President Emmanuel Macron’s office decried “disinformation” after footage showed him self-consciously snatching a small white object from a conference table while sitting with Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer and Germany’s Friedrich Merz.
The leaders of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany made a then-secret trip to Ukraine on Friday evening for joint events on Saturday, travelling from Poland to Kyiv by overnight train provided by the Ukrainian government. In the now-familiar travelling conference room used by dozens of world leaders on their trips to Ukraine during wartime while air warfare makes executive jet travel impossible, the three men met for a brief photo-call with their attendant journalists.
After these images and the trip were made public, footage of President Macron himself sitting at the head of the conference table before noticing a small white object on the table and snatching it to his pocket spread on social media along with claims that it had, in fact, been a bag of cocaine.
The assertion gained sufficient traction that the Élysée palace itself, the private office and residence of the French President, felt forced to deny the claims. Sharing high-resolution images of the interior of the railway carriage, the palace said, with apparent contempt: “this is a tissue. For blowing your nose”.
The Élysée said the spread of the idea that President Macron was attempting to hide a drug habit rather than clear the decks for an informal photograph with fellow leaders was an act of “disinformation” intended to undermine “European unity” on Ukraine.
“This fake news is being spread by France’s enemies, both abroad and at home. We must remain vigilant against manipulation”, they said, with publications like France’s Liberation linking it to Vladimir Putin.
The claims of drug use on Ukraine’s VIP leader express train fed somewhat into longstanding Russian claims that President Volodymyr Zelensky himself is a drug addict, or a drug dealer, or both. Indeed, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova leant into this over the weekend, calling the grainy video “incredible footage”, posting a satirical short of Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the part of a Soviet police officer making a drugs bust in the 1988 cop comedy Red Heat, and claiming the fate of the world is being decided by drug-addicted European leaders.
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