Russian President Vladimir Putin can count on many supporters in France, even at the highest level of politics.
Some French public figures can be counted on to spread the Kremlin’s message, damaging France’s credibility as an impartial ally in the Normandy Format peace talks in which the nation, along with Germany, are mediators seeking to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Putin’s friends undermine France’s foreign policy in Ukraine, which is to seek a way to end the Kremlin’s war and get Crimea and the Russian-controlled parts of the eastern Donbas back under Ukraine’s control. The ongoing seven-year war has killed more than 13,000 people.
From both the political left and right, whether motivated by money or shared values with the Russian dictator, these Kremlin-friendly French regularly push Moscow’s propaganda and agenda.
Here are some of the more prominent Putin cronies in France:
Hubert Vedrine
Hubert Vedrine, former foreign minister of France from 1997 to 2002, published a book in February where he outlined his vision of geopolitics.
In this book, Vedrine gives Russia the sympathy he has endlessly repeated in the French media since he left office. For Vedrine, Russia is the West’s easy target.
According to him, there is no reason to fight today Russia as it’s “less bad and much less powerful than the USSR was in the days of the Cold War, at a time when it was assassinating way more opponents.”
He also sweeps Kremlin opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s arrest under the rug, as “the West no longer has a monopoly on power and the hierarchy of values.”
For him, France and the West share the blame for the tense relationship with Russia. He supported French President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to open his arms to Putin in 2019.
“We need to reinvent our relationship with Russia,” he said back then.
Le Pen and her niece
Marine Le Pen (L) and her niece Marion-Marechal are both fervent loyalists of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Marine Le Pen said that Crimea “has always been Russian.” (AFP)
The most prominent supporters are the Le Pen family who is leading the anti-immigration National Rally formerly known as the National Front.
Le Pen’s platform, which is also anti-European Union, appeals to the Kremlin’s incessant posturing as a defender of conservative values.
Marine Le Pen, as well as her niece, Marion-Marechal, are both fervent loyalists of Putin. They have visited Moscow for high-level talks numerous times.
She is a serious contender for the presidency, with polls showing she could be French President Emmanuel Macron. The National Rally has only eight seats in the French parliament, but claims 22 out of 74 French seats inhe European Parliament. Some of her support comes from anger over Macron’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis.
Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Marine Le Pen said that Crimea “has always been Russian” and vehemently denied any invasion had taken place. Instead, she claimed a “coup d’état” in Ukraine resulted in a transfer of power.
In 2018, she went as far as calling Russia “a great, safe, modern country and a democracy” during an interview on French radio.
She has also promised to work to repeal the EU sanctions on Moscow over Crimea and pledged to recognize the peninsula as part of Russia if she’s elected.
Such public positions helped Le Pen secure an $11 million loan from a Russian bank in September 2014 to finance the party ahead of the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections, a loan for which the party is being sued because it still didn’t pay it back.
Le Pen’s party allegedly looked for Putin’s financial support because French banks had refused to lend money to the political party, which is stained by its xenophobic reputation.
Thierry Mariani
French lawmaker Thierry Mariani holds a matryoshka doll. He supports the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea and urged European countries to restore normal relations with Russia. (AFP)
A French lawmaker at the European Parliament on behalf of the National Rally, Mariani made headlines in 2016 when he visited Russian-occupied Crimea and hugged a statue dedicated to Russian troops in Sevastopol.
It wasn’t his first trip to Crimea nor his last, as he came back there last year with a delegation of French lawmakers supporting Putin.
He always supported the annexation, saying “Crimea is Russian, let’s move on and try to regain normal relations between European countries and Russia,” during a press conference in Sevastopol in 2016.
Despite being a mouthpiece for Moscow, in September 2020, Mariani was appointed member of the European Parliament’s special committee on “foreign interference in all democratic processes of the European Union, including disinformation” — a committee ironically designed to counter the information war carried out by the Kremlin.
Jean-Luc Melenchon
Jean-Luc Melenchon believes that France should leave NATO, form an alliance with Moscow. (AFP)
Putin has friends everywhere on the French political spectrum.
Melenchon, the leader of far-left party La France Insoumise, multiplies statements in favor of Moscow.
As a potential candidate for next year’s presidential elections, he has released his defense plan, which includes an exit from NATO and a new alliance with Moscow because “the Russians are reliable partners while the United States is not.”
Melenchon’s anti-capitalism and hate of the U.S. push him into the arms of the Kremlin, following the tradition of France’s far-left leaders since the creation of the Communist Party in France, which became Joseph Stalin’s antenna after the war.
He also recommends that the French government buy Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, rather than Pfizer, produced in the U.S.
This is not new for Melenchon, who was one of the only French lawmakers in Moscow on May 8, 2018 to celebrate the end of the “Great Patriotic War” alongside Putin.
Alain Juillet
Former head of French intelligence services Alain Juillet works at Moscow’s Russia Today mouthpiece. (AFP)
Alain Juillet, former head of Intelligence at the DGSE, French foreign intelligence services, was recruited by Moscow’s mouthpiece Russia Today in 2020 to host a geopolitics program twice a month on the French branch of the channel.
Launched at the end of 2017, RT France had already recruited the former host of France Televisions, Frederic Taddei, a well-known public figure who said at the time he didn’t “care where the money came from.”
Juillet’s recruitment is more problematic than Taddei’s because Juillet had access to sensitive files throughout his career in the French secret service, which makes him a particularly useful asset in Russia’s information war against the West.
