Emmanuel Macron arrived in Japan on Friday for a G7 summit which must agree on new sanctions against Russia and define the position of the Western powers vis-à-vis China, which France wishes “both engaging and demanding”.
The French president landed in Hiroshima early in the morning, joining the Japanese, American, British, German, Canadian and Italian leaders who had already arrived in the city, a symbol of peace, hit by the American atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 at the end of the Second World War. “This summit comes in a context of overlapping crises”, with the war led by Moscow in Ukraine but also the “rise in tensions between China and the United States” or even climate change, underlined the Elysée.
Paris wants to make its little music heard on the positioning with regard to Beijing, calling on the Europeans not to align themselves with a confrontational approach cherished by Washington. “The negotiation was relatively easy. There were no strong oppositions between the members of the group, ”assured an adviser to Emmanuel Macron to journalists in Hiroshima.
“A G7 of cooperation”
“This G7 will not be a G7 of confrontation, it will be a G7 of cooperation and of demanding with regard to China,” he added. “It will be said during this G7 that China has an important role to play, that China has a status, that China has responsibilities, that we want it to assume them”, but “under conditions which are sustainable, that is to say by entering into cooperation frameworks that meet a certain number of norms, standards and values”, explained this adviser.
“This is exactly the way of seeing France and its European partners,” he said. According to him, the leaders will “agree at the G7 to say that China” must “exercise its influence with Russia so that it puts an end to its aggression against Ukraine”.
The French presidency also affirmed that the list of new entities to be sanctioned as part of the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was “completed” on the European side, in coordination with the other G7 countries. In particular, this time, it is a question of “limiting the circumvention of the sanctions” already imposed on Moscow for almost 15 months.
The United Kingdom announced Friday morning sanctions targeting in particular diamonds and Russian nickel, Emmanuel Macron’s adviser said that this subject was however still “under discussion in Brussels”. The United States also unveiled new sanctions against the “Russian war machine” on Friday, as if to set the tone for this G7.
