Russia blasts France’s Macron as it mends fences with Washington

Russia ruled out European proposals to send peacekeeping forces to Ukraine and said Thursday that French President Emmanuel Macron had threatened it by suggesting that Moscow was a grave menace to Europe.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address to the nation Wednesday that he plans next week to hold a meeting of army chiefs from European countries willing to send troops to Ukraine after any eventual peace deal with Russia.

He also said France needs to be ready if the United States is no longer by its side.

President Donald Trump has upended U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Russia and demanded a deal to end the war, berating Ukraine while discussing a renewal of ties with Moscow.

Macron said that Russia was “a threat for France and Europe,” that the Ukraine war was already a “global conflict” and that he would open a debate about extending the French nuclear umbrella to allies in Europe.

The Kremlin said the speech was extremely confrontational and that it was clear Macron wanted the war in Ukraine to continue while President Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister said the speech amounted to a threat against Russia.

“This is, of course, a threat” against Russia, Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow.

“Unlike their predecessors, who also wanted to fight against Russia, Napoleon, Hitler, Mr. Macron does not act very gracefully, because at least they said it bluntly: ‘we must conquer Russia, we must defeat Russia’.”

Lavrov also dismissed European ideas about sending peacekeepers from NATO member states to Ukraine, saying that Moscow would consider such a deployment to be a NATO presence in Ukraine and that Moscow would not allow it.

Russia and the United States are by far the world’s biggest nuclear powers, with more than 5,000 nuclear warheads each, followed by China with about 500 and then France with 290 and the United Kingdom with 225, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

Russian officials say the tough rhetoric from Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other European powers over recent days is simply not backed up by hard military power and point to Russia’s advances on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Putin last year ordered the regular size of the Russian army to be increased by 180,000 troops to 1.5 million active servicemen in a move that would make it the second largest in the world after China’s.

Putin has repeatedly dismissed as nonsense Western claims that Russia could one day attack a NATO member.

Ukraine and the West say Putin is engaged in an imperial-style land grab in Ukraine, and have repeatedly vowed to defeat Russia, which currently controls just under 20% of Ukraine, including Crimea and a chunk of eastern and southern Ukraine.

Putin portrays the war as part of a historic struggle with the West, which he says humiliated Russia, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.

New ambassador

Putin appointed Alexander Darchiev, a veteran diplomat known in the past for public denunciations of the West, as ambassador to the United States on Thursday to lead a rapprochement that has stunned Ukraine and European countries.

The Foreign Ministry said last week Washington had given it the green light at a meeting between Russian and U.S. officials in Turkey to appoint Darchiev, who now serves as head of the ministry’s North America department.

The six-hour meeting in Istanbul last Thursday, where the delegations worked to try to restore the normal functioning of their embassies after years of tit-for-tat expulsions, was the latest sign of a thaw between the two countries.

Trump has upended previous policy on the war in Ukraine, opening up bilateral talks with Moscow and pausing military aid to Kyiv after clashing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the White House last week.

Russia has had no ambassador in Washington since last October when the previous envoy, Anatoly Antonov, left his post.

Darchiev, 64, has served two long spells in Russia’s Washington embassy and was ambassador to Canada from 2014 to 2021. Like other senior Russian diplomats, he has been known in recent years for strong public denunciations of the United States and the West.

“Apparently, Washington will need time to get used to the fact that its hegemony is in the past, and will have to reckon with the national interests of Russia, which has its own sphere of influence and responsibility,” he told Interfax in March 2022.

In a memoir, John J. Sullivan, a U.S. ambassador to Russia under then-President Joe Biden, described Darchiev becoming “visibly enraged” during a meeting at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, over remarks by Biden, who called Putin a war criminal.

“When I finished, he started screaming at me in a profane tirade that I should not come into the ministry with such a belligerent attitude,” Sullivan wrote. Sullivan declined further comment on the events when contacted by Reuters, and Reuters was not able to reach Darchiev for his side of the story.