Epa Hollande’s calculated turn on Russia The Socialist French president is acting tough on the Kremlin, but he may just want to stand apart from rivals at home.

PARIS — An unlikely new player has waltzed onto France’s political stage: Vladimir Putin.

Two years away from a presidential election, French political leaders have split into two camps with regard to the Russian president. On one side, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy and far-right leader Marine Le Pen have defended the annexation of Crimea and both describe Russia as a “partner” for France.

On the other, President François Hollande is turning a cold shoulder to the Kremlin.

In the past few weeks the Socialist leader has demonstrated his wariness in several ways — from a well-timed trip to Cuba to the alleged abandonment of a costly contract to sell two Mistral helicopter carriers to Moscow, to his government’s intervention to stop a French businessman with ties to Russian firms from heading the Thales nuclear group.

Hollande’s moves are not likely to amount to a full about-face in France’s Russia policy — there is no desire to turn Russia into another Iran. Nor do they mean that France will stand in the way of US-led efforts to try to normalize relations with Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine — an idea that he was the first Western leader to propose last December.

Rather, the impetus for his actions seems to come from France’s political scene, where Hollande is keen to set his government apart from an increasingly Kremlin-friendly cast of rivals on the right by showing voters it is immune to Russian influence.

“There has been a shift in the line on Russia,” said Thomas Gomart, a specialist in Franco-Russian relations and director of the IFRI think-tank on international relations. “There are two camps in the French establishment: the so-called Gaullist line which sees Russia as a partner in an enlarged, continental Europe; and those who are much more critical of its record on human rights, and its historical revisionism in Ukraine.”

“It’s the second camp that seems to be winning.”

Ceasefire violations

The shift has occurred quietly amid reports of renewed violations of ceasefire agreements between Ukrainian troops and Russia-backed separatists. Just a few months ago, Hollande was spearheading diplomatic efforts with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to engage with Putin on the Ukraine conflict and broker the Minsk I and Minsk II ceasefire agreements.

The French leader invited Putin to attend anniversary celebrations of D-Day in Normandy last year, despite the protests of some allies, in what appeared to be an ill-fated attempt to coax him into dialogue with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, also present.

But today, not much remains of the D-Day spirit of proactive French diplomacy on Ukraine. When Hollande last met with Putin during a trip to Armenia in April, the latter acknowledged that his country’s relations with France were “not in the best shape,” while Hollande called again for the Minsk agreements to be respected.

In May, while Merkel traveled to Moscow for World War II anniversary celebrations and to hold talks with Putin, Hollande chose instead to visit Cuba, becoming the first Western leader on the island since a thaw in its relations with the United States.

Putin brushed off the absence of Hollande and other Western leaders as unimportant, saying he had seen everyone he wanted to see. But the symbolism of Hollande’s choice did not go unnoticed among pro-Russian factions in France.

Sarkozy used a question-and-answer session with the public on Twitter to say that Hollande should have attended, while clarifying that he did not want a new Cold War with Russia. Ditto the National Front, whose pro-Russian vice president Florian Philippot called Hollande’s failure to show up in Moscow an “offense” to the Russian people, while far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon said Hollande had committed an “affront.”

A few days later, Prime Minister Manuel Valls welcomed his Ukrainian counterpart, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, in Paris. The latter said that France was ready to help Ukraine organize a privatization program to ease Kiev’s financial woes, while France is to host an investment conference for Ukraine in the autumn.

“All of this should be seen in the context of domestic party politics,” said Gomart. “Russia has become enormously involved with parts of the French right and this creates confusion abroad — a confusion that Hollande wants to clear up.”

Hollande’s handling of the Mistral sale can also be seen through the prism of French political jockeying ahead of the 2017 campaign.

The Socialist president, long saddled with having to carry out a contract signed in 2011 by Sarkozy, has faced diplomatic pressure from allies including the US to abandon the sale. For months he said that the contract was merely “suspended” pending full implementation of the Minsk II agreement — until reports this month from Russia said the sale had been finally been abandoned.

The symbolism of Hollande’s choice did not go unnoticed among pro-Russian factions in France.

Reuters reported that the two countries were now in talks over the amount that France must reimburse Russia for the sale, as well as over the question of whether or not France can sell on the ships, which Moscow does not want.

Hollande’s office and the defense ministry both declined to comment on the Mistral reports, pointing to a previous statement by the president that Russia would be reimbursed in the case of non-delivery.

But, if confirmed, the decision to back away from the €800-million sale sends two signals: one to Moscow, that France is ready to do without Russian money, especially if it can manage to sell the boats on to another country; the other to Nicolas Sarkozy, who negotiated the deal in the first place.

Regardless of French motives, Moscow has not taken the failure to deliver the ships lightly.

“We have taken decisions that are going to leave deep scars,” said Yves Boyer, of the Fondation Pour la Recherche Stratégique think-tank. “France has lost years of capital in Moscow.”

In the case of former EDF chief Henri Proglio, who was slated to take over the partly state-owned nuclear group Thales, similar left-right dynamics at the expense of Moscow may well have been at play.

Both Hollande and Valls had signed off on Proglio’s nomination to head Thales when Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron intervened to block it. He argued that Proglio’s presence on the board of two subsidiaries of Russian-owned nuclear firm Rosatom posed a “problem of ethics and conflict of interest,” and the executive branch quickly rallied to his view.

Macron’s office said that Proglio’s ties to Russian nuclear interests were incompatible with a role in a strategic French sector. But blocking his nomination had another, political upside: It knocked out an ally of Sarkozy whom he had nominated to run the EDF utility in 2009.

Alain Juppé, Sarkozy’s chief rival for his UMP party’s nomination to run for president, remarked on the group’s pro-Russian swing during an address to students at the École Normale Supérieure in late April.

“There is an onset of acute ‘Russophilia’ at the UMP these days,” said Juppé. “Russia is a great country, but there is a point where we need to know how to say ‘stop’ to Putin.”

Hollande might agree.