Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy supports talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, not isolating the Kremlin leader, according to an interview he gave to French daily Le Monde published on July 2.
Sarkozy, who currently leads the right-wing opposition party Les Republicains, said that whatever disagreement France may have with the Russian leader, “Putin is someone we must and we can discuss with.”
The former French leader said that although it is possible to disagree with how Putin behaved towards Ukraine, another Cold War between Russia and the West must be avoided. He underscored the value of cooperating with Russia, especially in the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State and with resolving the Syrian crisis where there is a bloody civil war.
Recalling his intervention to solve the four-day military conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008, when he flew to Moscow to negotiate a truce, he told the newspaper that he does not understand “why we had to wait one year” to hold discussions with Putin, referring to the Minsk II peace deal when current French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel brokered the February agreement in Belarus.
Russian President Vladimir Putin .
Sarkozy further noted that pressure should have been put on both the Ukrainian and Russian side.
He alleged that France should have prevented Ukraine from stripping the special status that the Russian language enjoyed side-by-side with the official Ukrainian language immediately after the EuroMaidan Revolution in February 2014. Sarkozy also said more could’ve been to stop Putin from stoking the conflict in Donbas.
This would’ve avoided the current controversy over the sale of two Mistral-class helicopter carriers to Russia worth €1.2 billion. France has refused to sell the modern naval carriers ever since Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 and engineered the war in Donbas. Concerns over jobs and filling state coffers have grown since the controversy started.
The Mistral-class assault warship Sevastopol, the second of two mammoth Mistral helicopter carriers built for Russia, is docked on Nov. 26, 2014 in the western French port of Saint-Nazaire after being taken from its dry dock on Nov. 20.
The first carrier was scheduled for delivery in November 2014, but under pressure from its NATO allies, France refused to hand over the carrier.
Yves Souben can be reached at [email protected].
