Traveling to the Rungis market on Tuesday morning, Emmanuel Macron responded in harsh terms to a man who deplored the weak impact of Western sanctions on the Russian economy.
“We wanted to isolate them, and today they have only lost 2%,” lamented the latter. According to the Russian statistics agency Rosstat, Russia’s GDP contracted by 2.1% in 2022, a percentage seriously questioned by the French head of state in this video, broadcast by an LCI journalist.
“And you, do you trust the Russian statistical institutes?” Emmanuel Macron replied. “They are the ones who say less than 2%. I say that it is much more.”
“Propaganda” figures
“There are hundreds of thousands of young people who left so as not to be mobilized,” continued Emmanuel Macron.
For the President of the Republic, the Russians “have lost many opportunities”, even though “they earn money with the gas they sell to others”. “But the rest of the economy is suffering a lot,” he said.
Emmanuel Macron concluded that he “did not believe these figures at all”, which he called “propaganda”, and declared that Russia was “no longer a free democratic country with an independent institute”.
Source: BFM TV
