The exchange lasted over two hours. On Tuesday, July 1, when Emmanuel Macron spoke by phone with Vladimir Putin, as the two heads of state had agreed earlier, the French president was fully aware that his move was both highly significant and fraught with risk.
The Kremlin leader, accused of war crimes, has been treated as a pariah by Europeans since the Russian army invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Yet, the risk of nuclear proliferation, heightened by the conflict between Israel and Iran during the “12-day war,” as US president Donald Trump refers to it – convinced the French head of state to resume dialogue nearly three years after his last call to the Kremlin in September 2022.
Paris and Moscow share a common interest: preventing Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Like France, the United Kingdom, the United States and China, Russia holds a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). As nuclear powers, these five countries are guarantors of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). In 2015, they all signed the Vienna Agreement with Tehran and Berlin, designed to control Iran’s nuclear program, before Trump withdrew from it three years later.
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