The Brief – What to expect from Russia at D-Day anniversary?

France has invited Russia to the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, an event that changed the course of World War Two. “Given the circumstances,” the organisers said, President Vladimir Putin is not invited but another figure, to be announced later, will represent Russia on 6 June.

It is certainly disturbing to imagine a Russian politician among world leaders at the historic site of the 1944 landing, at a time when this country is waging a war of aggression against Ukraine.

At the 70th anniversary, 10 years ago, the then French president François Hollande hosted 17 leaders including US President Barack Obama, Britain’s David Cameron, Canada’s Stephen Harper, Germany’s Angela Merkel, and Vladimir Putin.

At that time, Putin’s was already a controversial presence. He was invited despite the annexation of Crimea three months earlier. The explanation was the heavy price paid by Russia in the battle against Nazism: Historians put the Soviet death toll during the Second World War at 27 million.

Ten years ago in Normandy, Putin and the then Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko spoke in the midst of a pro-Russian insurrection in eastern Ukraine, which the West accused Moscow of fueling. Now there is no doubt that this was a hybrid war directly orchestrated by the Kremlin.

That D-Day event, in the presence of Hollande and Merkel, opened the way for discussions involving the four countries, in the so-called ‘Normandy format’, to try to find a solution to the situation in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

With hindsight, we know that Putin used the ‘Normandy format’ to keep the ball rolling until Russia was ready for the full-scale invasion of its neighbour.

On the other hand, Putin was not invited to the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019, while the situation was getting complicated in eastern Ukraine. He then assured the West that it was “absolutely not a problem”. And the French hosts made the point that this was not an anniversary ending in zero, implying it was therefore less important.

Putin is now under an ICC arrest warrant and is unlikely to set foot in any country signatory to the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, which includes 118 countries that have ratified it.

Therefore another Russian politician is expected to represent the country, and this gives grounds to speculation whether this could be someone with whom Emmanuel Macron could engage.

Vladimir Fedorovski, a French writer of Russian-Ukrainian origin, who started his diplomatic career as a translator to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, speculated on French TV that the top choice for engaging in meaningful talks could be Sergey Naryshkin, the director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service since 2016.

Without any doubt, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be among the high-level guests in Normandy and he would probably not shun a conversation with the Kremlin representative, whoever they might be. It is easy to imagine that such a meeting could be “moderated” by the host, Macron.

But it is healthy to manage expectations. A reported phone conversation between French Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu and his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu on 3 April was a positive fact in itself, but it ended in bitter controversy over the two sides’ different interpretations of what had been said.

France has every interest in establishing a better international climate ahead of the Paris Olympics, starting in just 99 days. Ideally, an Olympic truce could be negotiated, both for Ukraine and the Middle East, although at this stage, such a goal seems over-ambitious.

Russia, for its part, has every interest in making a comeback on the international stage, in a format different from BRICs or its own post-Soviet Eurasian gatherings.

A Russia-Ukraine contact in Normandy could also be a game-changer ahead of the peace conference hosted by Switzerland on 15-16 June, less than a week after the Normandy gathering. Russia is not invited to Switzerland, but who knows?

The pessimists will say the ‘Normandy format’, established 10 years ago, is a good example of Russian double-dealing. Why should it be different this time around?

The Roundup

On Tuesday, the French government unveiled the list of the first 55 new sites it is making to host green industries.

France has questioned the latest draft of the EU Cloud Certification Scheme (EUCS) that would allow member states to set national sovereignty requirements at the highest cybersecurity level of the scheme, according to a leaked letter sent to the European Commission’s Legal Service.

South Africa, the world’s second-largest citrus exporter in the world after Spain, has launched a dispute at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) over the EU’s phytosanitary trade rules, which it said were not justified or appropriate.

The world should ensure diverse supply chains and implement a framework to track the progress made towards tripling global renewable capacity by 2030, the EU’s Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson said in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday.

Stay on top of EU politics and elections with the latest weekly EU Elections Decoded.

Look out for…

• Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Finland, meets with PM Petteri Orpo on Friday.
• High Representative Josep Borrell participates in G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Capri on Friday.
• Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni takes part in spring meetings of World Bank/IMF in Washington on Tuesday-Friday.
• Informal meeting of consumer protection ministers, Thursday-Friday.

Views are the author’s

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]