Emmanuel Macron welcomed the Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, at the Elysée in Paris on February 21, 2024.
No one at the podium, where speakers took turns, had pointed out his presence to the 465 seated guests: former President of the Republic François Hollande, leader of La France insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Mayor of Marseille Benoît Payan, along with various elected officials, parliamentarians, journalists, diplomats, and ambassadors. No one commented on the diplomatic incident that occurred on Wednesday, March 20, during a dinner organized by the Coordination Council of Armenian Organizations in France (CCAF) at a hotel in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. The Russian Ambassador to France, Alexei Mechkov, left his table after Prime Minister Gabriel Attal criticized Russia in his speech.
On the first day of spring, the Armenian diaspora in France, as they do every year, invited what they call “friends of Armenia”. This year, the meeting was marked by a particular gravity. The military intervention launched by Azerbaijan on September 19, 2023, to regain control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave forced 100,000 Armenians to flee the region to neighboring Armenia.
Present at the podium were writer Sylvain Tesson, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Le Figaro magazine Jean-Christophe Buisson, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, and President of the Regional Council of Hauts-de-France Xavier Bertrand. The guest of honor, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, was scheduled to close the speeches in front of the representative of the Kremlin in Paris, as reported by Matignon a few hours earlier.
Armenia has long been an ally of Russia, and like the Armenian community, both abroad and in Yerevan, the CCAF is torn by recent geopolitical and diplomatic shifts. Despite the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and Russia’s abandonment of its commitments to its historical Armenian “ally”, Mr. Meshkov was once again invited to the annual dinner, as in previous years, even after Russia invaded Ukraine.
From his podium, Gabriel Attal did not denounce the gas agreement between Brussels and Baku, signed a few months after the Russian aggression against Ukraine, but made sure to emphasize Russia’s responsibility in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, with the ambassador in attendance. He faced a man who is regularly summoned to the Quai d’Orsay, as was the case on February 5 after the death of two French humanitarian workers in Ukraine, while Emmanuel Macron repeated that “nothing should be ruled out” regarding the deployment of Western troops to Ukraine.
