No Mistrals For Putin

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin gives an exclusive interview to Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Brussels, on November 17, 2014 | © AFP | Emmanuel Dunand France is "creative enough" to find a way to avoid delivering Mistral ships to Russia, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told the AFP. "The opposition from Kiev to the delivery of the two vessels to Russia is crystal clear," said Klimkin in an interview with AFP. "Now it is time to have a clear message to Moscow that further destabilisation in Ukraine will trigger further steps by the EU," Klimkin said as he visited Brussels for talks with new EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini. "Mistral ships should not be delivered to Russia" insists Ukrainian diplomat. Tweet This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License . Source: http://www.gandul.info/international/ucraina-cere-frantei-sa-nu-livreze-rusiei-navele-de-ra...

Protest in front of the Mistral "Vladivostok" in St Nazaire Sept 2014. Photo: Pierre Raimbault The goals of the French arms industry are 7 billion euros of exported arms per year. If France goes ahead and delivers the Mistral war ships to Russia, the countries that are directly threatened by Putin having such powerful weapon will most likely react by not buying any arms from the French market. For Poland alone, France will kick itself out of  a market of more than 21 billion euros , three years of the total goal for the French arms industry if it does not cancel the Mistral deal. As the newspaper "Le Monde" was underlining  in a recent article , the French market is actually focused on the Middle East countries but the Russian open invasion of Ukraine has brought an increasing interest in Lituania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania and a few other countries to increase their efforts to upgrade their military systems in order to be able to face...