PARIS, February 9. /TASS/. Marine Le Pen, French presidential candidate from France's National Front (FN) party, speaking with Europe 1 radio on Wednesday, compared the current crisis in Western relations with Russia to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and called on the United States to refrain from any incitement that could aggravate the situation.
"We are witnessing something akin to the Cuban crisis, only in reverse. Back then, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US didn't want to be within missile range. I think now the US should refrain from any form of provocation that leads to a Cold War of deterrence," she specified.
Le Pen believed that the current crisis in Western-Russian relations could worsen, but stressed that she did not consider the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine to be real. "The current situation is due to the fact that there was an unspoken agreement between Russia and NATO in 1997 that presupposed that there were always going to be buffer states. The idea was that NATO would not enter those countries bordering Russia so that there would be no military confrontation on the Russian border, and this is where the problem began. And the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO undermines this unspoken agreement, so Russia is gathering troops near its borders," she explained.
Le Pen expressed her belief that French President Emmanuel Macron was given a cold reception in Moscow because he arrived there "not as a French leader, but as a telegraph operator for NATO and the EU". In her view, Macron has not done enough to improve relations between Moscow and Paris during his five-year term, and one of the obstacles to this has been France's presence in NATO's integrated command.
"NATO's integrated command is geopolitical, strategic, and military subordination. I think that France should withdraw from NATO's integrated command because in its current position it cannot be the world’s referee that it has always been and wants to be," the veteran politician maintained.
Ukraine and security guarantees
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday held hours-long talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where the leaders discussed, among other things, the situation around Ukraine. The heads of state themselves said at a news conference following the meeting that they discussed European security issues in the context of appropriate US and NATO guarantees for Russia, the internal Ukrainian crisis, and other topics.
Concerns over Moscow's alleged preparations for an ‘invasion of Ukraine’ have been increasingly echoed throughout the West and in Kiev recently. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov castigated these statements as an ‘empty and groundless’ escalation of tension, emphasizing that Russia posed no threat to anyone. At the same time, the Kremlin press secretary did not exclude some possible provocations to justify such claims and warned that any attempts to resolve the Ukrainian conflict by force would carry extremely serious consequences.