Jean-Luc Mélenchon Donbass remarks Ukraine France Insoumise controversy, Digi Mart USA News: Jean-Luc Mélenchon was criticized over the weekend for his position on Ukraine. The leader of La France insoumise stated that the population of Donbass should be able to say whether it wants to be Ukrainian or Russian.
“We do not accept that a peace involving territorial concessions in Ukraine be considered without asking the populations concerned whether they agree to be on this side of the border or the other,” he said.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, a guest on the RTL-Public Sénat-Ouest France-M6 Grand Jury on Sunday, November 6, accused the France insoumise candidate of having “become the spokesperson for the Kremlin.” Raphaël Glucksmann also made a similar criticism.
In September 2022, Russia held widely condemned “annexation referendums” in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and then wrote those regions into its Constitution, although it does not fully control the territory. Moscow maintains that these territories are Russian.
On RTL on Monday, November 9, Mathilde Panot, president of the LFI group in the National Assembly, rejected the accusation outright. “We do not agree that Russia violates the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine and therefore invades its neighbor as it has been doing for almost five years now,” she said.
She explained that La France insoumise is not demanding territorial concessions from Ukraine.
Panot added that “if there are territorial concessions, which we are not asking for, then the inhabitants must be able to decide and self-determine.” She turned the accusation back on the minister, saying: “We have a French foreign minister who is the spokesperson for Macronist impotence in the world.” She also criticized the government’s foreign policy regarding Gaza, saying the minister “allows a genocide in Gaza through a cowardice that borders on complicity.”
Mélenchon also defended himself in a post on X, saying he wants to “condition any change of the border on a vote of the populations concerned.” He wrote: “It is not up to Trump and Putin to decide alone the fate of the inhabitants of Donbass. Nor up to Barrot.”
Panot concluded by pointing to the work of La France insoumise with Russian opponents of Vladimir Putin. She challenged Barrot to say whether he, too, hosts Russian opponents of Putin, including opponents of the war, adding that her camp has done so “for more than four and a half years now.”
