The talks in the Kremlin between the presidents of Russia and France, Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron, lasted over five hours. The situation in Ukraine is at the center. Putin said in the press conference he held at the end that it is “possible” to move forward on some of the proposals brought to Moscow by the French president. “Several of his ideas or proposals, which are perhaps too early to talk about – can be used to lay the groundwork for our further steps,” he said.
Putin, in agreement with Macron, who will be in Kiev tomorrow to meet Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky, reiterated that “there is no alternative to the Minsk agreements” for a solution to the war in the Donbass. But the Russian president denounced, ironically, that instead the Ukrainian president often changes his mind about the Agreements, completely reversing his position.
In the event of a war between NATO and Russia, a concrete possibility if Ukraine joins the Atlantic Alliance, in the event that Kiev wants to use the military tool to regain control of Crimea, for example, “there will be no winners “Putin said in the press conference.
“We must partially reconsider the developments that have taken place in the last 30 years, the Founding Act of relations between NATO and Russia (signed in 1997, ed) but at the same time respect the right of countries to choose how to organize their security”, he said. Macron’s song, after the interview. “We must urgently work to avoid an escalation”, he added, speaking of “a very substantial conversation” on Ukraine “.
Putin and Macron talked for five hours about the crisis generated by Moscow’s demands for binding guarantees of security in Europe and later shared a working lunch offered by the Kremlin. The menu, published by Ria Novosti, included baked apples with lobster, ravioli with spinach, soup with five types of fish, ginger sorbet, sturgeon steak, venison with sweet potatoes and blackberries, pear pie with vanilla ice cream. The two Presidents drank a 2015 Chardonnay and a 2015 Rebo from the Divnomorskoye estate (the one denounced by Aleksei Navalny in the video on the Black Sea estate, remembers the New York Times correspondent).
The choreography chosen by the Kremlin for the meeting was based on the theme of confidence. The Russian president, the Russian journalists accredited to the Kremlin pointed out, addressed his counterpart confidentially calling it to the West ‘Emmanuel’. The interpreters, who at first sat next to the two presidents, were asked to leave the room, since Putin and Macron were given earphones with which to listen to the translation carried out remotely. Last week, when the long oval white table of the Kremlin meetings was inaugurated, whose distances are marked by caution for the covid, on the occasion of Putin’s meeting with his European ‘ally’, the Hungarian Premier Viktor Orban, two interpreters visually made the conversation less intimate.
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