Continuity and change in France’s policies towards Russia: a milieu goals explanation DAVID CADIER International Afairs 94: 6 (2018) 1349–1369; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiy186 © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Afairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com A decade after being identifed in European policy debates as one of the ‘Russia- friendly’ member states of the EU, France was being depicted as a ‘leader’ in its support for EU sanctions against Russia. 1 After the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, France signed a deal that was to lead to the delivery of two Mistral amphibious assault ships to Moscow and was seeking more generally to engage Russia from a security and defence point of view. Following Russia’s 2014 intervention in Ukraine, however, Paris cancelled this deal and suspended its high-level bilateral strategic meetings with Moscow. While France has been overall a rather lukewarm supporter of EU policies towards the eastern neighbourhood, since 2014 it has found itself deeply involved and indeed representing the EU in the region through its co-sponsorship, with Germany, of the confict resolution process in eastern Ukraine (the ‘Minsk Process’). And while Paris had long been opposed to perma- nent NATO military deployments at Russia’s borders, on the ground that they would upset regional security equilibriums, it is currently contributing troops to the NATO battlegroups deployed on a rotating basis in Poland and the Baltic states as security reassurance measures after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine—and, in its latest strategic document, it commends these deployments for ‘reinforcing security in eastern and northern Europe’. 2 To be sure, these changes should not be exaggerated: they are not necessarily correlated, not necessarily permanent, and not necessarily prompted by precisely the same factors. Nevertheless, France’s policy choices in the context of the Ukraine crisis and beyond are concrete enough to be meaningful in themselves, and unanticipated enough to be puzzling. Considering its strong political—and growing economic—ties with Moscow, and the fact that Ukraine had never regis- tered prominently on its foreign policy radar, 3 France’s reaction to the Ukraine 1 The two descriptions were conferred on France by the same think-tank ten years apart: Mark Leonard and Nicu Popescu, A power audit of EU–Russia relations (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2007); European foreign policy scorecard 2016 (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2017). 2 Ministère de la Défense, Revue stratégique de défense et de sécurité nationale 2017 (Paris, Oct. 2017), p. 60, https://www. defense.gouv.fr/dgris/presentation/evenements/revue-strategique-de-defense-et-de-securite-nationale-2017 (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 16 Sept. 2018.) 3 For instance, President Chirac ‘showed no interest in Ukraine’ and visited the country only once in his twelve- year term: Anne de Tinguy, ‘Le rapprochement avec la “nouvelle” Russie: une relation instrumentale ?’, in Maurice Vaïsse and Christian Lequesne, eds, La Politique étrangère de Jacques Chirac (Paris: Riveneuve Editions, 2013), p. 18. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/94/6/1349/5162429 by guest on 20 January 2019