PARIS, Aug 18, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – French President Emmanuel Macron will
attempt to convince Russia to accept Ukraine’s overtures of dialogue when he
meets Vladimir Putin for talks on Monday ahead of a G7 summit.
Macron, who hosted his Russian counterpart in grand style at the palace of
Versailles in 2017, will this time meet Putin at his official holiday
residence in Bregancon in southern France.
The visit comes days before world leaders, including US President Donald
Trump, gather for the August 24-26 Group of Seven (G7) summit in Biarritz.
Russia was slung out of what was the G8 in 2014 after it seized Ukraine’s
Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, an annexation the international community
deemed illegal. Shortly after, a war broke out in eastern Ukraine between
government forces and Russian-backed separatists. An estimated 13,000 people
have been killed so far.
Macron has taken a keen interest in brokering an end to the conflict and
believes that the arrival in power of new Ukrainian president Volodymyr
Zelensky could give a new impulse to halting the fighting.
Zelensky has offered to meet Putin for face-to-face talks and spoken to
him by phone in recent weeks.
“President Zelensky has made offers to which — it seems to us —
President Putin should respond in an encouraging way,” said a French
official, who asked not to be named.
“The election of President Zelensky gives us some room to manoeuvre,” the
official added.
– French banker released –
Brokering peace in eastern Ukraine would be a major feather in the cap for
Macron, who since coming to office in 2017 has sought to magnify France’s
international role.
Kremlin advisor Yuri Ushakov said that the dialogue between France and
Russia had “intensified” in the recent months and that Putin’s visit was the
“logical continuation” of his regular contact with Macron
Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said
Macron would be looking for ways to resuscitate the 2015 Minsk ceasefire deal
which Paris and Berlin helped broker.
“The main public issue will be reviving the Minsk accords,” Baunov told
AFP.
Iran will also feature high on the agenda, with Paris keen for Moscow to
use its close ties with Tehran to prevent a further escalation of conflicts
in the Middle East.
Tensions have shot up since Washington’s unilateral pullout from a 2015
deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, known as the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JPCOA).
Ushakov confirmed that Macron and Putin would discuss Iran’s nuclear
programme, as well as the conflict in Syria, EU-Russia cooperation and
Franco-Russian relations.
Macron is expected to press Putin to use his influence on the regime of
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to stop an offensive in the northern region
of Idlib and ward off new refugee flows towards Turkey.
On Russia’s domestic front, France has repeatedly rebuked Moscow over its
crackdown on protesters angered by a refusal to register opposition
candidates for elections later this year.
In an apparent gesture of goodwill, a French banker who had spent the last
six months behind bars in Russia on fraud charges, was released into house
arrest on Thursday.
Explaining his surprise release, Ushakov said: “The French president had
spoken about it (the case) several times with the Russian president.”