Poutine boasts, Xi gropes – Liberation – Liberation

DiplomacySubscribers onlyUkrainian-Russian warfileThe Russian president delivered a speech to a crowded stadium in Moscow on Friday and spoke with Macron. The Chinese leader, meanwhile, discussed with Biden. Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron evolve in two alternate realities which, during a phone call against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, cross paths at regular intervals. Friday provided a glaring illustration of this. At midday in Moscow, in the Luzhniki stadium where the French football team won its second world championship title in 2018, the Russian president celebrated eight years of the annexation of Crimea and the battle ” for a world without Nazism” in front of nearly 100,000 spectators feverishly waving flags. At the same time, in Pau, the French president answered questions for more than three hours from readers of the daily Sud-Ouest – on purchasing power, pensions, the income of farmers or nursing homes. Then Vladimir Putin joined the Kremlin, Emmanuel Macron the prefecture of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, swapping the costume of the campaigning candidate for that of head of state. And the two leaders spoke for the fifth time since the start of the war more than three weeks ago. Should we see signs that this telephone diplomacy is running out of steam and that Putin’s paranoid extremism is making dialogue more and more sterile? In any case, Friday’s conversation…