Kremlin Confidential? With Putin Call Leak, Macron Proves Otherwise

The French president does not answer to the Kremlin, but Emmanuel Macron’s past penchant for calling his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on the phone is well known — so well known, in fact, that the Kremlin is now complaining about it. Moscow’s beef is about the airing of a two-hour documentary on French state-run television that includes a nine-minute chat between the two leaders. While Mr. Macron often comes off as almost risibly naive in his dealings with Mr. Putin, the Kremlin considers the broadcast of the conversation to be a breach of protocol. “Diplomatic etiquette does not provide for unilateral leaks of such recordings,” the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said. Mr. Lavrov is traveling in Asia for the G-20 meeting in Bali, and can be counted on to bark for his boss wherever in the world he happens to be. The Kremlin spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, was also piqued: “When Macron called the Russian president, the entire conversation was recorded by journalists, who were filming it,” she said. “This is an example of the odd way they interpret the word diplomacy.”Russian state media chimed in, too, but the Russian viewpoint actually has some merit. As the Times of London reported, that Mr. Macron approved the dialogue for inclusion in the documentary, which sports the anonydne title, “A President, Europe and War,” surprised many Western embassies in Paris because it is indeed a breach of diplomatic protocol.The bigger breach, of course, is invading your neighbor and calling it a special military operation, which is exactly what Mr. Putin did only a few short days after the now infamous call included in the documentary. The real reason for the Kremlin’s ire is less the lack of good manners between nations than that the conversation provides hard evidence that Mr. Putin is, if not an outright liar, a man who cannot be trusted. The February 20 call was made as Russian troops were massing along the Ukraine border — it was no secret. Mr. Macron asked the Russian president if the maneuvers would end the next day, as per an official announcement. The Russian’s reply? “Probably.”In another part of the conversation, the French top dog asks the Russian fox to meet with President Biden to try to de-escalate the situation along the border. How Mr. Putin replied is one for the history books: “To be honest, I wanted to go play ice hockey,” he said. “Here I am talking to you from the gym before working out.”If the documentary, which was cleared to air by the Palais Élysée itself, shows Vladimir Putin to be a cold-hearted manipulator of the highest order, it also shows an Emmanuel Macron who doubles down on a top-down, elitist approach to mediation even when it is clearly not working. He even admits as much, in another part of the film, when he says of his communication with the Russian leader, “We talked, we spent a lot of time trying to stop [the war], to involve others. I thought we could find a path with Vladimir Putin based on trust and intellectual conversation.” A correspondent for Le Monde at Washington, Piotr Smolar, apparently watched the entire film, which prompted him to tweet that it unwittingly depicted a kind of diplomacy “that is operated by a handful of people, as if they were running a start-up, as if everything could be resolved with the mobile numbers of ‘Olaf,’ ‘Volodymyr,’ and ‘Vladimir.’” Also heard on the line, in separate calls, are Britain’s Boris Johnson, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. None of those leaders have reacted yet to the broadcast of their conversations, at least not publicly. In the weeks and months ahead, though, foreign leaders may approach any ostensibly private communication with Mr. Macron with considerably greater caution. Starting with Vladimir Putin.

Kremlin Confidential? With Putin Call Leak, Macron Proves Otherwise

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