My colleague in Paris, Kim Wilsher, sends this on France’s slightly ambiguous current relations with Russia: France will not send a minister to the Sochi Paralympics...but will deliver two state-of-the-art warships to Russia, despite the Ukraine crisis, French president François Hollande has confirmed. The controversial deal – and it was controversial even before the Crimea crisis – involves France handing over two Mistral vessels. These are 22,000-tonne warships capable of carrying 16 helicopters, four landing craft, 13 battle tanks and up to 450 soldiers, and giving the ageing Russian naval fleet the capacity for a quick sea response. The deal, worth €1.2bn, was criticised by several of Paris’s NATO allies back in 2011 after Russia invaded Georgia in the Caucasus in 2008, leading to what became known as the Five-Day War. This week the first of the two ships, named the Vladivostok, left the French Atlantic port of Saint Nazaire for sea trials. “We respect our signed contracts,” Hollande said. The other vessel will be called Sebastopol, which is of course in Crimea. France’s reluctance to use the ships as a bargaining chip against Moscow, has cast doubt on Paris’s determination to back tough sanctions to force Russia to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity. Updated at 11.33am GMT theguardian/world/2014/mar/07/ukraine-crisis-putin-russia-crimea-us-eu-sanctions-live-updates
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 13:27:38 +0000
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