic disruption it would face should Russian gas deliveries be interrupted by a conflict. The country imports well over half its gas from Russia and this dependence is set to rise as it phases out its last nuclear power plants this year and shifts away from coal.

In Washington, Mr. Scholz is expected to come under renewed pressure from the Biden administration to publicly commit to closing the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Russia should Moscow invade Ukraine—something he has stopped short of saying despite Washington’s insistence. Nord Stream 2, which runs alongside the older Nord Stream pipeline, is completed but is awaiting certification to come online, something German authorities have said was unlikely to happen until the second half of the year.

Mr. Scholz has also faced criticism in the U.S. for refusing to send weapons to Ukraine. Chancellery officials have said Mr. Scholz was working behind the scenes to defuse the crisis and would visit both Ukraine and Russia in the coming days after meeting with Mr. Macron and with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Berlin on Tuesday.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz arrived in Washington on Monday.

Photo: Kay Nietfeld/Zuma Press

Ahead of the U.S. and German leaders’ meeting in the Oval Office on Monday, Mr. Biden said the two nations were “working in lockstep to further deter Russian aggression in Europe.”

On Monday, Germany said it was sending up to 350 troops to Lithuania as part of NATO’s enhanced forward presence on the alliance’s eastern flank. German Foreign Minister

Annalena Baerbock, who was in Kyiv on Monday, said she plans a trip to the frontline zone in eastern Ukraine and will visit a military hospital that Germany has supplied with medical equipment. She added that Germany is ready to continue backing Ukraine financially.

“We’re ready to pay a high economic price, because what’s at stake is the security of Ukraine,” she said.

A close aide to Mr. Macron said the French leader aims to persuade Mr. Putin to draw down his forces and agree on steps to implement a peace accord that was negotiated years ago for Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Kyiv is fighting pro-Russian separatists. Mr. Macron, the aide said, also plans to brief Mr. Putin on his ambitions to reshape Europe’s defense strategy. Last month, the French leader took the helm of Europe’s rotating presidency with a speech calling for “a new order of security and stability” in Europe, aside from the postwar trans-Atlantic alliance that has underpinned the continent’s security for decades.

Some analysts warn that Mr. Macron risks playing into the hands of Mr. Putin with his outreach to Moscow. In discussing plans to revamp European defense, analysts say, Mr. Macron must be careful not to undercut NATO’s role in the continent’s security.

“Russia wants Europeans to become more independent from the U.S.,” said Ms. Kastoueva-Jean. “But they understand that Europe is still very far from achieving this strategic autonomy,” she added.

Sitting down for the talks in Moscow, Mr. Putin addressed Mr. Macron using the informal Russian word for you, typically reserved for friends. The two leaders sat at separate ends of a long oval table.

“I understand that we have a common concern about what is happening in the field of security in Europe,” Mr. Putin said.

French officials say Mr. Macron’s history with Mr. Putin allows him to play a unique role in mediating between Russia and the U.S. In a phone call with Mr. Macron last week, the Russian president described the Frenchman as a “quality interlocutor,” according to an aide to Mr. Macron.

Since his election in 2017, Mr. Macron has sought to cultivate ties with Mr. Putin, meeting with him a dozen times, including a visit to the Palace of Versailles. Mr. Macron has pushed Western allies to maintain dialogue with Mr. Putin, raising fears among some that he was too willing to offer concessions to Mr. Putin.

A meeting he held with Mr. Putin at the French president’s summer residence in the Fort of Brégançon on the French Riviera in August 2019 unnerved other Western governments, who felt they hadn’t been properly informed that it would take place.

“There’s always been a lingering suspicion that France plays solo, and may be too prone to concessions to Russia,” said Bruno Tertrais, a political scientist and deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, a think tank in Paris. “The Brégançon visit was the original sin,” he added.

Later that month, Mr. Macron riled French diplomats with a blunt call to reach out to Russia.

“We have our own deep state,” Mr. Macron told an annual gathering of French ambassadors, “and I know that many of you distrust Russia.”

In December 2019, he hosted a meeting between Messrs. Putin and Zelensky at the Élysée Palace. It remains the only time Messrs. Putin and Zelensky met in person.

The meeting seemed to breathe new life into the Normandy format, the peace talks between France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine. In the months that followed, Kyiv and Russia-backed militants in Ukraine’s eastern provinces exchanged prisoners and took other steps to ease tensions. But then progress came to a halt.

“The Russian side stopped playing the game,” said Marie Dumoulin, a Russia expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former French diplomat.

—Matthew Dalton in Paris, Bertrand Benoit in Berlin and Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington contributed to this article.

Write to Noemie Bisserbe at noemie.bisserbe@wsj.com and Ann M. Simmons at ann.simmons@wsj.com