Foreign Ministry Statement regarding French President Emmanuel Macron’s speech

Foreign Ministry Statement regarding French President Emmanuel Macron’s speech:

In the run-up to the EU summit dedicated to Ukraine crisis and confrontation with Russia, and clearly trying to set the tone for the upcoming gathering, French President Macron made an extremely aggressive anti-Russia speech calling our country, as he did on multiple previous occasions, a “threat to France and Europe.” Without providing any evidence, as he usually does, he accused our country of all the deadly sins from cyber attacks and interference in elections to our alleged plans to attack other countries in Europe.

We have heard him come up with similar fabrications and provocative claims before as well. Perhaps, this was the first time he laid them out in such an intense and irreconcilable manner which made them sound like a catechism for the Russophobic action programme.

Notably, the French leader has repeatedly made public his plans to call President Putin on the telephone to discuss ways to achieve peaceful settlement in Ukraine and to ensure security in Europe. The Russian side has always been open to discuss these matters. However, Macron, this time again, confined himself to clamorous public rhetoric.

The French President is trying hard to convince the French citizens of an “existential threat” coming from Russia. In fact, Russia has never threatened France, but, instead, helped it defend its independence and sovereignty in two world wars. However, Macron’s statements, in fact, pose a threat to Russia.

The French leader evokes his country’s foreign policy traditions, but his rhetoric runs counter to them and the ideological legacy of Gaullism. He cannot be unaware of the fact that France’s high standing in the international arena has for decades relied on his predecessors’ push to play a balancing role in international affairs and to contribute to alleviating tensions between Russia and the West. Back in the day, de Gaulle put forward the concept of indivisible security from the Atlantic to the Urals which relied on building consensus and being mindful of the opinions and interests of all countries on our continent. As opposed to that, we are witnessing official Paris depart from these fundamental principles of French foreign policy.

President Macron’s speech is all about providing security guarantees for Ukraine. Not a word, however, was said about security guarantees for Russia. Notably, the lack of such guarantees and the West’s never-ending attempts to create threats to our country, primarily through unbridled expansion of NATO, which ran counter to promises that were made to us, as well as the push to turn Ukraine into an anti-Russian bridgehead, has led to the current crisis. We have repeatedly and over many years notified Western leaders, including Mr Macron, about it. This is yet another instance that reiterates our conviction that Paris remains unwilling to reckon with our country’s vital interests and is focused on “forcing” us into compliance with the decisions that suit the West. Rest assured that this will never happen.

As we react to what Mr Macron had to say in his speech, we are compelled to once again remind everyone that the tragedy of Ukraine dates back to 2014, when, following a coup, openly neo-Nazi forces grabbed power in that country with the West’s connivance and support. These forces set out to discriminate against the Russian and Russian-speaking population and to eradicate the Russian language, culture and canonical Orthodoxy, which led to a bloody civil conflict in Donbass.

The excessively forward assertions claiming that Russia had violated the Minsk agreements do not hold water and look like an attempt to shift the blame on us. Our country pushed for strict compliance with these agreements, while Kiev, with the tacit consent and incitement of its Western curators, sabotaged its commitments in every possible way. Former leaders of France, Germany and Ukraine have repeatedly admitted in public that they merely took advantage of these agreements to get ready for war.

What is the French leader’s idea of the “path to peace?” It’s the same old one of flooding Ukraine with Western-made weapons and continuing hostilities, and the EU and NATO engaging in unprecedented expansion of military spending. In this context, accusing Russia of ramping up its military allocations and the numerical strength of its armed forces looks absurd. After all, NATO countries’ aggregate military budget is double that of the defence spending of the rest of the world combined, and the EU military budget is multiples of what Russia is spending on defence. It is likewise notable that Russia’s military construction programme is a forced reaction to NATO’s aggressive policy, including Sweden and Finland’s expedited NATO membership.

With regard to Mr Macron’s idea of deploying Western military contingents in Ukraine under the guise of peacekeeping forces, we have repeatedly made it clear that this is unacceptable. This, what essentially represents an occupation of Ukraine, would inevitably lead to an extremely dangerous escalation.

President Macron’s statement clearly conveys undertones of a nuclear blackmail. Paris’s ambitions to become Europe’s nuclear “patron” by providing it with its “nuclear umbrella,” almost replacing the American one, have come to the surface. Needless to say, this will do nothing to strengthen the security of France or its allies. Besides, the French nuclear capability cannot be compared with that of the United States. France has only 56 nuclear warhead carriers, while the United States has 898 of them. The total capacity of the nuclear component of the French armed forces amounts to 67.2 megatons, while the United States boasts a whopping 1,814 megatons. Without a doubt, Russia will take the French President’s remarks into consideration when it plans its defence strategy.

The speech leaves one feeling bad for President Macron, who is seeking to portray himself as a new leader of the “free world.” It really tells a story if you want to see the current low level of embittered European elites for what it is. The looming Russia-US normalisation that has just begun to take shape, and the first steps towards peaceful resolution of the Ukraine crisis are causing genuine panic among them. One would think that the Europeans, who were in the thick of the confrontation between the superpowers during the Cold War, should be interested more than anyone in seeing the trajectory of Russia-US relations change, tensions defuse, and a constructive dialogue between Moscow and Washington begin.

Needless to say, the French president’s emphatic militarism is dictated by the domestic agenda as well. Military rhetoric is a way to divert his own population from aggravating socioeconomic problems in France and the EU, to shift the people’s attention to external pseudo-threats, and to somehow fortify his rocky political position, which has taken a blow or two over the past year.

Macron’s speech caused whatever was left of the masks to come off and showed who’s leading the “party of war.” It also showed who’s really opposing the ceasefire and betting on continuing and escalating the Ukraine conflict.

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