The Kremlin explained on Friday that the long table separating Vladimir Putin from Emmanuel Macron during an interview on Ukraine was aimed at respecting a sanitary distance after the French president’s refusal to submit to a COVID test in Russia.
The images of the two presidents seated on either side of this six-meter-long white table sparked many comments, some seeing it as a sign of Mr. Putin’s coldness towards Mr. Macron, whom he received on Monday in the Kremlin.
Asked by a journalist who asked him if Mr. Macron had indeed refused to submit to a PCR test on his arrival in Russia, the spokesman for the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, replied in the affirmative.
“Some follow their own rules […] But in this case, a health protocol is applied to protect the health of our president and that of his host,” Mr. Peskov said.
“If doctors from both sides interact, then it is possible to reduce the distance,” he added. In recent weeks, Mr. Putin has displayed greater physical proximity with certain visiting foreign officials who had submitted to Russian health protocol.
“There are no political considerations on this subject” and the physical distance “does not interfere in any way with the negotiations”, he insisted.
The Élysée, for its part, justified this position by indicating that “the protocol conditions allowing an interview between the two Heads of State with less distance (contact with shaking of hands and smaller table) imposed a health protocol which does not seemed to us neither acceptable nor compatible with the constraints of the agenda which were ours”.
“We chose the other option proposed by the Russian protocol”, underlined the entourage of the French president.
Since January, the Hungarian Prime Minister and Iranian President Ebrahim Raissi, two allies of Russia, have also been seated at the large six-meter table in the Kremlin.
Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokaev, on the other hand, were seated in the immediate vicinity of Mr. Putin.
Sanitary measures have been considerably reinforced in the Kremlin since the start of the new coronavirus pandemic. Journalists are subjected to several screening tests before press conferences and Mr. Putin, 69, regularly appears several meters away from his hosts.
Mr. Macron’s trip to Moscow on Monday was aimed at reducing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, which have been growing steadily in recent months.
Russia has massed more than 100,000 soldiers on the borders of Ukraine and the West accuses it of preparing an attack on this country, which Moscow denies.