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Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu

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Uncredited / dpa

It's not often that the Russian defense minister calls his French counterpart. The last phone call between the two was a year and a half ago. Now Sergei Shoigu and Sébastien Lecornu spoke on the phone - and the tone was apparently rather rough.

The Russian Defense Ministry said after the phone call on Wednesday that Shoigu had explicitly warned Lecornu not to send troops to Ukraine. Otherwise, France would “have problems of its own.” French President Emmanuel Macron caused a global stir in February when he refused to rule out the use of French ground troops in Ukraine.

During the phone call, Lecornu tried to convince Shoigu that Ukraine and its Western allies had nothing to do with the terrorist attack on the concert hall in the Moscow suburb of Krasnogorsk, the Russian Defense Ministry said. But Shoigu insisted that Moscow had "information about Ukrainian traces in the organization of the terrorist attack." “The Kiev regime does nothing without the consent of its Western henchmen,” Shoigu then said to Lecornu. "We hope that the French secret service is not behind this case."

It is also said from Russia that Shoigu and Lecornu "identified a willingness to engage in dialogue about Ukraine" in the telephone conversation. The French Ministry of Defense denied this a little later.

Possible future negotiations with Ukraine could be based on a proposal discussed during Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul in March 2022, the Russian Defense Ministry said. According to media reports, the draft at the time stipulated that Ukraine would abandon its application to join NATO and remain neutral. However, the talks were broken off after a short time.

In the phone call, Shoigu is said to have mentioned the “Istanbul Peace Initiative” as the starting point for a new dialogue. In March, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan offered to host peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine during a visit by Ukrainian head of state Volodymyr Zelensky. “France has not accepted or proposed anything of the sort,” it was said shortly afterwards from those directly close to the French Ministry of Defense.

vet/AFP/AP