The Kremlin rolled out its team of talking heads on Thursday morning to pour scorn on French President Macron, accusing him of everything from duplicity, nuclear sabre-rattling, bad manners, and even being the living embodiment of both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler at the same time.
French President Emmanuel Macron addressed his nation and the world on Wednesday evening to lay out his vision of Europe taking up the slack in supporting Ukraine and taking responsibility for its own defence. While President Donald Trump is committed to bringing peace to Europe, the continent, at least not being totally reliant on American taxpayers for its own defence, has also been a key part of his agenda and may well be positively received in Washington.
The same could not be said for Moscow, which — gently put — reacted with fury on Thursday morning after Macron’s speech, as various senior government figures and spokesmen lined up to criticise the French leader in the strongest possible terms. The attacks on Macron ranged from the very serious to the fairly absurd, including accusing Paris of violating ‘diplomatic etiquette and decency’, a certain abrogation of self-awareness from a nation like Russia.
Speaking on Thursday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Macron’s position was “extremely confrontational” and proof Paris is “looking for a continuation of the war”. He asserted: “It can hardly be perceived as a speech by a peace-minded head of state… France is already ready to use its nuclear weapons for security and so on. This is already such nuclear rhetoric, this is a claim to nuclear leadership in Europe. So it is very, very confrontational.”
Of course, security is precisely what nuclear weapons are for; deterrence is the purpose. Nevertheless, Macron’s speech did touch on the emerging German-French plan to extend a Franco “nuclear umbrella” over central Europe, something Russia is extremely sensitive over, even if it has already acted very questionably over the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968 in recent years.
Chair of the international affairs committee in the lower house of the Russian parliament Leonid Slutsky, one of Russia’s cast of critics always quick to accuse the West of escalatory action, said Macron was bidding to lead the “European war party” and toying with a third world war. Per Russian state media, he replied to the Paris address: “He’s not talking about peace, he’s talking about World War III, in which there can be no winners.
“Macron is a prominent representative of the Western European elite of the last generation, who is unable to solve the country’s internal problems, but is trying to ‘save face’ through ostentatiously harsh foreign policy rhetoric. Such politicians are pushing the world towards a nuclear disaster for the sake of their own ambitions. But they will inevitably lose!”.
Slutsky also accused Macron of trying “new Napoleonic armour” for size, an important touchstone for Russia’s self-identity in relation to Europe. While Napoleon is mostly remembered in the West outside of Britain as the great strategist, to the Russians, he is a reassuring reminder of the potency of their winter as an anvil on which to crush its enemies.
And that parliamentarian wasn’t the only Russian to lean on that idea. Indeed, the usually comparatively staid and reserved — at least compared to Kremlin hotheads like Pekov and Slutsky — foreign minister Sergei Lavrov responded to Macron’s speech with undisguised anger. Attempting to reject claims that Russia was preparing for war with wider Europe as unreasonable and irrational, Lavrov said: “Unlike his predecessors, who also sought to fight with Russia — Napoleon, Hitler — Mr. Macron does not act very diplomatically.
“They stated openly: ‘We must conquer Russia, we must defeat Russia.’ And he apparently wants the same thing, but for some reason, he says that it is necessary to fight Russia so that it does not defeat France, that Russia poses dangers to France and Europe.”
Russia would consider any move to deploy European troops eastwards — in Ukraine as a peacekeeping force, for instance — and forward-deploying French nuclear weapons as a “threat” and an act of war, Lavrov said.
While the bluster — mainly meant for global consumption — from these Kremlin figures has become par for the course over the duration of the Ukraine war, a handful of comments speaking specifically to France and Germany’s involvement in the Ukraine war do reveal something else, and something more revealing, about Moscow’s worldview. Personal spokesmen for both Putin and Lavrov took the time today to individually cite France’s former President Francois Hollande — who was leader at the time of Russia’s first invasion in 2014 — in a bid to prove a point about French bad faith diplomacy.
Both raised the point of a specific 2022 interview with former President Hollande by a Ukrainian publisher, the Kyiv Independent. While the article made no impact in the Western media at the time, Moscow instantly picked it up as proof of Europe manufacturing a conflict with Russia through Ukraine for its own ends.
Indeed, Russia’s President Putin cited the interview shortly after it was published, and Hollande’s remark that the 2014 Minsk Agreements were only intended to give Ukraine time to rearm has been repeatedly cited by the Kremlin ever since.
Elsewhere in Europe, Macron’s Wednesday night speech was better received. Some 20 European countries are said to have expressed interest in the Anglo-French plan for a “coalition of the willing,” reports the Daily Telegraph. However, as the United States has previously expressed, inevitably, some of these nations will have very small militaries with no real fighting experience.
Canada has since stated it is also interested in getting involved, saying Thursday morning it would be willing to contribute a contingent to a Ukrainian peace force.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a leading globalist and former Eurocrat, followed Macron’s address with a call for Europe to take on Russia’s “arms race” and to “win”. He said: “Everyone is determined to take up this challenge. There is no doubt that the war in Ukraine, the new approach of the American administration to Europe and, above all, the arms race started by Russia… pose completely new challenges to us. Europe must take up this arms race and must win it.
“I am convinced that Russia will lose this race, just as the Soviet Union lost a similar arms race 40 years ago. And this is also the only method to avoid a larger-scale conflict.”
Ukraine’s President Zelensky is meeting with European leaders in Brussels today as the European Union discusses defence spending and peace plans.
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