France has sent a message to Vladimir Putin not to instrumentalize Friday’s attack in Moscow, after the Russian president had pointed out, without directly accusing, Ukraine’s responsibility.
The Minister of European Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, reiterated this Sunday that the French are “in solidarity with the Russian people” in the face of this attack on a shopping center on the outskirts of Moscow that caused at least 133 deaths.
“This hateful and barbaric act must be clarified, which should not be exploited”Barrot added in statements to the BFMTV channel in which he justified the calls made by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to take a step forward in their support for Ukraine.
Asked if he believes that Putin is instrumentalizing Friday’s massacre by not having referred at any time to the claim of the Islamic State and having suggested that the perpetrators had been prepared to flee from Ukraine, the French minister responded that they have been observing “for weeks and months a hardening of Vladimir Putin’s position.”
This has been evident – he specified – in greater repression inside Russia and abroad in the disinformation campaigns in Europe and in the “use of food as a weapon”, by flooding the cereal market.
He has also insisted on this hardening of Putin’s position when he was questioned about the Russian missile that This morning it entered Polish airspaceaccording to Warsaw authorities.
And he added that to confront it, in line with what Macron has been advocating for weeks, the leaders of the European Union agreed at their summit on Thursday and Friday in Brussels to advance “a historic advance” with a “united” position to equip itself with industrial capabilities to arm itself.
In his first reaction to the attack on Friday night, the French president had condemned “strongly the terrorist attack claimed by the Islamic State in Moscow” and had expressed “solidarity with the families of the victims, with the injured and with the Russian people.”
Its Foreign Ministry had stressed, for its part, that “these hateful acts must be completely clarified.”
