Presidents Macron and Putin held first call since 2022, talked about Ukraine, Iran, NATO

By Paul Jouvenet, lawyer, essayist and consultant in international affairs. Eurasia Business News, July 2, 2025. Article no. 1591.

The French President Emmanuel Macron, and the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, spoke for more than two hours on the phone today to discuss Iran’s nuclear programme and Ukraine. This is their first telephone exchange since September 2022.

The main topics of the dialogue between the heads of state were the situation in the Middle East in the context of the recent Iranian-Israeli conflict and the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as well as the ongoing Ukraine crisis.

During this phone conversation, Presidents Putin and Macron stressed the special responsibility of Russia and France in maintaining peace and stability in the Middle East and preserving the nuclear non-proliferation regime on the NPT of 1968. On the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, the heads of state expressed their support for resolving the issue exclusively by political and diplomatic means, while respecting Tehran’s right to develop peaceful nuclear energy. They also agreed to continue contacts in order to coordinate positions on this subject.

Iran and Israel announced the end of their 12-day armed confrontation on June 24. The day before, the United States launched an attack with missiles and bombs dropped by B-2 stealth bombers against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

During the conversation, the Russian president described the Ukrainian conflict as a direct consequence of the policy of Western states, “which for many years ignored Russia’s interests and created an anti-Russian bridgehead on the territory of Ukraine”. According to President Putin, the West has supported Kiev’s oppression of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking residents, and now it is deliberately delaying the resolution of the crisis by supplying weapons to the Ukrainians. The settlement of the Ukrainian crisis would be impossible without eliminating its root causes and taking into account the new territorial realities, the Russian president stressed.

During the phone talk, which lasted more than two hours, President Macron called for a ceasefire and the opening of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, and also stressed Paris’ “unwavering support” for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Emmanuel Macron called for the establishment, as soon as possible, of a ceasefire and the launch of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia for a solid and lasting settlement of the conflict. The two Presidents will also continue to discuss this point.

Presidents Putin and Macron had their last telephone conversations in September 2022, during which they mainly discussed the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which came under the control of Russian troops in March of the same year. The last face-to-face meeting of the heads of state took place on 7 February 2022, during which they discussed the situation around Ukraine.

President Macron, at a press conference after the NATO summit in The Hague on 25 June, called on EU countries to consider the terms of a dialogue with Moscow. According to him, the parties should start talking about arms control. At the same time, he called on European countries to rearm to confront Russia.

The telephone conversations between the presidents of France and Russia are extremely important, given the current crisis in Russian-French relations. However, while the call itself is remarkable, it’s too early to talk about forming a new stage in the relationship. According to him, the conversation between the heads of state could take place because of the similarity of Moscow and Paris’ positions on many issues in the Middle East, especially on Iran’s nuclear program.

Macron and Putin once enjoyed a good personal relationship. Newly elected, the French president had first hosted Vladimir Putin in May 2017 at the sumptuous Palace of Versailles, west of Paris, where Putin expressed hope that among Macron and his team there would be “more people who understand us” — unlike the French president’s Socialist predecessor, Francois Hollande.

Later, in December 2019, the French president Macron organized in Paris the Normandy Four Summit, with the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany, holding talks at the Elysee Palace. The last meeting of the “Normandy Four” was in Berlin in October 2016. The initiator of this event was the French President Emmanuel Macron, who hosted the Russian President at his official residence in the South of France in August 2019, before the G7 Summit in Biarritz. Paris had been working on activating the political dialogue with Moscow since May 2017 and now wants to unlock the situation in Eastern Ukraine.

But the outbreak of the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022 halted any dialogue between Paris and Moscow. As NATO member state and a major EU member state, France chose to support the U.S. and E.U. policies in Ukraine and the sanctions regimes against Russia.

In Macron’s last call to the Kremlin, in September 2022, the two men discussed the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and the possibility of shipping Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea.

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© Copyright 2025 – Eurasia Business News. Article no. 1591.