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French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian on Thursday said that the announced French military presence in Romania cannot be seen as a "challenge" by Russia since France doesn't do anything else but honouring its commitments, Agerpres reports.
The French minister held a joint press conference with his Romanian counterpart, Bogdan Aurescu.
Jean-Yves Le Drian said that the possible coordination with the US forces present on the Romanian territory, as announced on Wednesday, could be based on the "complementarity" principle.
Asked if Russia would see France's announcement that it would send troops to Romania as a "challenge," the Paris chief diplomat said: "I don't think this can be said to be a challenge, we're just meeting our commitments with NATO."
The French high official also said that "the key issue at the moment is de-escalation." He also spoke in this regard of the dialogue variant.
"We must make every effort to achieve this goal. And this is what we are doing for this purpose: we are deterring and trying to talk. We want to find channels of communication with Russia. It is true that this dialogue is always demanding and difficult, but we must have it in order to prevent the deterioration of the situation because it is now true that the situation is serious and that Russia has the necessary deployed forces at its disposal that it can engage in an aggressive initiative very fast if it wants. But it did not decide anything else. So we must make all efforts and take all possible initiatives to lead to de-escalation and for President Putin to prefer negotiating over confrontation," Le Drian pointed out.
In his turn, Aurescu spoke about the importance of the deterrence component.
"I would like to add something that we, Romanians, keep in mind, because of our historical experience - when you want to have a dialogue that is substantial and that gives results, in this part of the world you need to rely on a strong deterrence," he said.
At the same time, Aurescu reiterated that "the allied presence on the eastern flank of the Alliance, including in the southern part, where Romania is located, if compared to the current Russian presence in the vicinity of Ukraine and the Black Sea region, is clearly a presence that is significantly smaller so there is no way we can talk about the deployment of allied forces that would be a challenge for Russia."
