Sébastien Lecornu, the French Minister of the Armed Forces, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigou, hadn't spoken since October 2022 due to the war in Ukraine. The rare phone call between the two men therefore came as a surprise on Wednesday, April 3, made all the more mysterious by the fact that it gave rise to diametrically opposed accounts.
The conversation was solicited by Lecornu at the request of President Emmanuel Macron – who hasn't spoken to Vladimir Putin since September 2022 – in an attempt to revive cooperation in the fight against terrorism, almost two weeks after the Crocus Hall attack near Moscow on March 22, leaving at least 144 dead and 360 wounded. It was claimed by the Afghan-Pakistani branch of the Islamic State organization. The group "had carried out several attempts in recent months" on French "soil," said Macron three days after the attack.
With four months to go before the Paris Olympic Games, France is on maximum alert and believes that concerted action with Russia could thwart any planned attacks during the height of the competition. As the war in Ukraine drags on, however, Paris regrets that Moscow sought to incriminate Kyiv and Western capitals in the attack perpetrated on its territory.
During the phone call, Lecornu insisted that France "had no information to link this attack to Ukraine" and asked Moscow to "stop any instrumentalization." This was not convincing, according to the account released by the Russian Ministry of Defense: "The Kyiv regime does nothing without the approval of its Western handlers. We hope that, in this case, the French secret services are not behind this."
The Russian Defense Ministry also said that the two countries were "open to dialogue" on the war in Ukraine. "The starting point could be the Istanbul Peace Initiative," he added, referring to the quickly aborted talks between Kyiv and Moscow in the first weeks of the war. Lecornu had indicated earlier that he had "condemned unreservedly the war of aggression that Russia has launched in Ukraine."
When contacted by Le Monde, the Ministry of the Armed Forces said that "the call should not be interpreted as a means of reopening a channel of communication with the Russians." "The fight against terrorism is a government priority, it has nothing to do with Ukraine," Lecornu's entourage told Le Monde. Aware of the attention the telephone exchange was likely to draw, the French minister of the Armed Forces nevertheless warned several of his European counterparts of the call and spoke with them afterward, notably to avoid any attempt at Russian manipulation. "We provided both pre-sales and after-sales service," the Ministry of Defense Le Monde.
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