It’s experience that speaks. While the meeting of the French Minister of the Armed Forces with his Russian counterpart was the occasion of a new diplomatic hiccup, former President François Hollande recommended, this Thursday, April 4, that the government maintain “no contact” with Russia after the “instrumentalization” made by Moscow.
“You have seen how Russia exploits this type of discussion and even suggests that it was France which could have supported the attacks in Moscow […] My recommendation is no contact with Russia,” the former president argued on France Inter.
A telephone exchange with Choïgu
Following the attack in Moscow on March 22 which left 144 dead and was claimed by the Islamic State organization, Sébastien Lecornu took the initiative on Wednesday of a telephone exchange with Sergei Choïgu, a first since October 2022.
But the Russian Defense Ministry affirmed after this meeting that the two countries had said they were “ready to dialogue” regarding the conflict in Ukraine, comments denied by Paris. The Russian ministry even said it “hoped” that the French secret services were not involved in the attack.
We must “help, help and help Ukraine again […] The more we help Ukraine, the greater the chance that this conflict will end,” said François Hollande. “It is not abandonment that makes peace, it is capacity, in the face of authoritarian regimes. , to be able to show that there are limits and that these limits lead to a certain number of consequences when they are crossed,” he underlined.
The parallel with Bashar al-Assad
“When we allowed Bashar al-Assad to massacre his own people with chemical weapons without reacting even though a red line had been set, in the years that followed you had balances of power that went in the same direction, ‘that is to say the use of force,’ he remarked.
On Gaza, he deemed it “unbearable […] that we allow civilian populations to be starved, not even to be treated.” “Netanyahu hears nothing and he himself is in a headlong rush,” he admitted, calling for pressure to “cease the -fire, a peace process and elections in Israel and the West Bank because there too, we have a Palestinian Authority which is not an interlocutor.”