François Hollande recommended Thursday that the government maintain “no contact” with Russia after Moscow’s “instrumentalization” of a meeting between the French Minister of the Armed Forces and his Russian counterpart. “You have seen how Russia exploits this type of discussions and even suggests that it would be France which could have supported the attacks in Moscow (…) My recommendation is no contact with Russia,” argued the former president on France Inter.
We must “help, help and help Ukraine again”
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 for 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,” judged François Hollande. “It is not abandonment that makes peace, it is the ability, in the face of authoritarian regimes, to be able to show that there are limits and that these limits entail a certain number of consequences when they are crossed “, he stressed.
“Netanyahu hears nothing”
“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 considered it “unbearable (…) that we allow civilian populations to starve, not even to seek treatment.”
“Netanyahu hears nothing and he himself is in a headlong rush,” he admitted, calling for pressure for “the ceasefire, a peace process and elections in Israel and in West Bank because there too, we have a Palestinian Authority which is not an interlocutor.”