Paris continues to be indignant at Moscow’s propaganda that the Russian Embassy relays on its Twitter account. This Thursday, the Minister of Foreign Affairs decided to summon the ambassador, disgusted by his “indecent” communication.
On Wednesday April 6 in the evening, the Russian Embassy issued a provocative and brutal message. On this post, since deleted, many journalists could be seen in front of the wreckage of a tank, taking photographs, in the town of Boutcha where hundreds of civilians were found shot dead after the withdrawal of Russian forces. And below, this short message: “Filming set, city of Boutcha”.
“Indecency” and “provocation”
A clear way to take up the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin who affirms that the hundreds of corpses of civilians discovered near kyiv are only a “staging” orchestrated by the Ukrainian forces. Shocked by the publication, the Secretary of State for Europe Clément Beaune reacted with a terse message “beyond shame, stop”, only twenty minutes after the original post.
This Thursday morning, Jean-Yves Le Drian again summoned the ambassador. “Faced with the indecency and provocation of the communication from the Russian Embassy in France on Bucha’s abuses, I have decided to summon the Russian Ambassador to the Quai d’Orsay this morning”, writes the Minister Foreign Affairs on Twitter.
Previous skids
The diplomat is far from being in the small papers of the Elysée. He had already received a summons on March 25 for the publication of two cartoons on Twitter, deemed “unacceptable” by the French executive. One of the cartoons – both removed after criticism from the French government – showed kneeling Europeans licking Uncle Sam’s buttocks with the message ‘European solidarity in action’.
The other represented Europe stung by the European Union and the United States with syringes labeled with the words “NATO”, “Covid-19” or even “Neo-Nazism”. Images then qualified as “shame” by Clément Beaune. With this new slippage, many Internet users are demanding the expulsion of the Russian ambassador.