The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, refused to take a PCR test to rule out that he had coronavirus before meeting on Monday in Moscow with his Russian counterpart, according to the Kremlin, which has suggested that, as a result of the rejection, protocols of distance between the two leaders.
The image of the two leaders sitting at opposite ends of a six-meter table, as well as the distance kept in the press conference after the meeting, have become part of the political debate in recent days, to try to understand this obvious coldness.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, has confirmed that Macron did not undergo the PCR that Russian authorities usually carry out on foreign leaders, so the format of the meeting could also be affected, according to the Sputnik news agency.
Peskov has acknowledged this Friday that, on occasions, there is a very close distance between Putin and his interlocutors, with handshakes included, and in others, additional measures are chosen to “protect the health of the president and that of the guests”. The Russian spokesman has avoided going into details about the specific case of Macron.
The French president traveled to Moscow as part of a tour that also took him to Kiev and in which he aspired to reduce political and military tensions in Eastern Europe. Macron left Russia taking it for granted that there would be no new military escalation, but the Russian government later clarified that he had not promised not to take further military action and questioned France’s role as an interlocutor.
