The Elysee has broken the most elementary diplomatic conventions among statesmen by making public a nine-minute recording of the telephone conversation that Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin held on February 20, four days before the invasion.
In a two-hour documentary, broadcast Thursday night by the state-owned channel France-2, which has had privileged access to the presidential entourage for the past six months, an exasperated Macron is heard telling his interlocutor: “No I know where your jurist has learned Law.” The French leader reproaches Putin for messing up the negotiation with Kyiv by demanding a leading role for the Donbass separatists, which violated the Minsk agreements. The Russian leader puts off an offer from Macron to mediate a summit with Biden in Geneva. Putin goes so far as to tell him: “To be frank with you, I was going to play hockey now. I’m in the gym to start the exercises.”
The disclosure of the talk at this time has caused perplexity among French analysts. It is difficult to understand the objective and he warns of the risk of the loss of confidence of future interlocutors of the French president by having violated confidentiality.
In the documentary, with unpublished images, brief fragments of Macron’s conversations with Zelenski, Scholz, Draghi and Johnson also appear. In a call to the Ukrainian president, just six hours before the Russian attack began, Zelensky is still not convinced an invasion is coming. He admits that there are fears but “not a certainty.” The next day, with Kyiv already under Russian missiles, Macron offered his Ukrainian counterpart to take refuge in the French embassy.
