On December 12, 2023, an anonymous Facebook account published a Russian-language video of a conversation between French President Emmanuel Macron and French politician Marine Le Pen, with Georgian subtitles. In the video, we hear how Macron claims that they don’t need Russian natural gas, and in response to Le Pen’s question about where he plans to buy natural gas, he names Germany and Poland. Marine Le Pen points out that these countries buy natural gas from Russia, to which Macron replies that this is the problem of these countries.
The video disseminated on Facebook is fabricated. The video uses footage of the 2017 French pre-election presidential debate. In the debate between Macron and Le Pen, there was no dialogue about banning the import of Russian natural gas. It is also false to claim that Germany and Poland depend on Russian natural gas.
The disseminated video belongs to the TikTok account adam721024, who posted the video on his page on May 8, 2022. As of today, the video has 1.3 million views. The account is in Russian and regularly publishes videos making fun of European and American politicians.
The footage of the video featuring the French politicians was cut from the debate held before the second round of the French presidential election on May 4, 2017. The shot is quite close, which does not allow us to see the background of the politicians, although the clothing of Macron and Le Pen, specifically the color of their suits, as well as Le Pen’s necklace and her collar are identical to the debate.
In a segment of the debate where the candidates discussed foreign policy issues, Macron noted that there are several problems with Vladimir Putin, including the conflict in Ukraine that needs to be de-escalated and the conflict in Syria where Russia is part of the solution, though, unlike Le Pen, he would not allow his behavior to be dictated by Putin. According to Le Pen, there is no reason to start a cold war against Russia, because Russia has not shown hostility towards France.
During this debate, the parties did not talk about the ban on Russian natural gas, therefore, the Russian-language dialogue voiced in the video and its Georgian translation are fabricated.
The last public debate between Macron and Le Pen took place before the April 2022 presidential election. The parties also touched on the topic of Russian natural gas, although Germany and Poland were not mentioned. According to Le Pen, the only sanctions against Russia that she does not agree with are natural gas sanctions, because they hurt France more than Russia. In response, Macron accused Le Pen of being dependent on the Kremlin over a loan taken by her party from a Russian bank.
As for the claim made in the video that Germany and Poland receive natural gas from Russia, it does not reflect reality either. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both countries significantly reduced their dependence on Russian energy resources. In 2022, the share of Russian natural gas was only 22% of Germany’s total imports (in 2021, this figure was 51%), although the main part of imports came in the first half of the year, from June to September 2022, the volume of imported natural gas decreased to zero.
The volume of natural gas imported to Poland is also significantly reduced. In May 2022, Poland stopped receiving Russian gas through the Yamal pipeline, after Russia demanded payment for natural gas in rubles.
About the Source:
The Facebook account “anti-liberal” often publishes posts with anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western content. This is not the first case when the user shared disinformation as, in May 2022 the user published a video, according to which humanitarian aid sent to Ukraine was being sold in a supermarket. For more information about the topic, see the “Myth Detector” article:
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