and turn toward Russia.” She called for lifting the “completely stupid” EU sanctions against Russia because there had been “no invasion” of Crimea, which had “always been Russian.” Echoing Moscow, she described Ukraine’s (freely elected) government as the product of “a coup d’état.” When the EU, the U.S., and the UN called the 2014 referendum in Crimea illegitimate, she retorted that its legitimacy was “indisputable.” ( Later that day, a Kremlin official sent her an SMS asking “how to thank” her.) “I admire Vladimir Putin,” she told the Russian journal Kommersant, noting that Europe’s economic crisis offered “an opportunity to turn our back to the U.S. She has given Putin his money’s worth, too, hewing faithfully and proudly to the Kremlin line. Le Pen, the far-right candidate, is literally on Moscow’s payroll, and lest the libel editor send this back to me with the words, “We can’t say this!” - oh yes, we can. Macron, at least, comes by his Russophilia honestly. Germany apart, the rest of Europe - the Baltic states and Ukraine, in particular - have viewed Macron as a preening, Putin-loving nincompoop at best, an outright menace to European security and NATO’s integrity at worst.īut this isn’t the strangest part. But Macron has spent the past five years trying to draw Russia into his embrace, evidence be damned. Such an introduction to Russia’s malevolence might subdue a president’s enthusiasm for Moscow, especially given its contemporaneous attacks on other Western democracies, incessant cyberattacks, poisonings, assassinations on Western soil, and, of course, war crimes in Ukraine and Syria. The leaks interested the American right more than they did the French electorate.) (The hackers, too, were culturally unfamiliar with France they labored, for example, under the impression that French voters would be dissuaded, not encouraged, by revelations of Macron’s peculiar sexual tastes. The leaks fizzled because Macron’s campaign, having seen what happened to Hillary Clinton, had prepared, seeding ludicrous documents among the leaked ones to muddy the waters. This was the culmination of a months-long Russian disinformation campaign in favor of Le Pen and against Macron. Indeed, his introduction to leadership on the international stage was Russia’s attack on the 2017 French election campaign, when directly before the final round, their hackers leaked two gigabytes of data stolen, allegedly, from Macron’s campaign and purportedly replete with evidence of his improprieties, sexual and financial. His five-year term has seen ever-more outrageous Russian aggression. Both are known for their overtures to Putin, but the case of Macron is particularly curious.
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