Seven EU countries to attend Putin’s inauguration – Reuters
7 May 2024 10:03
The US, UK and most EU countries will boycott the inauguration ceremony of Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, among Ukraine’s partners in the European Union, there are those who will participate in the event, [komersnat] reports, citing Reuters.
The day before, a senior Kremlin official said that the heads of all foreign diplomatic missions in Moscow had been invited to Putin’s inauguration. However, not all of them accepted the invitation.
“No, we will not have a representative at his inauguration. We certainly didn’t think it was a free and fair election, but he is the president of Russia and he is going to continue to hold that office,”
– said Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the US State Department.
The UK and Canada also said they would not send representatives to the ceremony.
An EU spokesman said that the bloc’s ambassador to Russia would not attend the ceremony, which is in line with the position of most member states. It is known for certain that representatives of Germany, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia will not attend the event in Moscow.
However, a European diplomat told Reuters that not all EU countries will boycott the inauguration. 7 out of 27 EU countries will send their representatives to the ceremony.
One of them will be France. It will be represented at the inauguration by the French ambassador to Russia, a diplomatic source in Paris said.
The day before, during a meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the French leader said he had no bad intentions towards Russia:
“We are not at war with Russia or the Russian people, and we have no desire to change the regime in Moscow.”
It remains to be seen which other EU countries will honour Vladimir Putin. It is highly likely that they will include such Russia-supporting states as Hungary, Slovakia and Austria.
on 17 March, Russia held “presidential elections” in which Vladimir Putin received 87% of the vote. International institutions do not consider these “elections” to be fair and just. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament have stated that they do not consider Vladimir Putin to be the legitimate president of Russia.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said it saw no legal grounds for recognising Putin as the democratically elected and legitimate president of the Russian Federation.
