Read on Twitter
Monsieur Araud. There is a question I’ve been meaning to ask you (and, admittedly, many other French people) for a long time. What exactly do you mean by ‘geopolitical constraints’? That Belarusians (or Ukrainians, Georgians etc.) have less of a right to determine their future /2 https://twitter.com/gerardaraud/status/1295246796839690241
...because their country is neighbouring Russia? That they must somehow accept living in a kleptocratic authoritarianism because NATO would risk war with Putin was f push came to shove? Is that what we’re going to ‘discuss with Russia’? Give them a little bit of freedom /3
but let the Kremlin decide their future ‘parce que la géographie, c’est le destin des peuples’, as your ingenious compatriot Napoléon put it? I tell you, If that were true, 1989 would not have happened. If that were true, we would live indeed live in the deterministic world
that you and your Realpolitik friends fantasise about. That includes many of my fellow Germans, by the way, let’s not make this a Franco-German dispute. But back to the main issue: as we speak, literally, people in Belarus risk their flesh and blood for the right to decide /5
what are free and fair elections, what is a system without blatant corruption, which government policy is best against COVID-19 etc. No matter where their country happens to be on the map! And EU should firmly stand on the side of these people, not talk to Putin over their heads6
Is that so hard to understand, M Araud? Am I asking too much here? Here’s a reality check: why don’t you go and talk to those protesters with flowers in BY cities and tell them: nice job, but we got to talk to Putin first about you. Take his interests into account. Then we can /7
talk about your issues. Let’s see how that would go down with them. And how you would feel yourself, and whether you could still look at yourself in the mirror after that. But something tells me you could, with a broad smile.