Two senior officials in Moscow, Dmytro Medvedev and Vyacheslav Volodin, said on Wednesday that President Emmanuel Macron has Napoleonic aspirations, but that any French troops sent to help Ukraine would suffer the fate of the army that Napoleon invaded Russia with. Reuters.

Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, said Macron appeared to see himself as the new Napoleon and warned him not to follow in the French emperor’s footsteps.

“To preserve his personal power, Macron could not think of anything better than to start the third world war. His initiatives are very dangerous for the citizens of France,” said a message published on his social media accounts.

“Before making such statements, Macron would do well to remember how it all ended for Napoleon and his soldiers, more than 600,000 of whom were left lying in the ground,” he added, referring to statements made on Monday night by the French president, who said The idea of ​​introducing Western troops into Ukraine cannot be ruled out.

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 progressed rapidly, and the French emperor even managed to occupy Moscow, abandoned by Tsar Alexander I. But the retreat of the Russian army inland eventually forced the large army assembled by Napoleon to abandon his invasion, hundreds of thousands of his soldiers dying of disease , hunger and cold.

Dmytro Medvedev calls the head of the French state a “small heir” of Napoleon

Macron’s comments on Monday evening led to a wave of denials on Tuesday from European heads of government, who ruled out sending their countries to Ukraine, and France’s foreign minister later stepped in to clarify that the leader in Paris was not talking about sending troops to fight in Ukraine .

But those explanations did not convince former Russian prime minister and president Dmitry Medvedev, now vice president of the Security Council in Moscow, who suggested on Wednesday that Macron had a dangerous delusion of grandeur and that his statements were an instructive example of how political opinion on West was developing.

“The petty and tragic heirs of Bonaparte, trying on the golden epaulettes broken 200 years ago, crave revenge on a Napoleonic scale and make extremely dangerous mistakes,” he said.

In turn, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the reaction of other European NATO member countries to Macron’s comments shows that they, unlike the French leader, understand the danger of a direct conflict between Russia and the Northern Alliance. Atlantic.

“The leaders of many European governments quickly declared that they did not plan and do not plan anything like this. This shows that they understand the danger,” Zakharova said.

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