François Hollande recommends “no contact with Russia”

“Today, my recommendation is no contact with Russia”reacts Thursday April 4 on France Inter François Hollande, former President of the Republic, while the French Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu and his Russian counterpart Sergei Choïgu spoke by telephone on Wednesday, for the first time since October 2022. If this call “surely started with a good intention”, François Hollande insists on the risk that “Russia is exploiting this type of discussion.”

The former head of state presents himself as the one who “been the most lucid” in front of “Vladimir Putin’s Russia”. He also maintains that he “was the president who did not deliver the Mistrals, when there was a first war in Ukraine”. He nevertheless admits to having “dialogued with Vladimir Putin”, but makes it clear that the context was not the same.

François Hollande claims to be “aware that Emmanuel Macron has evolved on this subject” to arrive “at one position” that he judges “just”namely to help “Ukraine faces an invader”. The former socialist president believes that “The more we help Ukraine, the greater the chance that this conflict will end.” He further considers that “If we want peace, we must be able to show strength.”

“It is not abandonment that makes peace, it is the capacity that we have, in the face of authoritarian regimes, to be able to show that there are limits and that they lead to a certain number of consequences when they are crossed.”

Francois Hollande

at France Inter

François Hollande then refers to the situation in Syria. He explains that “when we allowed Bashar al-Assad to massacre his own people with chemical weapons, without reacting, while a red line had been set, we had, in the years that followed, a balance of power which went in the same direction sense”.