Kyiv answers Mélenchon: no referendum in Donbas
Ukraine's foreign ministry spokesman answers Mélenchon, who called for consulting Donbas residents: referendums held under occupation amount to annexation.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry has rejected Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s proposal to consult Ukrainians in Donbas about their future. On Monday, spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi wrote on X that Ukraine’s border was already decided by the 1991 independence referendum.1 Mélenchon leads La France insoumise (France Unbowed in English), a French radical-left party, and is running in the 2027 presidential election.21
What Mélenchon said
On Saturday, at a large rally, Mélenchon declared that his party refuses to leave the leadership of peace negotiations on Ukraine to European leaders.1 He added that a peace deal involving territorial concessions cannot be accepted without first asking for the consent of the people concerned, on both sides of the border.1 His words come as France, Germany and the United Kingdom, together with a European Union delegation, prepare to take part on Tuesday in US-mediated talks between Russia and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi.1
Kyiv’s response
According to Tykhyi, Russia’s invasion amounted to a decision to disregard what Ukrainians had already chosen. He judged that votes staged under occupation serve to annex territory rather than to reflect what people actually want.1 In his words, a civilized democratic state would never agree to settle its own frontiers in this manner, and Ukrainians should therefore not be offered that option.1 Moscow has already staged sham votes on the Crimean peninsula it annexed, as well as in the four partly occupied regions of Ukraine’s southeast. Kyiv and the wider international community refused to recognize those procedures.1
The French government’s position
On Sunday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot had called Mélenchon a “spokesman for the Kremlin”. According to Barrot, the Kremlin is trying to convince governments and heads of state that Donbas is Russian and that the war is meant to liberate it.1 Barrot spoke of unprecedented gravity and said that, in his view, this definitively disqualifies Mélenchon from the offices he aspires to.1
Why it matters
The exchange shows how the war in Ukraine is entering the French presidential campaign. In mid-October Marine Le Pen had said that, if elected in 2027, she would halt financial aid to Kyiv, which she estimates at 6 billion euros a year, and President Volodymyr Zelensky had responded by defending military cooperation with France.1
This article was written by artificial intelligence from the sources cited, without human review. Automatic newsroom by Redazia.
